You’ve seen the headlines. Two insanely hot brothers. Elite athletes. Spicy content pages. One banned from his sport, the other who switched countries rather than face the same fate. It’s the kind of story that writes itself – and the internet has been very happy to write it, over and over, with the same basic plot.
But this week, Klass Francisks Rozentals posted something that made us look twice. Not because of the abs – though those were present, obviously – but because someone had slid into his DMs accusing the whole thing of being a PR stunt.
That the brothers weren’t even really athletes. Just two guys playing a clever angle.
His response was a social media post. And what it revealed about who these two actually are – before the controversy, before the content, before the chaos – is a lot more interesting than any headline has given them credit for.
The Headlines Don’t Say It All
If you’ve been following the Rozentals brothers’ story, you’ll know the broad strokes. Klass and his older brother Kurts Adams Rozentals are elite canoe slalom athletes – genuinely world-class, not influencers who happened to pick up a paddle.
Kurts, now 24, was on the UK World Class Programme, the lottery-funded pathway for Olympic hopefuls. Klass, 20, was competing for Team GB.
Then Kurts launched an OF page to fund his training, earned more in five months than Paddle UK had paid him in years, and then – in a separate move that cost him dearly – posted something explicit on Instagram that landed him a two-year competition ban.
Klass, watching all of this unfold, made his own page shortly after. And rather than risk the same treatment from Paddle UK, he made a clean break – switching his sporting nationality to Latvia, where the family originally came from.
It’s a wild story. And it’s been covered plenty. But almost every article about them leads with the OF angle and calls it a day.
What they rarely mention is the part that actually explains everything.
Two Little Latvian Dudes With a Dream
Klass and Kurts grew up in Latvia before their mother made the decision to immigrate to the UK – a move driven entirely by the belief that her boys deserved a better shot at life.
They arrived when Klass was around six years old. They tried multiple sports, hated soccer, and eventually both fell in love with canoeing.
It sounds simple when you say it like that. It wasn’t.
Elite canoe slalom is not a sport that tends to welcome kids without money. It’s a world of wealthy families, expensive equipment, and international travel that costs more than most mortgages.
The Rozentals brothers found themselves competing in exactly that world – two immigrant kids from a single-parent household going head-to-head with families who’d never had to think twice about the cost of chasing a medal.
“A family who always did their best to fit in to a sport full of wealthy families who’d had very different upbringings to us,” Klass wrote in his post. No bitterness in it – just the quiet acknowledgment of a reality they learned to navigate early.
£5 in Their Pockets, Racing Across Europe
As teenagers, the brothers were racing at international level across Europe. The glamour of it sounds obvious on paper – young athletes, summer competitions, countries they’d never have seen otherwise. The reality was a little different.
They raced with £5 between them. They slept overnight in airports when they couldn’t afford hotels between events. They pushed each other relentlessly – “going head to head,” as Klass put it – because competition between them was the fuel that kept both of them moving forward.
It was somewhere in those airport terminals, surviving on next to nothing between races, that the brothers also became best friends. “The more we grew up, the more we did together,” Klass wrote.
Klass credits his mother as the ultimate inspiration for his “do whatever it takes” mentality. Watching her sacrifice everything, move countries, and fight for her sons’ dreams while the sport establishment offered them very little – that’s where his refusal to give up comes from.
It’s also, he’s been clear, part of why the OF pages never felt like a shameful last resort. More like the only logical move left.
Suddenly 18, Not Qualified in Anything Else
Klass studied engineering in college. Decided it wasn’t for him. Tried bartending. Tried construction work. Neither left him enough time to train at the level he needed to compete. This is the part of the athlete funding conversation that tends to get lost in the debate about who’s allowed to post what on the internet.
The cost of chasing an Olympic cycle in canoe slalom runs between £100,000 and £180,000 over four years. Paddle UK’s World Class Programme – the financial support for Britain’s best Olympic prospects – paid Kurts £16,000 a year. The math is not complicated, and it is not kind.
“No one told us how expensive it would be,” Klass wrote. “Suddenly we’re 18 years old, not qualified in anything else, and somehow we have to fund a career that costs up to hundreds of thousands per Olympic cycle.”
OF wasn’t the first choice, or the second, or the third. It was the option that actually worked. Kurts earned more than £100,000 in the first five months alone – compared to the £16,000 annual grant that was supposed to sustain a world-class training program.
Whatever you think about the content, those numbers tell their own story about a system that was never designed to support athletes who didn’t already have money.
And what does Kurts’ page actually look like? Let’s just say the man did not get those shoulders from sitting at a desk. His subscribers are very aware of this.
Kurts was even a guest on Good Morning Britian last year:
The DM That Started All of This
Last week, someone slid into Klass’s DMs to tell him the whole thing was PR – that the brothers weren’t even really athletes, just content creators running a clever angle.
Normally, he said, he’d ignore it. But it stayed with him. Because the story people know – two broke athletes start spicy pages to fund their careers – is technically accurate and almost completely misses the point.
So he posted the carousel. Eleven slides, starting with the headlines and working backwards through time – through the competition years, the airport floors, the summers racing across Europe with empty pockets, all the way back to two little Latvian boys who just loved a sport and had a mum who believed in them enough to move continents.
“Brothers who fought together for their place on the team, despite the odds always seeming against them.”
The last slide is just a heart. And the words: “A family with an Olympic dream.”
Kurts is currently serving his two-year ban. Klass is competing for Latvia, chasing the same dream they’ve both had since they were kids. The OF pages are still very much active – and if you’re curious about what the fuss is about, well, you know where to find them.
But that’s not really what this story is about. It’s about two brothers who were told, in a hundred different quiet ways, that the sport wasn’t built for them – and who refused, every single time, to accept that as a final answer.
Follow Klass on Instagram @francisksklass and Kurts at @kurtsadams.