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Throughout much of its history, the Olympics have been associated with the ideal of amateurism - unpaid athletes competing for the love of the sport rather than for the money. While this does portray the Games in a romantic light, politics and the Olympics have always been intertwined. Even in Ancient Greece, where the Games stopped wars, only Greeks could participate. And contrary to popular belief, these Olympic athletes of Ancient Greece were not amateurs. They were supported during their training, and even though a winner received only an olive wreath at the Games themselves, back home he was well rewarded and could become rich. In fact, the stakes may have even been higher then they were today, with victory being of paramount importance and defeat disgracing the entire city-state which the athlete represented. And champions could even be lured away from one city-state to another. Amateurism actually developed in 19th-century England as a means of preventing the working classes from competing against the aristocracy. The wealthy could take part in sports without worrying about having to make a living, and thus could pursue the ideal of amateurism. Everyone else had to give up training time in order to earn a living, or else take money for sports performances and become a professional, ineligible for such competitions as the Olympics. Baron de Coubertin, father of the Modern Olympic Games and a member of the French aristocracy, was well aware of the inequities of the amateur system. His solution was to have wealthy people come forward as "patrons" to support working-class athletes. Even so, at the beginning of the Modern Olympic Games it was only the aristocracy that could afford the expense of pursuing sporting activities in this non-profit format. Eventually, however, in the late 1920s, the International Olympic Committee gave its permission for loss-of-income compensation to be paid to athletes. The qualifications for being an amateur have varied from decade to decade and from sport to sport. Jim Thorpe was stripped of his two gold medals in 1912 for having accepted a small sum of money to play professional baseball. In the 1920s, British spokesmen accused the Americans of circumventing the rules of amateurism by the awarding of athletic scholarships to universities (although even the Ancient Greek medical colleges recruited athletes). As late as the 1930s, physical education teachers and recreation directors were considered professional athletes and thus ineligible for the Olympics. And of course, throughout the Cold War United States athletes and officials accused the Soviet Union of permitting professionals to compete for their teams, particularly in marquee sports like basketball. After the 1988 Games, the IOC voted to declare all professionals eligible for the Olympics, subject to the approval of the international federations in charge of each sport. All but three federations eventually went along with the lifting of restrictions promoted by the IOC. Soccer and baseball continued to forbid professionals, while soccer has agreed to allow three professionals on their roster in addition to the professionals under the age of 23, against whom there is no prohibition. | |