Remember when the Olympics was an amateur event? Me either, but it was. It was all over by the 1992 Games when the US fielded the ‘dream team’ in the basketball.
The decision to allow professionals to compete was made in 1986 by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Before then the Olympics was still exciting but that’s just because we didn’t know any better. As seamlessly as the fax was replaced by email, amateurism was replaced by professionalism.
After watching the Olympics for a solid three days, like everyone on Twitter appears to have done, could you imagine a more boring Olympics than one without the professional athletes? I could not. But it did happen for almost a century.
American athlete Jim Thorpe won Olympic gold medals in the 1912 games in the pentathlon and the decathlon. Nobody cares about those events now but back then they were very prestigious. But Thorpe was stripped of his titles after Olympic officials discovered he had previously played two seasons of semi-professional baseball, a game not even remotely related to the sports for which he won gold. The titles were reinstated in the 1980s which was no consolation to Thorpe who had been dead for decades.
These days it is almost impossible to compete in the Olympics as an amateur. The standard required to compete means athletes have to take up their sport as a full-time job. Getting to the Olympics takes more than just hard work and persistence, it also requires money. Lots of money. The difference between the amateur era and what we have now is that someone else raises the money for you.
Australian swimmer Mark Tonelli, who won a gold medal in the 1980 Olympics in Moscow as part of the 'Quietly Confident Quartet' in the 4x100 medley relay, will tell stories of the old days when athletes had no sponsorship. I can only imagine the Olympic village was a shoebox in the middle of the road and every day it rained sharp sticks. He says fundraising was just part of the games back then: “Sponsorships weren’t around like they are now for top performers in all sorts of sports. It was more just the amateur style of things that we did. You just wanted to be the best no matter what the cost.”
He said many athletes would turn to the bank of Mum and Dad: “Often your parents would foot the bill, the doctor’s bill, the physio, the vitamins. Your club would get involved and help pay for you to go to competitions.” It didn’t make Tonelli’s victory any less sweet. Australia troubled the top step of the podium only twice in 1980.
When we watch the Olympics we want to see the world’s best athletes, and the best athletes get paid. The motto Citius, Altius, Fortius is Latin for Faster, Higher, Stronger. There’s no mention, Latin or otherwise, of not getting paid.
Having pros in the games also sets up the inevitable upsets where heroes are humanised. We have already seen upsets in the tennis with the relatively unknown hometown pair Thomaz Bellucci and Andre Sa beating Wimbledon champs Jamie and Andie Murray. In 2004 we saw Argentina beat the US at basketball and in 2008 we saw Japan beat the US at softball. Actually seeing anyone beat any sporting powerhouse is mildly satisfying.
Ed Hula runs the independent Olympic news website Around the Rings. “The best athletes in every one of the sports on the Olympic program are competing at a professional level outside the games, receiving prize money, sponsorship income even salaries from national federations,” he says.
“An ongoing question is whether the IOC should provide appearance fees and cash prizes for the Olympics.”
The IOC is expected to have raked in more than $7 billion when the smoke clears after Rio, and there is an increasingly loud call for it to pay athletes for competing.
Anyone who is worried that too much professionalism is harming the Games need only look at the figures. The IOC has a potential viewership of more than 5 million people during this Olympic Games. In 2012 it was 4.8 billion.
From a spectator’s point of view, the massive amounts of money thrown around behind the Olympic rings has not made it any less enjoyable to watch. While records are still being beaten and the world’s best are doing battle in front of millions of people for a shiny disk on a ribbon, the Olympic Games will continue to keep billions of pairs of eyeballs glued to screens. While we watch hours on end of obscure sports we haven’t thought of for four years, we should keep in mind how lucky we are to be in the post-amateur era where the actual best of the best compete.
Sam Ikin is a freelance journalist based in Hobart.
