Traditions Pro Vs. Amateur
Call them the In-Your-Face Games. That is what they will feel like to the Angolans, Venezuelans or whoever else has the misfortune to be standing on the Olympic basketball court as Michael Jordan spins, slides and flies by on his way to the hoop. The show put on by the U.S. team will be spectacular but one- sided. But that's what happens when one team can assemble the finest basketball talent ever to strut the Olympic floorboards.
Players who face the Americans will not be the only ones experiencing a revelation: fans will too. The old-style Games, in which a collection of the mostly unheralded and unpaid would suddenly achieve the glory of champions, are utterly gone. Sure, the unsung heroes of team handball will still have their moment on the podium. And a modestly compensated athlete with little chance of a medal, such as U.S. table-tennis player Sean O'Neill, will nonetheless bask in the chance to compete.
But more than ever before, the Olympic scene will include pampered stars: Carl Lewis, Steffi Graf, a U.S. basketball team that collectively earns about $33 million a year -- the budget of a good-size town. The pertinent word here is amateurism, and the official condition is deceased. There were steps in this direction in 1984 and 1988, but now the modern Olympics are wide open.
Good or bad? Will the Olympic slogan of "Faster, higher, stronger" metamorphose into "Dollars, hype, celebrity"? Will the remaining truly amateur events, such as archery and Greco-Roman wrestling, be marginalized even more? The challenge for the Olympic movement will be to strike a balance between the inevitable marketing excesses and that evanescent thing, the Olympic spirit.
The first beneficiary of flinging open the gates is the historical truth: amateurism has long been portrayed as part of the heritage of the ancient Greek Games. The tie with the past, though, was completely spurious. The Greeks had no concept of amateurism. For them, an Olympic competitor was a city's champion, who was supported while he trained and then was richly rewarded for his victory.
Amateurism's provenance was much, much later, in Victorian England. A devoted Anglophile, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, stipulated that the modern Games he conjured into existence in 1896 should be amateur, in part because he believed that would guarantee gentlemanly fair play. Bound up as well in the ideal was a desire to maintain the barriers of class. The leisured rich did not want to compete with working-class athletes whose muscles were toned by manual labor.
Unfortunately, the creed of amateurism ill fit a world in which competition was being democratized, the popularity of sport was burgeoning, and standards of competition were rising. Nonetheless, the rules were followed strictly, even vindictively, and never more so than in the case of Jim Thorpe, U.S. winner of both the decathlon and the now discontinued pentathlon in the 1912 Olympics. The following year, it was discovered that Thorpe had received $25 a week to play baseball during the summers of 1909 and '10 -- a common practice for college athletes, many of whom used aliases. Thorpe was stripped of his awards. Seventy years later -- 30 after Thorpe's death -- the injustice was rectified.
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