The International Olympic Committee and the Preservation of the Amateur Ideal

The Rise of the ‘Shamateur’: The International Olympic Committee and the Preservation of the Amateur Ideal Matthew P. Llewellyn & John T. Gleaves California State University, Fullerton, U.S.A. The inter-war years marked a period of profound change in the international, political and social order. In the aftermath of the Great War, one of the darkest and most violent epochs in modern his- tory, western civilization reemerged from the shadows radically transformed. Amidst the smoldering of ash, dilapidation, and lost lives, Socialist and Communist movements, fueled by the 1917 Bolshe- vik revolution, swept across the European continent.1 Ideological upheavals also gripped the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent as large-scale, newly-organized nationalist movements emerged following the disintegration of the Turkish-Ottoman Empire.2 Debilitated post-war economies, high rates of national debt, and swelling ranks of unemployment ensured that mass trade unionism and political and social unrest simmered dangerously on both sides of the Atlantic. Europe’s old aristoc- racy, left ravaged and reeling from the destructive capabilities of modern technology and weaponry, faced a more devastating threat as the currents of liberalism and capitalism threatened to topple the propertied order, the traditional political hierarchy, and the entrenched economic system3. In this era of widespread social and political upheaval, the dominant traditions of bourgeois amateurism came under serious assault. As democratic impulses swept throughout Europe and North America, the aristocratic, patriarchal, and conservative power structure that sustained and legitimized the amateur ethos was rocked to its core. Progressively-minded European and Latin American nations, in concert with a small band of international governing bodies of sport, pushed for a gradual loosening of amateur restraints during the inter-war years. In 1926 the International Lawn Tennis Fed- eration sparked uproar when it vigorously lobbied, albeit unsuccessfully, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to grant reinstated (contaminated) amateurs permission to compete in Olympic competition after knowingly becoming professionals.4 The Union Cycliste Internationale caused an even greater stir a year later when it voted to open its World Road Championship to both amateurs and professionals.5 The preservation of the IOC’s vaunted amateur ethos faced its greatest threat in the build-up to the 1928 Olympic Games. During a meeting of the IOC’s Executive Committee in Paris on August 8, 1927, members voted 4-2 to award broken-time payments—monetary compensation to help defray the cost of travel—to amateur football players during the 1928 Amsterdam Games.6 The Executive Committee’s ruling signalled a blatant departure from the rules of amateurism laid down at the 1925 23 24 Matthew P. Llewellyn & John T. Gleaves IOC Congress in Prague, where members granted permission to international federations to enforce their own amateur definitions on the condition that all athletes “must not be a professional in any branch of sport; must not have been reinstated as an amateur after knowingly becoming a professional; and must not have received compensation for lost salaries.”7 Such a dramatic breach in the IOC’s amateur code was the result of a threat made by the Fédération Internationale de Football Asso- ciation (FIFA) on June 5, 1927, during its annual Congress in Helsinki, to boycott the Olympic football tournament unless the IOC recognized a FIFA ruling that granted all affiliated national association’s permission to award compensation for lost earnings.8 The football tournament, which served as the de-facto World Amateur Championship, had long established itself as the “greatest source of revenue” at the Olympic Games. At the 1924 Paris Olym- piad, the football tournament yielded more gate money than the entire track and field program, and even exceeded the aggregate receipts of swimming, rugby union, tennis, cycling, wrestling, gymnas- tics, and fencing.9 The prospect of the reigning Olympic gold-medal team, Uruguay, and South Amer- ican power, Argentina, pitting themselves against some of Europe’s strongest football nations at the 1928 Amsterdam Games heightened the IOC’s expectations that profits would reach unprecedented levels. Forced into a seemingly untenable position, the Executive Committee conceded to FIFA’s demands on the condition that monetary payments “will be placed in the hands of the employers, the athletes having no direct contact with any compensation for lost salary.”10 Trapped between the lure of increased spectatorship and windfall profits on the one hand, and appeasing its most vocal amateur allies on the other, the IOC faced the harsh realities of maintaining an increasingly outmoded amateur ideal in an era of broader democratic reform. Democratizing Sport The years leading up the 1928 Amsterdam Games represented a period of remarkable change in the Olympic movement. After twenty-nine years at the helm, Pierre de Coubertin fulfilled his promise to resign from the position as IOC President. Under Coubertin’s tenure (1896-1925) the Olympic Games had grown exponentially, from a grandiose vision to a global mega-event, attracting athletes from all of the continents. Through Coubertin’s ingenuity and the enduring goal of Olympic universality, the IOC attempted to expand the Olympic brand by adding a separate Winter Games, first held in 1924 in the glamorous French resort town of Chamonix Mont Blanc. Coubertin’s plans to establish both a Pan-American Games and African Games for non-Europeans were well developed at the time of his retirement.11 With rising media attention, high financial stakes, and strong nationalistic involvement, the Olympic Games had fast become a sporting colossus.12 The rapid development and consolidation of competitive sport overseas dramatically altered the Olympic landscape. The aristocratic, chivalric, and gentlemanly amateur contest that Coubertin orig- inally conceived had radically transformed into a highly commercialized, increasingly politicized, global sporting spectacle. The Oxbridge, Ivy League, and hereditary European elites that comprised the original Olympic contestants in Athens in 1896, had been gradually replaced by a more socially, racially, ethnically, and geographically diverse body of participants—an impressive 2,883 athletes from 46 IOC members nations competed at the Amsterdam Games. At the bureaucratic level too, the world’s leading governing bodies for amateur sport boasted increased heterogeneity: by 1928 the IOC comprised 67 members from 47 different nations, while the International Amateur Athletic Fed- eration (IAAF) recently awarded membership to representatives from Argentina, Chili, Egypt, India and Romania.13 The Rise of the ‘Shamateur’ 25 The democratic shift in global sporting culture inevitably brought the battle over Olympic amateurism to the surface. The extraordinary post-war globalization of modern sport slowly eroded the Eurocentric orientation of the Olympic movement. The emergence of Latin American countries Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico and Uruguay, the new European states of Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia, as well as African and Asian newcomers Egypt, India, and Turkey posed a direct threat to the Olympic movement’s amateur rules and regulations. For these new Olympic enti- ties, the cultural nuances and ideological beliefs and practices of amateurism were alien. Lacking an established professional sporting structure (and thus a clear distinction between amateurism and pro- fessionalism), and bred in a different school of sportsmanship, far removed from the chivalric, muscu- lar Christian virtues of Anglo-Saxon moral superiority, these new IOC member states considered existing Olympic prohibitions against broken-time payments as jejune and outdated. Unlike their wealthy Anglo-American rivals, athletes from less affluent sporting nations struggled to bear the financial burden of lengthy transcontinental journeys to compete in Olympic competition without monetary compensation. Realizing a chance to become more inclusive, the IOC Executive Committee’s ruling attempted to remove this apparent inequity. Under existing guidelines, a football player whose employer gener- ously agreed to pay him his full salary while he competed was considered a legitimate “amateur.” If on the other hand, his employer ceased to pay him his salary, and he received it from the national football association he represented instead, that player was considered a “professional.” In effect, the broken-time ruling abolished this distinction by granting national football associations permission to reimburse employers for the money they paid out in salaries. The authorization of broken-time payments not only contravened the IOC’s existing rules on amateurism, it also officially sanctioned a practice long considered anathema in many leading western sporting nations. The End of the Amateur Ideal Writing on the eve of his resignation in 1925, IOC president Pierre de Coubertin foreshadowed the impending debate over Olympic amateurism and broken-time payments. Coubertin, whose own atti- tude towards amateurism long oscillated between ambivalence and apathy, acknowledged that the burgeoning of international sport placed the traditional “British concept” of amateurism on an inevi- table collision course with a more progressive and democratic “Latin concept.” Coubertin envisioned a titanic clash of sporting cultures,

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