Watching Michael Phelps win his eighth gold medal at the Olympics, and especially watching Mark Spitz congratulate him for win number 7, something started bouncing around in my head. Something just didn’t feel right, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
I finally realized what was off when I saw yet another Michael Phelps ad during the Olympic coverage.
When Mark Spitz set his record for seven Olympic golds in 1972, the Olympics were – at least as far as the United States was concerned – an amateur athletic competition. The rules at that time specifically prohibited paid athletes from competing. Being paid to appear in ads for wireless phone and credit card companies would have automatically disqualified athletes from competing in the games. It was simply unheard of.
In addition, Spitz was, as some commentators noticed, swimming in off the shelf swim trunks without a cap and with a big cheesy mustache. There were no highly regimented, chemist created nutritional programs, aerodynamically designed suits, and shaved armpits. There were just amateur swimmers who often had menial jobs to do in the midst of training.
The rest of the world began to crank out athletes in Olympic farms much the same way the Chinese now do with their gymnasts – taking small children into the program and engineering athletes from scratch. When the US finally allowed professional athletes to compete, it forever changed the Olympics for me.
I watch professional athletes like LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Keri Walsh, Misty May. Phelps, despite the lack of a professional swimming league, falls into that same category for me because of the commercial endorsement deals that allow him to train as a full time job.
I watch them and I really miss the old Olympics. I miss the days when the athletes were people you had never heard of who lived in near poverty to train for the games because they simply loved to compete.
While Phelps’ feat is no doubt impressive, and his record likely to stand for another four decades, I feel it should be recorded with an asterisk the way home run records are. The fact is Mark Spitz record in 1972 is a record from another era. It represents a completely different approach to the Olympics and, to me, a completely different level of achievement.
Your facts are a bit off on when exactly amateur status was dropped from the Games. It wasn’t individual nations that decided to allow professionals play, it was the IOC which dropped the curtain first. They let each Olympic sport decide on what level of mixture between the Amateur and Professional ranks could play each game. 1992 were the first games FIBA drops its full amateur status for basketball, yet before that, they often allowed “just-drafted” college stars to play in the Games.
Baseball’s international governing body (through the demands of MLB) is never going to go beyond its rules of allowing college and minor leaguers to play.
Of course the point’s rather moot since baseball’s no longer an Olympic medal sport after this Olympiad.
I see what you mean in your post, but I also think the IOC was left with no choice as two systems battled each other out for medal supremacy. One privately-financed corporate machine vs. one state-financed machine; that’s eventually what you’d have had. Two systems stretching the meaning of the word “amateur” to interesting lengths.
Given what has happened since then, I frankly like it. If the Olympics are supposed to be about the World’s Best competing against each other, than why not allow for professionals sacrificing their time, talent, and money to play for their nations. Yes, some have and will say no to the request, but you deal with them putting their egos before their counties. What’s so bad about seeing pros play basketball in the Summer Games and ice hockey in the Winter Games anyway?
The IOC decided that, true, but other nations had been running athletic factories that spit out athletes who did nothing but train. The stereotype of the steroid enhanced Russian female athletes stemmed from that.
Nations that honored the ideal of amateur athletes continually came up short on the medal count and pushed for changes. You’ll likely see similar complaints against the Chinese and the age verification process as a result of the 12 year olds that were passed off as sixteen.