Or how Baillet-Latour and Brundage made life miserable for generations of athletes
The founders of modern Olympism would have us believe that amateurism emerged in Ancient Greece. As we saw in the previous post of this series nothing is further from the truth. The social origins of amateurism are to be sought in Victorian Britain. As upper classes strove to set themselves apart from the working class (which they assumed to be morally corrupt) they used amateurism in order to promote segregation in sports (a dichotomy that did not exist prior to 1860).
Amateurism spread throughout the British Empire but failed to enjoy popularity and legitimacy in France (but also, and not only, in Italy and Spain). Put in this way, it seems bizarre that Coubertin opted for the Anglo-Saxon tradition. The truth is a bit more complicated than this.
When de Coubertin sent out the invitations for his 1894 congress he did not invite for a discussion the revival of the ancient Olympics but rather to an “International Congress of Amateurs”. Upon arrival to Paris the participants discovered that the program had been modified at the last moment and it was now question of reviving the Games. De Coubertin confessed his ruse in his memoirs. In his own words:
“Today I can admit it; the amateur question never really bothered me. It had served as a screen to convene the Congress designed to revive the Olympic Games. Realising the importance attached to amateurism in sporting circles, I always showed the necessary enthusiasm, but it was enthusiasm without real conviction”.
He used the myth of ancient Greek amateurism as a vehicle to promote his ideas of modern olympism, establishing thus a continuity between the remote past and the present. He could get away with this because amateurism was something very vaguely defined. The 1894 congress tried to give a definition to be used in the selection for the future Olympics:
An amateur is any individual who has never participated in a competition open to all comers, nor competed for a cash prize, or for a prize of any amount of money regardless of its source, specifically from admissions to the field—or with professionals—and who has never been, at any time in his life, a teacher or paid instructor in physical education.
However, when it came to enforcing amateurism during the first Games this turned out to be impossible. Spiros Louis, winner of the inaugural 1896 marathon (more on this is some future post) received financial and material rewards, including a marriage proposal. And I will not discuss the great farce of the 1900 (the only positive outcome of which was the fact that they breached the gates for the participation of women in the Olympics) and of the 1904 Games.
The London 1908 Games strived to put some order to the Games but even the british failed to reach an agreement on what constituted an amateur. Thus each sport applied their own definition. As a consequence the English Football Association re-qualified former professionals as amateurs allowing them to compete in London (and receive defrayals). Still the englishmen insisted on their sacrosanct amateurism aiming at separating men who are ‘gentlemen of position or education’ from the rougher and uneducated lot. De Coubertin found this childish: “Why disqualify an amateur athlete because he had competed with a professional, because he had taken part in events open to all comers, or because he was a sports instructor". And failing to obtain a consensus on the definition of amateurism "I lost even the little interest I had had in the question". Going back to an earlier fancy of his, he proposed that the athletes swear an oath as "the only way of being sure about a man’s sporting past”. As expected, the proposal was firmly denounced and dismissed.
After the War the interest for sports mushroomed. And the IOC being a conservative, patriarchal establishment, was not equipped to deal with the situation. De Coubertin, faithful to his colonialist credo, proposed a separate African Olympics "as a platform for imbuing indigenous athletes with the lofty principles of Olympism". One can safely conclude that our baron was also the inventor of “sporting apartheid".
De Coubertin retired from the IOC in 1925, fearing in the years to come a “struggle between the haves and the have-nots”. The clash he predicted arrived in the form of the broken-time controversy. Namely national federations, in particular the football ones, started to award indemnities to their sportsmen for the loss of salary during the participation in the Games. The international football federation, FIFA, did not officially condone this but in practice turned a blind eye. And it was difficult for the IOC to sanction a sport like football which was the olympic sport with the higher number of tickets sold. Fearing that if football were absent from the 1928 Games the organisers would refuse to host them, the IOC accepted broken-time payments for amateur soccer players. (Things were stricter in the case of tennis. When the tennis federation, ILTF, threatened to break away from the Olympics, Baillet-Latour let them go, since tennis was not so popular and in no comparison to the football spectator-wise. It was only in 1988 that tennis would reappear in the olympic program). After the Games a motion by the British was approved, with a large majority, forbidding broken-time payments. As a consequence FIFA exited the 1932 olympic program and removed all passages relating to amateurism from its statutes.
While de Coubertin had a pragmatic vision of things, Baillet-Latour strove to transform the amateur ideal into an enforceable legislation. Together with his vice-president S. Edström, he saw as his duty to keep the athletes in the right path, perhaps through the occasional punishment. And the most spectacular of those was that of the nine-times Olympic champion P. Nurmi. He was planning to take part in the Los Angeles, 1932, Olympics, running the marathon but was declared professional for having received under-the-table cash payments. The Finnish federation protested vehemently but the IOC stood firm and Nurmi put an end to his career. Nurmi got a vengeance of sorts when he lit the olympic cauldron in the Helsinki, 1952, Olympics, under the disapproving eyes of Edström and Brundage.
In my article on Baillet-Latour I wrote about the implication of Baillet-latour in the Berlin, 1936, Games and the fact that he worked hand-in-hand with the Nazi government. Hitler was initially against the organisation of the Olympics in Berlin, but Goebbels, the minister of propaganda, convinced him of the political value of hosting the Games. The IOC demanded that the policy of racial discrimination be rescinded and non-Aryans be allowed to try out for the national team. Baillet-Latour was happy. He expressed his contentment in a letter to Brundage: "rumours have been spread now and then about every sport, in those countries, where sport is under the leadership of a dictatorial government, but they have also been proved to be untrue every time". We know how that turned out: out of the 21 jews preselected for the Olympics, none made the final team.
In 1936, A. Brundage obtained a seat in the IOC, some say as a reward to his opposition to the USA boycott of the Berlin Olympics. He immediately became the right-hand man of S. Edström and established himself as the dominant voice in the amateur debate. And while Baillet-Latour established an ad-hoc amateur commission with Edström, Brundage, complemented by two fascist dignitaries Karl Ritter von Halt, and count Alberto Bonacossa, de Coubertin, shortly before his demise, revealed his true feelings on amateurism. In an interview with the french journal l'Auto he said:
"Olympic amateurism is a stupid old question. And how often and how wrongly have people blamed me for the so-called hypocrisy of the Olympic sermon. Just read this famous Olympic sermon of which I am the proud and happy father. Where do you find that it demands from athletes appearing on the Olympic Stadion the absolute amateurism which, I am the first to recognise, is impossible? All I demand is loyalty to sport. Loyalty to sport, however, is not the monopoly of amateurs. I have known professionals and even circus professionals who showed a sporting spirit which the majority of amateurs could envy. It is this very sporting spirit which interests me and not the ridiculous concept which only enables millionaires to devote themselves to sport without doing violence to superseded dogmas. I am not the one who wanted that kind of amateurism. It was imposed by the International Federations".
I would agree with everything except for the last sentence. It was not the international federations which imposed the strict rules of amateurism but the IOC zealots. It remains that what de Coubertin presents as a moral ideal was reduced, by his colleagues and with his tolerance, to a set of regulations aiming at marginalising working-class athletes keeping them away from the olympic arena.
When Baillet-Latour died in 1942 he was succeeded by S. Edström who guided Brundage's rise to power. He first named him vice-president and the next year “first” vice president signalling that he was meant to be his heir (and, indeed Brundage succeeded Edström at the head of the IOC in 1952) . No-one played a more significant role in the history of amateurism than Brundage. His idealism was second to none and he had a taciturn and rigid personality. Amateurism was for him something non-negotiable, an absolute truth.
The amateur commission that he chaired set out to re-examine and re-invigorate, if need be, the amateur olympic code. When the question of indemnities was again on the table Brundage pontificated (exhibiting his lack of culture) that "amateurism, coming to us from antiquity, has contributed to and strengthened the noblest aspirations of great men of each generation". And he continued in his display of ignorance, saying that "We all know what happened when the ancient games were commercialised" meaning that they were abolished, whereas the truth is that the abolishment of the ancient Games was for purely religious reasons.
Under Brundage guidance a one-sentence definition of what is an amateur replaced the detailed conditions that appeared previously in the olympic charter:
An amateur is one who participates and always has participated in sport solely for pleasure and for the physical, mental or social benefits he derives therefrom, and to whom participation in sport is nothing more than recreation without material gain of any kind direct or indirect and in accordance with the rules of the International Federation concerned.
At this point it would be interesting to tell the story of Soviet Union entering the Olympics and the role played by Edström and Brundage. However this is a long story which should better be told in some other post. Suffices it to say that Brundage put aside his anti-communist feelings in order to ensure the growth of the olympic movement.
One of the ridiculous moments of his career is when Brundage proposed the creation of a literary prize to be awarded to the journalist who writes the best article in favour of the defence and better understanding of amateurism and of Olympism. and lo and behold the IOC sycophants voted to award the inaugural prize to Brundage “on account of the unfailing devotion and courage he is displaying in the defence of amateurism".
In 1960, Albert Mayer, the Swiss representative to the IOC, proposed a revision of the amateur code, contending that the current regulations were so prohibitive, arbitrary, and hypocritical that the average working-class athlete was forced to either stay at home, or alternatively, violate the rules in order to finance Olympic participation. He proposed the sanctioning of reimbursements for broken time, a clothing and equipment indemnity, pocket money to cover daily expenses, and the award of nominal monetary gifts. Alas, for Brundage, any regulatory change, however small was deemed sacrilegious. He openly disapproved of the proposals and tried to stifle the motion by requiring a two-thirds majority for the approval of any modification of the amateur rules. Finally in 1962 the majority of the IOC voted in favour of the amendments and the IOC officially permitted broken-time defrayals. The dam had finally been breached.
Brundage wrote to the National Olympic Committees urging them to be vigilant. The point is that the defence of amateurism was essentially based on trusting the international federations without any means of control. In fact under Brundage's presidency the IOC had all in all a staff of two part-time employees. But Brundage steadfastly refused any financial profitability forcing the IOC to function on the basis of voluntary service, sacrificing any organisational efficiency. To his eye merging the Olympism with the television was a no-no.
"We in the IOC have done well without TV for 60 years and will do so certainly for the next 60 years too”, he pontificated.
But the box of Pandora (or was it the horn of Amalthea?) was open and the money started to flow in the IOC coffers. Rome offered the IOC 5 % os its television revenues. For the first time the IOC, who was permanently in the red, started generating money. Brundage introduced what came to be know as the Rome formula whereupon the organising committee received 2/3 of the revenue and the remaining 1/3 was split into equal parts going to the IOC, the NOCs and the international federations.
Brundage pursued his amateurism whim and proposed to define a series of infringements which would render an athlete ineligible to participate in the Games. But money was flowing, Brundage's threats started to ring hollow and his lack of administrative foresight plunged amateurism into life support.
While the Rome and Tokyo Games registered some modest profits, the situation changed drastically from 1968. Mexico signed a deal of 4.5 dollars with ABC a sum that was more than doubled once the international television rights were factored in. Munich, in 1972 obtained 13.5 millions. The Olympic Games became a branch of television entertainment and Brundage could not back out of this. But a spectacle without the protagonists was impossible, and quite understandably the athletes wanted their slice of the cake.
In 1970, the commission for eligibility proposed to replace the concept of amateur by that of olympic athlete. Brundage as expected greeted the proposal with contempt and managed to kill it. Instead of a realistic reform the IOC produced a stricter eligibility code and set out to enforce it. The first victim of the witch hunt was the austrian skier K. Schranz who was expelled just before the 1972, Sapporo, Olympics. (In retaliation the austrian council of ministers awarded him the Order of Merit for sports). The result for Brundage was a public backlash, that portrayed him as a senile old fool, stubbornly defending an unrealistic, moribund ideal.
The grand finale of his career were the Munich Olympics, where, in a display of callous racism, he assimilated the terrorist attack of israeli sportsmen, which resulted in the death of 11 members of the team, to the exclusion of Rhodesia from the Olympics (for apartheid reasons). I have written on Brundage on several occasions and he occupies a prominent place in my Gallery of Shame.
At long last, after the 1972 Olympics, Brundage was out and a freedom wind could blow (for the first time) in the olympic arena.
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