The spikes wars (bonus track of "the amateurism myth")

This is the story of two "frères ennemis" (warring brothers) who dominated the sports shoes industry and, through their actions, precipitated the disappearance of the hypocritical amateurism.

Adolf (Adi) Dassler started his career just after WWI as a shoe repairman. He was interested in sport shoe design and he produced one of earliest spiked shoes. His elder brother, Rudolf, joined him and together, in 1924, they founded the "Gebrüder Dassler, Sportschuhfabrik" ("Dassler Brothers Sports Shoe Factory"). Already in 1928, Lina Radke, who won gold over the 800 m in the Amsterdam Olympics, wore Dassler track shoes.

But the breakthrough for the Dassler's came when they befriended the former Olympian and at the time coach of the German Olympic athletics team, Josef Waitzer. It was this relationship that gave the Dasslers access to the participants at the 1936, Berlin, Olympics. In particular Adi managed to persuade the legendary Jesse Owens to use Dassler handmade spikes during the Olympics.

I will not go into details concerning the Dasslers, their membership of the Nazi party and their war and post-war (temporary) setbacks. The interested readers can consult the corresponding, very detailed, articles in Wikipedia. 

The two brothers had a fall-out in 1948 and the Gebrüder Dassler shoe company was split into two. Adolf named his' Adidas while Rudolf, initially opting for Ruda, finally rebranded his company to Puma. The fraternal rivalry was just starting.

The funny story is that the three stripes which are Adidas visual identity was a later (and ingenuous) acquisition. In fact the Dassler shoes had two distinctive stripes on the sides but after the split neither company could use them. Adi Dassler opted for a design with three stripes only to find out that it belonged to the finnish sports company Karhu (famous in athletics for their javelins). Karhu sold the three stripes to Adidas for a token sum and two bottles of whiskey! (The latter may be simply an urban myth). 

The war between the two brother-owned companies started in earnest when Adi Dassler, sent his son, Horst (who was to found Arena in 1973, expanding Adidas' empire to swimwear), to the 1956, Melbourne, Olympic Games with the instruction to hand out free Adidas track spikes to all athletes. Although this clearly violated IOC amateur rules, Horst wagered that spikes could qualify as a technical assistance. As a result Bobby Morrow who won the 100, 200 m and the 4x100 relay appeared on the front cover of Life with Adidas shoes. 

That was only the beginning. Puma's move was to pay professional football players in order to switch allegiance to them. 

At the 1960, Rome, Olympics, Puma paid Armin Hary, the world record holder future olympic champion to run the 100 meters in Puma spikes. Hary did this and then he went to the podium in Adidas shoes. (Hary, was later suspended by the german federation but a that time he had practically retired following a car accident. In 1980 Hary was sentenced to 18 months in prison for abusing his real estate trader position and defrauding the Catholic Church of more than 3 million marks).

Adidas riposte to Puma came at the 1968, Mexico, Games. They managed to sign exclusive contracts with the Mexican government giving them access to the olympic village and practically preventing Puma from importing shoes into Mexico. At this point, the amateurism tzar, A. Brundage could no more turn a blind eye and continue feigning ignorance. But this is exactly what he did. Had he intervened, issuing suspensions, the U.S. athletics team would have returned home empty-handed.

The Mexico Olympics are famous for many things (see my article "Celebrating Mexico" for a refresher), but the best known, even outside the athletics circles, is the "silent gesture" on T. Smith and J. Carlos on the podium of the 200 m. What is probably less known to the public at large is that the, barefoot, sprinters placed their Puma shoes on the podium. Smith explained that "it was important for me to have them on the stand, because they helped me get there during the race and long before” (the "before" referring to the financial aid of Puma during his long months of preparation).

Adidas and Puma had greased practically everybody (including most probably olympic officials) so that nobody could be singled out and sanctioned, lest the IOC decided to take them all down. As a result nobody received a sanction.

And Brundage in all this? Well, he received a most interesting visit by none other than Horst Dassler who met him after the Games and told him "Athletes have been paid". That was not a moment of honesty on behalf of Dassler but an astute manoeuvre aiming at limiting the outrageous expenses. In fact, in trying to increase their market share both Adidas and Puma spent huge sums but just managed to keep the status quo. The only ones who profited were the athletes.

But only for a short while. In 1970, the IAAF proposed to permit the national sports federations (rather than the individual athletes) to sign commercial contracts with chosen manufacturers. So, the federations started filling their coffers with the money earned off the efforts of unpaid athletes. This hypocritical attitude, signing lucrative contracts while publicly promoting the amateur virtue and using amateurism as a criterion for eligibility to the Games could only fool everybody for a limited time. The death knell of Olympic amateurism had already sounded.

The discreet charm of the 400 m hurdles, revisited

A few years ago I wrote an article with title "The discreet charm of the 400 m hurdles". It was inspired by the announcement that A. Eaton was going to take a year off decathlon in order to compete in the 400 m hurdles. He had predicted a time between 47 and 48 seconds but specialists thought that he would be lucky to break 50 seconds. Things turned out to be in between the two predictions, with Eaton registering a 48.69 s, and winning a Diamond League event.

J. Mulkeen in his blog had published an interesting study on the unlikely couple, as he put it, of decathlon (and heptathlon) and 400 m hurdles. Unfortunately his study goes up to 2014 and thus would be slightly outdated today. 

What spurred the current article were two events just a few weeks apart, where the combined event specialist 400 m hurdles record was broken, both for men and women. Ayden Owens-Delerme is well-known to the readers of this blog. With 8532 points he was fourth at the 2022 World Championships after leading the event the first day and registering a 45.07 s in the 400 m. This year, following some minor injuries, he decided not to compete in the NCAA decathlon in order to concentrate on the World Championships. And in the meantime he went back to the 400 m hurdles where he had a modest 53.13 s best, from 2016 (when he was just 16). And, on May 13, he surprised everybody with a blistering 48.26 s, almost half a second better than the time of Eaton. 

But wait, it does not stop here. While following the Florence Diamond League meeting I discovered that the athlete running in lane 8 was none other than last year's world bronze medalist in heptathlon, Anne Hall. Of course Hall is a superb 400-800 runner, having won the indoor national title over the shorter distance this winter. And she has one of the best performances over the heptathlon 800 m, with 2:02.97, obtained the previous week in Götzis, where with 6988 points she scored the fifth best score ever. (At long last the 2:01.84 record of Nadine Debois is under a substantial threat). Hall had already run the 400 m hurdles in March and April with 54.94 and 54.48 s. With 54.42 s in Florence she finished 3rd, behind F. Bol and S. Little.

The question that springs to mind is how do the performances of Hall and Owens-Delerme compare to those of the world record holders. Well, it turns out that both K. Mayer and J. Joyner-Kersee have run the 400 m hurdles. Mayer has a 54.57 s performance dating back to 2017, while JJK has a 55.05 s best (and a few other performances in the 55-56 bracket). And the most natural way to compare these performances is by using the scoring table. (Yes, Virginia, there is a scoring table for combined events scores). Owens-Delerme scores 1218+1209 points for the 400 m hurdles and the decathlon for a total of 2427. Mayer with 914 points in the 400 m hurdles cannot do better than 2216 despite his 9126 score at the decathlon (1302 points). Eaton beats Owens-Delerme scoring 1196+1289 for a total of 2485. D. Thompson, who was number one in Mulkeen's list scores 1004+1258 points, a total on 2264, for his 52.6 and 8847 performances.  In the case of women, Joyner-Kersee wins easily with 1171+1331 points (a total of 2502) compared to 2461 (obtained from 1191+1270) for Hall. It is tempting to compare Hall to that other great heptathlete, K. Klüft, who has a 7032  heptathlon personal best and had run the low hurdles in 61.14. Her total is just 2267 (with only 988 points in the hurdles) but one must bear in mind that Klüft ran the 400 m hurdles just once at the very last year of her career. The only other heptathlete among the elite who has a 400 m hurdles performance is K. Johnson-Thompson. Her 58.3 combined with the 6981 heptathlon points give her a total of 1072+1269, i.e. 2341 points.  

So, all in all, Hall and Owens-Delerme are already number two in the combined 400 m hurdles and deca/heptathlon. Given that they are still in activity and have a substantial progression margin I would not be astonished if they ended up by becoming number one.

Before wrapping up this article the question that springs to mind is how do the two combined events specialists compare with record holders of the hurdles event, in particular since it is well-known that K. Warholm started his career as a decathlete. His personal best goes back to the days he was competing in the U20 category and his 7764 score obtains 1090 points. Adding them to the 1341 points of his hurdles world record gives a total of 2431, just ahead of Owens-Delerme. On the other hand, none of the top female hurdles specialists has dabbled with combined events. One must go back to S. Gunnell who at the very beginning of her career, when she was just 17, completed a heptathlon obtaining 5395 points. Combining this with her 52.73 world record gives her a 2202 total (obtained as 957+1245), even lower than the one of Klüft. 

And, at this point, I am willing to risk a prediction. If one day the women's decathlon becomes the mainstream event, we may have more athletes trying the 400 m hurdles, the decathletes being more versatile than the actual heptathletes.

The amateurism myth (part four)

Or how the rigmarole ended: not with a bang; it just fizzled out

In 1972 Baron Killanin (yes, another baron) was elected at the presidency of the IOC. Contrary to his predecessor, he demonstrated intellectual flexibility and one of the first issues he addressed was that of the amateur eligibility.

The first attempt at modernisation did not yield substantial results. Still, everybody agreed to drop the requirement that athletes “be engaged in a basic occupation to provide for their present and future”. The limits of days an athlete could devote to training was lifted coupled to broken-time payments. But all those were token reforms, since they just acknowledged practices that were already in place (albeit ones to which everybody turned a blind eye).

The real changes came when W. Daume (the organiser of the 1972, Munich, Games) was appointed chairman of the eligibility commission in 1978. In his first address he reminded the IOC members of some basic facts that were voluntarily forgotten: the ancient Greeks were not amateurs and, in fact, de Coubertin himself did not give a damn about amateurism. 

Lord Killanin and W. Daume

In an age where the IOC was going to rake in millions, it was dishonest and hypocritical to ask the athletes to make sacrifices. And with millions dangling in front of them, the IOC dignitaries were not going to stick to asceticism for the sake of amateurism.

But another danger was lurking. The whole olympic ideal was based on the catchy Citius, Altius, Fortius maxim. But “Higher, Faster, Stronger” implied specialisation and a scientific approach to training. After WWII the science of sport exploded with research in every possible direction. Among the latter, that of pharmacological assistance of training was prominent. The eastern European countries were the pioneers in this domain, with GDR becoming the indisputable champion. Western countries followed suit, the US supporting doping both officially and unofficially. The IOC had to do something about that and antidoping rules were introduced, the enforcement of which was entrusted to the medical commission.

In 1981, Daume proposed a more liberal eligibility code: "the Olympic Movement, which expects athletes to pursue excellence, should not discriminate against or exploit the full-time athlete because of that excellence”, he said. Curiously the ones who opposed the more lax amateurism code were the eastern European countries. This is easily understood, since the state support to athletes in those countries was akin to professionalism.  With a good measure of anticommunist feelings the president of the AAU remarked that "the marriage of convenience between communists and Brundagian amateur ideologues resembles to the same unholy alliance you find when the bootleggers and the clergy combine their votes to maintain prohibition”.

The main merit of Lord Killanin is to have appointed W. Daume to the chairmanship of the Eligibility Commission. In fact some believe that Daume's intervention in Munich, prior to the vote for the IOC presidency, where he implored the IOC members to reform amateurism, because eligibility rules forced athletes “onto a path of untruth and destroys the belief in the entire Olympic movement”, could have been instrumental in Brundage not seeking another term.

Lord Burghley, who had lost to Brundage in the 1952 election for the IOC presidency, remarked in 1980 that “professional sport was a perfectly reasonable way of earning a living”.

In 1980 J.A. Samaranch succeeded Killanin (a Marques succeeding a Baron). While Killanin had been treading lightly during his mandate, Samaranch did not hesitate.  He worked to secure the financial prosperity of the Olympic Movement, transforming the IOC into a full-fledged corporate entity. The challenge for the IOC was substantial. While they were ready to grant the international federations a liberal eligibility code, they insisted that there was no place in the Olympic Games for professionals. But this was also going to change. And that was going to happen under Samaranch's reign.