College Athletics and Olympics

North American collegiate athletics

All North American university sports are conducted by amateurs, and even the most commercialized college sports, such as NCAA Football and NCAA Basketball, do not financially compensate competitors, although coaches and trainers generally are. Athletic scholarship programs, unlike academic scholarship programs, cannot cover more than the cost of food, housing, tuition, and other university-related expenses. A promising academic can be paid to go to school, but a promising athlete cannot.

In order to insure that the rules are not circumvented, stringent rules restrict gift-giving during the recruitment process as well as during a collegiate athlete's career; college athletes also cannot endorse products, which some may consider a violation of free speech rights.

Some have criticised this system as exploitative; prominent university athletics programs are major commercial endeavors, and can easily rake in millions of dollars in profit during a successful season. College athletes spend a great deal of time "working" for the university, and earn nothing from it at the time; basketball and football coaches, meanwhile, earn salaries that can compare with those of professional teams' coaches.

The most ardent critics of collegiate athletics say one of two things. First, that young athletes (stereotypically young black men) are being encouraged to waste their time chasing after a career in basketball or football for four years rather than focus on getting an education while in college. Second, that colleges have no business wasting time and effort in developing apparently "professional" athletic programs, as they should be concentrating on educating people.

Supporters of the system say that college athletes can always make use of the education they earn as students if their athletic career doesn't pan out, and that allowing universities to pay college athletes would rapidly lead to deterioration of the already-marginal academic focus of college athletics programs. They also point out that athletic scholarships allow many young men and women who would otherwise been unable to afford to go to college, or would not be accepted, to get a quality education.

The Olympics

Through most of the 20th century the Olympics nominally only allowed amateur athletes to participate. The amateur code was strictly enforced. Jim Thorpe was stripped of track and field medals for having taken expense money for playing baseball in 1912.

Later on, however, successful Olympians from Western countries often accepted endorsement contracts from sponsors. Complex rules involving the payment of the athlete's earnings into trust funds rather than directly to the athletes themselves, were developed in an attempt to work around this issue, but the intellectual evasion involved was considered embarrassing to the Olympic movement and the key Olympic sports by some. In the same era, the nations of the Communist bloc entered teams of Olympians who were all nominally students or working in a profession, but many of whom were in reality paid by the state to train on a full time basis.

After the 1972 retirement of IOC President Avery Brundage, the Olympic amateurism rules were steadily relaxed and in many areas amount only to technicalities and lip service. In the United States, the Amateur Sports Act of 1978 prohibits national governing bodies from having more stringent standards of amateur status than required by international governing bodies of respective sports.

In 1982 Adidas was paying British Olympic athletes to wear their gear. The main person involved in the scandal was Horst Dassler.

Olympic amateurism regulations were eventually abandoned in the 1990s.