Quote:
Originally Posted by Jay Random
First: There was genuine competition among cities to host the Olympics. Now, almost nobody is interested except third-world kleptocracies trying to make a PR splash.
Second: I gave you an example of a kind of enthusiasm that never, and I mean never, has happened in an Olympic team sport where professionals were openly allowed to compete.
I suspect a lot of people answer that way in the poll because they're too young to remember anything else. It's hard to understand the merits of something you've never seen and never been allowed to see.
You're dead wrong about that. Athletes were barred from the Olympics for taking so much as one single dollar in payment for their athletic performances.
The crock was the U.S.S.R. and other totalitarian countries gaming the system by sending professional athletes to the Games, and then pretending that they were being paid to serve in the armed forces. Of course, none of those athletes ever did any real military service; their duty was to train and perform in athletic events year-round. The solution to that should have been to ban those countries from the Olympics outright, not to make cheating legal.
You're saying that the entire Olympic movement was a crock of #### until they admitted pro athletes in the 1990s. You're wrong.
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The bold is the only thing I will bother replying to, as these arguments are old.
But that is laughably misleading and naive.
Bruce Jenner, for instance, earned a salary significantly in the six digits (if I remember correctly, it was $750k) as an amateur, while training for the Olympics.
If you want to hold on to the technicality that he didn't earn that for competing, knock yourself out. But the only reason he
did earn that salary was that he was expected to be the Olympic decathlon champion.
Many Olympians earned significant wealth while training. The founder of the games, Pierre de Coubertin, was an aristiocrat and a Baron, and many believe the reason he wanted only amateurs was in order to keep the games to the upper class.
The very definition of amateur has been a debated and unsettled item since the initial creation of the games. And many scholars argue that the original Greek athletes were in fact professionals (though that too is debatable).
The whole thing is such an empty argument.