The Professionalization of the Olympics has made them better

Yet again, the United States took home the highest number of bronze and silver medals in the Summer Olympics. We tied with China for the most gold medals.

American dominance in the Olympics is an old story—since the modern Olympic games began, the United States has taken home over thirty-one hundred medals, between two-and-a-half and three times the next most-winning country (the Soviet Union).

We’ve managed that despite competing against dictatorial powerhouses like the Soviet Union and Communist China that handpick athletes, house them, train them, feed them, and sometimes dope them, while our athletes are not given any material or financial public support. In years past, this meant that many athletes were poor, working multiple jobs to scrape together the cash to go to the Olympic Games. Today, because the Games have been opened to professionals, athletes either come from major sports teams or are sponsored by brands, or both.

In either case, the athletes’ salaries, their training expenses, their food and housing and travel and incidentals, and their athletic needs are financed by advertising. The athletes sell shoes and sports drinks. They wear uniforms from Nike or Adidas. They star in McDonalds ads. They promote athletic equipment. They hawk gear and cookbooks and supplements and training advice. Their teams exist in large part because of corporate sponsorships, and because television and radio advertisements subsidize ticket sales.

There are those who bemoan this relationship between athletics and marketing. They prefer the “purity” of athletic competition untainted by the need to sell products. They hear about the amounts involved in the Olympic Games – tens of billions to host the Games, billions for the IOC, over seven billion for NBC to broadcast the Olympics —and wonder what ill effect big money has on sports.

But the truth is that the professionalization of the Olympics has made the competitions better and improved the lives of the athletes. And romanticizing the days of amateur athletics propagates a false narrative about the past and diminishes our appreciation for great athletic performances today.

Top Athletes Can’t Perform Well Unless They Focus Exclusively on Their Sport

This should go without saying, but the romantic view of amateur athletics holds that it’s actually better when athletes have to work a real job because doing so either instills character, or it makes them more relatable to regular people like you and me. So, it’s important for me to address this up front, before going into the history of professionalization.

To perform at the highest level, an athlete can’t work a job. All effort must be dedicated to training and preparing. It is impossible to set a world record in any mature sport unless you are solely focused on the world record. The only reason it was possible in the past is that the world records weren’t very hard to beat. Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile in 1954 despite working as a junior doctor, because running wasn’t a mature sport. Today, high school boys routinely run under four minutes in the mile and to be a world-class athlete, a man needs to run much faster than that. (The women’s world record is 4:07.64.)

Since distance running is the sport I know best, I will focus on runners. To prepare for the Olympics, Cole Hocker and Grant Fisher needed to spend seven days a week training multiple hours a day. Top runners will typically run anywhere from eighty to one hundred and twenty miles in a week, with two or three hard days on the track and a long run. Many of them will add in some cross training (usually cycling) to increase their volume of aerobic activity without adding miles.

In 1978, runners could get away with just running. But in 2024, top runners need to be in the gym strength training and doing preventative physical therapy for their joints and core. The shorter-distance athletes will also be doing plyometrics and explosive lifts.

On top of that, they need to meet with their coaches, watch videos of their form, and fix any inefficiencies in their stride. All of that takes time. Between hours spent running or in the gym, and hours spent watching videos or meeting with coaches, we might be talking close to a full-time job.

And we haven’t even mentioned the word recovery. Athletes training multiples hours every day need to spend even more time recovering. The human body can handle hundred-mile weeks, but only if allowed to rebuild itself. The primary obstacle setting elite athletes apart from talented individuals who work ordinary jobs is that the latter can’t handle the same volume and intensity of training because they don’t have time to recover. This includes stretching, massage (and other soft-tissue work), mobility drills, and preparing nutritious food. All of which take time.

The most important aspect of recovery is sleep. Elite runners usually sleep ten to twelve hours every day. Most individuals can’t recover from ninety-mile weeks on eight hours of sleep.[1] But the average American worker sleeps much less than that. Add to that the fact that most working runners are training at suboptimal times for their circadian rhythm (i.e., before sunrise or after sunset), and you can begin to see how difficult it is to train well while keeping a job.

All of which is to say that the gap between elite athletes and talented athletes who have to work a job is very large, because the obstacles in the way of the latter are prohibitively difficult to overcome. The best evidence for this is the difference between Japan and the United States in elite and semi-elite running.

While the United States has more runners who can run under sixty-two minutes for a half marathon, Japan has more who can run under sixty-four and sixty-five, despite being a much smaller country. In The Way of the Runner, Adharanand Finn explains that Japan’s system of corporate teams–runners paid by their companies to spend part of their workday training for national races–allows for a flourishing of the semi-elite tier of distance runners, a flourishing wholly unlike the situation in the United States. In America, only the very best runners can get sponsorships. Even many very good runners–athletes who would be on national television in Japan–have to say goodbye to their running careers after college. Some former collegiate athletes who lack corporate sponsorships may do their best to train hard during their twenties in the hopes of winning races, but most will give up their careers. Those who continue to train hard on their own will find that the obstacles of working life impede their performance.

Thus, as Finn explains, there is a wide gulf between the top runners and the best recreational runners in America. In a nation of 340 million, we should have many more runners capable of going under sixty-four minutes in the half marathon, under fourteen minutes in the 5k, and under 2:30 in the marathon.

Without the corporate-sponsored infrastructure of Japan (or some other funding source for professionalizing “minor league” running), most American athletes are amateurs, not professionals. And since amateur athletes can’t perform as well while juggling other priorities as professionals can when devoting all of life to preparing for competition, America has a shallow bench of talent compared to a country a third of our size. In other words, America’s relative lack of professionalization outside of a highly-selective tier has hindered our ability to compete globally in sports like running.

And if American Olympic athletes were still required to be amateurs, America’s performance would be hindered even more. The professionalization of Olympic sports has led to better competitions, improved records, more spectacular performances, and simplified lives for the athletes. It has allowed athletes to train properly, unhindered by the obligations of work life.

In order to see that, it’s important to take a look back at the transition from amateur Olympics to professionalized Olympics.

The Amateur Athletic Union

Olympic athletes used to compete as part of the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), which worked with the United States Olympic Association to run qualification trials and coordinate the national team. It determined amateur standing–banning American athletes from competing in the Olympics if they were earning money from playing or coaching their sport.

This rule came out of an older era when certain sports were the province of the monied classes, whose members didn’t need to train for money because they didn’t need to work for money either. Amateurism was considered noble. It was the hallmark of a gentleman. Sports were played for the love of the game. Earning money detracted from that ethic. It demeaned the spirit of competition.

But many people didn’t see it that way. Working-class athletes often saw amateurism as arbitrary or unfair, something which was nice if you had enough money to live on, but wouldn’t pay the bills if you didn’t. Increasingly, they pushed back on the AAU, insisting that they deserved to be able to make a living from their talents.

In 1978, the Amateur Sports Act removed the AAU from its role. Athletes can now be voluntary members, but the AAU no longer controls who participates in the Olympic Games, and on what terms. The 1998 Olympic and Amateur Sports later removed the amateurism requirement entirely, making official what had been unofficial ever since the passage of the Amateur Sports Act: the professionalization of American Olympic athletes.

These laws were passed partially in response to widespread cheating from other countries (especially the Soviet Union), but they were also passed due to anger from Olympic athletes towards the AAU.

Famously, Steve Prefontaine fought hard against the AAU. Though he was “the one who [has] made all the sacrifices,” he was being asked to suffer more (“if I decide to compete at Montreal, to make all the sacrifices necessary, I'll be a poor man. If you're not a millionaire, there's no way”).

Prefontaine wasn’t exaggerating that he would be a poor man. Poverty was the norm for runners in the 1970s. While today’s Boston Marathon winners typically earn comfortable salaries from their corporate sponsors, Prefontaine’s compatriot Bill Rodgers (who won Boston and New York four times between 1975 and 1980) could be found putting mayonnaise on a pizza because he was too poor to afford more nutritious high-calorie food.

Prefontaine was right that Americans were at a financial disadvantage compared to the rest of the world. The Soviet Union paid their athletes (who had been selected for natural talent) to train while listing their occupation as “soldier,” in order to pass them off as amateurs. They weren’t the only ones.

Today, American athletes earn fifty thousand dollars from World Athletics (the international governing body for Olympic sports) for winning a gold medals. That might sound like a lot of money, until you realize that it usually only comes once or twice a lifetime, and that it typically accounts for decades of training. Moreover, it’s a lot less than many people think American athletes are earning for winning gold medals. Olympic athletes aren’t usually multimillionaires. Some of them make decent salaries. Others make enough to allow them to focus on their training. But they aren’t living Hollywood lives of luxury. Olympic swimmers don’t get the contracts NFL or NBA players do. More money goes into putting the Olympics on than to paying the athletes.

But Isn’t Money Corrupting?

Some will still argue that something was lost when the Olympic and Amateur Sports Act opened up the American Olympic team to full professionalization. After all, money can be corrupting. The Olympic ideal was originally about the love of sport.

But lack of money can be just as corrupting as too much money. In “The Ballad of Timothy Touchett,” Amor Towles tells the story of a fictional young writer trying to make it in New York City while working in a used bookstore, who is presented the opportunity to forge authors’ signatures on rare first editions. The gifts he will receive for this work are modest—fifty dollars will not make him rich—but he is struggling to get by, and an extra fifty dollars one week means the difference between a cheap burrito and dinner at a French restaurant.

“At each crossing, faced with the decision of whether to go left, right, or straight ahead, the young man may rely upon the advice he has been given as a child, or the sum of his experiences, or the flip of a coin. But of all the forces that are likely to influence him as he proceeds from one fork to the next, there are few more powerful than the moderate increase in income… ‘But,’ you may well ask, ‘is this incremental improvement in daily life really enough to make a difference? Is it enough to enhance a young man’s happiness, boost his ego, and silence the nagging voice of envy, if only for a minute?’ Suffice it to say that at the fork in the road, offer a young man an extra fifty dollars a week in exchange for a modest adjustment to his dreams, and you will have him by the throat [emphasis added]” (Towles, A Table for Two, 51-52).

Good fiction shows us the world as it is, not as we imagine it to be. It tells us what we already know in ways which we can’t deny as easily as we can direct evidence. Poverty, and that stage of limbo between poverty and lower middle-class in which an individual or a family can hang uncertainly, makes temptation hard to resist. When you need money, you think about it all the time. When an athlete is hard up and a little bit of money could go a very long way towards easing her stress, she will find it much harder to resist than when she doesn’t have to worry about where she will get her next meal. When an athlete has to worry about how he will possibly afford to attend the Olympics, to the point where he can’t focus on his training, he will more easily manage to convince himself that petty corruption is neither petty nor corrupt. Indeed, if he didn’t need the money, a sudden offer of ten million dollars in exchange for taking that third lap of the 1500m a little slow would provoke his righteous indignation. But when he is working two jobs just to make ends meet, one hundred dollars in exchange for a taking his competitors out for a drink or three the night before the race might not even strike him as corruption. The players who took bribes to lose the World Series in the infamous 1919 “Black Sox” scandal weren’t offered life-changing fortunes. But they were poor, and the modest sum they were offered was enough.

Prefontaine’s comments to the New York Times from 1975 come off as selfish and unpatriotic. Especially when you compare them to the comments of some athletes today, who express gratitude towards their country and family for sending them to the Olympic Games. But when you realize that Prefontaine’s country had given him no reason for gratitude, that instead he was being forced to join an organization which essentially mandated poverty, that he was being asked to pay his own way, that he had to find coaches and train on his own, and that he was being given no help or aid, you might see that if anything had encouraged selfishness in Prefontaine, it had been the amateurism requirement of the AAU. If anything had caused his lack of patriotism, it had been the expectation that he make all the sacrifices without any support or encouragement from his country and that the gold medal belong (metaphorically speaking) to the United States. It seems only fair that if he was the one sacrificing, the medal should be his.

Moreover, before the Amateur Sports Act, many athletes were already taking money under the table in order to support their efforts.

In other words, it wasn’t money that corrupted the Olympics and led to rule-breaking, but the lack of it.

Just as it isn’t fair to ask people to work hard without any compensation, for no other reason that industriousness is a virtue and working builds character, it isn’t fair to ask athletes to break their bodies and endure years of pain and hardship for nothing other than the love of the game. Jobs do provide meaning in people’s lives. They do instill important lessons. But we still expect compensation from our jobs for our time and effort.

Likewise, athletic competition has intrinsic value, as do the sports played at the Olympics. But athletes work very hard, spend a lot of time, expend tremendous effort, and make sacrifices few other individuals make. It is only fair to expect that they be compensated accordingly, too.

Moreover, many of us love to watch the Olympics. We love to cheer on our favorite athletes. We enjoy their performances. Their hard work creates some small measure of value in our lives. Given that there are millions of people who enjoy the Olympics every two years, and these athletes create value in the lives of millions of people, if the athletes are to be compensated accordingly, they should be paid well. Since we enjoy the fruits of their efforts for free, sitting through advertisements is the least we can do to ensure they can live comfortable lives dedicated to the pursuit of excellence within their chosen sport.

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Sources Cited

Finn, Adharanand. The Way of the Runner, Faber & Faber, 2015.

Towles, Amor. Table for Two, Penguin Random House, 2024.

[1] Most elite runners use naps to supplement their sleep at night, so they may not sleep all ten or twelve hours in one nighttime stretch.

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Ben Connelly is writer, runner, and personal trainer based in Virginia. Ben can be found on Twitter and on his Substack, Hardihood Books, where he publishes short fiction and essays.