Professional Athletes

mollymoo

mollymoo

mollymoo

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I'm almost certain that when I was young (thirty odd years ago), that olympic athletes weren't allowed to be professional athletes. Has this changed? The tennis players spring to mind.
 
mollymoo said:
I'm almost certain that when I was young (thirty odd years ago), that olympic athletes weren't allowed to be professional athletes. Has this changed? The tennis players spring to mind.
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Boxing is the only sport where professionals cannot compete in the olympics.
I dont know if its changed recently or what.
 
I just seem to remember the Americans having their top athletes in well paid positions in the army. So they were well paid soldiers who trained for the olympics, sort of a get out clause. Could be that I have it wrong though.
 
mollymoo said:
I'm almost certain that when I was young (thirty odd years ago), that olympic athletes weren't allowed to be professional athletes. Has this changed? The tennis players spring to mind.
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Wikipedia has the answer. I couldn't have told you that it was after 1988 but I would have guessed that it was within the past twenty years the rules have been relaxed.

I'm not completely sure why wrestling is an exception because I simply don't know enough about it. Boxing is an exception I believe because of the different rules governing professional and amateur bouts e.g. the latter has headguards and different weights of gloves amongst some other differences.

Then there's the oddities such as football where it's up to 3 players over the age of 23 and the rest of the team has to be under 23 but can be professional. There's strangely no such restrictions on basketball which is at least as professional a sport. You could argue it would be better for tennis as well to have some sort of age stipulation too.
 
The 1988 thing might explain the dominance of communist countries until the rules were relaxed. Moscow 1980, USSR won 80 gold and East Germany 47, 3rd place it dropped to eight.
 
mollymoo said:
The 1988 thing might explain the dominance of communist countries until the rules were relaxed. Moscow 1980, USSR won 80 gold and East Germany 47, 3rd place it dropped to eight.
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Moscow 1980 was a bit of an aberration in that the US (amongst a few other countries) refused to attend so that naturally allowed the USSR the chance of winning many more medals than they otherwise would have.

Set in context though you've also got to consider a number of the results there dubious given there were noted and widescale doping programmes for a number of the communist countries. That's not to say that there couldn't have been clean athletes from those countries but unfortunately there has to be a certain amount of suspicion falling on the medalists in particular from that sort of time period.

I'd also point out that I don't think the other countries were necessarily clean, I'd suspect many weren't but perhaps weren't as focused on it as an ideological exemplar of the proof that their nation and method of governance was better. I think the Olympics and sport in general have made great strides in eliminating drugs cheats which might go some way to explaining some variance in the results.
 
I think each sport is now looked at individually, rather than just a sweeping "all professionals are allowed".

Boxing is as semi-pro said, because of the different governing bodies and match styles. You couldn't really run a knockout tournament over 2 weeks using 12 round KO matches.

In basketball, is there a large amateur scene? Would limiting it to amateurs take it down to kids in the playground level?

I expect the limitations on football are to stop it just being 'another World Cup'. Although there is also a lot of talk about the availability of top players.

Tennis is like basketball. Are there enough amateurs? Would we just end up with the world number 308 playing the world 783?

For most of the sports though, the Olympics is the biggest global stage for it, so it makes sense for it to allow professionals. Its only those sports that have their own global stage that get a bit of scrutiny.
 
semi-pro waster said:
Moscow 1980 was a bit of an aberration in that the US (amongst a few other countries) refused to attend so that naturally allowed the USSR the chance of winning many more medals than they otherwise would have.

Set in context though you've also got to consider a number of the results there dubious given there were noted and widescale doping programmes for a number of the communist countries. That's not to say that there couldn't have been clean athletes from those countries but unfortunately there has to be a certain amount of suspicion falling on the medalists in particular from that sort of time period.

I'd also point out that I don't think the other countries were necessarily clean, I'd suspect many weren't but perhaps weren't as focused on it as an ideological exemplar of the proof that their nation and method of governance was better. I think the Olympics and sport in general have made great strides in eliminating drugs cheats which might go some way to explaining some variance in the results.
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It's certainly changed for the better, there's still two countries dominating but it's not a massive leap in medals, just seems a lot more level nowadays.
 
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