Dogtrousers
Lefty tighty. Get it righty.
In the 20th century, the concept of amateurism was a big thing in many (but not all) sports, with people being banned from various sports for seemingly innocuous things like selling trophies or winning money at fairs.
Some sports, like cricket, maintained a pro/amateur distinction but muddled along somehow. Some, like Football and Rugby League, didn't care. Rugby Union was particularly hard line, handing out bans for the slightest contact with Rugby League while other players found their boots mysteriously stuffed full of banknotes and other top players were found cushy "jobs" enabling them to train full time. Baseball in the US was professional from the outset as was Road cycling in France (although the Tour de France did include touriste-routiers who were typically wealthy amateurs just there for a laugh).
Then from about the 1980s onwards it all fizzled out. It ceased to be a requirement for the Olympics after Barcelona 1992, and eventually the shamateurism hypocrisy got too much even for Rugby Union in 1995.
The subject seemed to go from a vital battle for the soul of sport to a completely forgotten non-issue in the blink of an eye. Now we have lottery funding and it all looks silly from a modern perspective. Why did people expend so much energy on such a daft ideal?
Was it peculiarly British (or peculiarly English?) I know that Baron de Coubertain - Mr Olympics - was French but the whole amateur thing did seem to chime in very well with the rigid British class system which fizzled out (or morphed into something different) around the same time.
Any thoughts? Have we lost anything by making pretty much all elite sports professional? Was it simply that a generation of old farts and gin-soaked dodderers died off and the concept became irrelevant?
Some sports, like cricket, maintained a pro/amateur distinction but muddled along somehow. Some, like Football and Rugby League, didn't care. Rugby Union was particularly hard line, handing out bans for the slightest contact with Rugby League while other players found their boots mysteriously stuffed full of banknotes and other top players were found cushy "jobs" enabling them to train full time. Baseball in the US was professional from the outset as was Road cycling in France (although the Tour de France did include touriste-routiers who were typically wealthy amateurs just there for a laugh).
Then from about the 1980s onwards it all fizzled out. It ceased to be a requirement for the Olympics after Barcelona 1992, and eventually the shamateurism hypocrisy got too much even for Rugby Union in 1995.
The subject seemed to go from a vital battle for the soul of sport to a completely forgotten non-issue in the blink of an eye. Now we have lottery funding and it all looks silly from a modern perspective. Why did people expend so much energy on such a daft ideal?
Was it peculiarly British (or peculiarly English?) I know that Baron de Coubertain - Mr Olympics - was French but the whole amateur thing did seem to chime in very well with the rigid British class system which fizzled out (or morphed into something different) around the same time.
Any thoughts? Have we lost anything by making pretty much all elite sports professional? Was it simply that a generation of old farts and gin-soaked dodderers died off and the concept became irrelevant?
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