As NCAA and Olympics start paying athletes, what happens to the amateur ideal?

Day 6 of the 2023 Pan American Games in Santiago, Chile, was the day that Morelle McCane literally punched her ticket onto the USA Boxing Olympic Team roster.

One minute into her quarterfinal match, Ms. McCane split Costa Rican Nicole Vega Moya’s guard with a right uppercut, left cross combo that resulted in the first standing count knockdown. Thirty seconds later, a left cross ended the fight. Ms. McCane went on to win a silver medal.

Thirteen years after she started boxing in high school, she is one step closer to fulfilling her dream of winning Olympic gold. She has already won a slew of other medals, including four Golden Gloves, the 2023 Gee Bee International Tournament, and two USA Boxing Elite Championships. She trains twice a day, six days a week, a time-consuming effort. Yet she is still considered an amateur. In order for her mother and siblings to be able to come to Paris to watch her compete this summer, she started a GoFundMe page to raise $50,000. Currently, she’s well short of her goal.

If Ms. McCane were a track and field athlete, she would stand the chance of winning a $50,000 cash prize at the Olympics. World Athletics, the global governing body for track and field, announced in April that all track and field gold medalists will win prize money this year, and that relay teammates will split the same amount. The group also said it will start paying silver and bronze medalists in 2028. The possibility of this attitude spreading to the governing bodies of other sports, including less-celebrated Olympic competitions, caused curious inquiries and opinions from athletes about remuneration.

“The purist in me says no, but the reality of it is all the money being made. It’s the same thing that’s happening in college athletics,” says Matthew Robinson, a professor and area head of the sport management program at the University of Delaware’s Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics.

Dr. Robinson helped the International Olympic Committee and United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee create the International Coaching Enrichment Certificate Program, which has provided coaching apprenticeships for more than 400 coaches in 125 countries in 24 different sports.

The Paris prize money comes amid a shift in thought about amateurism generally across the United States, especially in college athletics. The love of the game still exists, but there is a growing recognition that everyone else – from colleges to video game companies to broadcasters and betting operations – is making vast sums of money off the “amateurs.” Is it fair, these athletes and their supporters say, that they are the only ones not profiting from their own likenesses and the years they’ve spent honing their skills? 

On Thursday, in a seismic change, the NCAA and college conferences agreed to start paying college athletes directly. Current and former athletes who sued in House v. NCAA will receive $2.8 billion in damages. The players sued arguing that it was their names, images, and likenesses that were being sold for broadcast rights. A new revenue-sharing model would pay athletes part of the profits their schools generate from sponsorships, ticket sales, broadcast rights, and other revenue streams.

On the other hand, is the Olympic spirit lost if athletes are competing for money, rather than for purely the glory of representing their country? For his part, Dr. Robinson says the Olympic ideal of amateurism has been eroded over time. 

“The key is the embracing of the Olympic spirit for the athletes, that they are doing it for the love of sport,” Dr. Robinson says. He adds that a $50,000 reward for people like billionaire NBA star LeBron James, who will compete this summer, doesn’t move the needle. He understands how it could for others.

“There are a number of sports, where people have given up careers, because your peak years of being an elite athlete are also the formative years of starting a career ... and so the idea of compensation, sometimes you can say, ‘Hey, it makes sense,’” he says.

Ms. McCane is an example of someone who doesn’t get an off season.

“In a combat sport, it’s a year-round thing. You’re working six, seven days a week sometimes. In my sport, where you have to maintain weight, you have to do extra stuff sometimes. And people don’t see that side of it, but we know as athletes. ‘Show us the money,’” Ms. McCane laughs, quoting “Jerry Maguire” as she and other athletes speak about prize money at an Olympic summit in New York.

“That would definitely make us feel better, even though we already love the sport,” she adds.

From $0 to $737,000 to cash under the table

For the record, many countries pay winning athletes through their individual Olympic committees. The U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee (USOPC) pays winners $37,500 for gold, $22,500 for silver, and $15,000 for bronze. For the Tokyo Olympics, Singapore paid its gold medal winners the sum of $737,000. And, historians agree, in the past some Olympians were paid under the table.

The money that World Athletics is awarding athletes comes directly from a $2.4 million pot that it gets from the International Olympic Committee. As a nonprofit organization, World Athletics puts 90% of money earned back into sport and development. Not every participating athlete gets large sponsorship deals, and not everybody wins a medal. But all, the organization points out, add value to the competitions.

Requests for compensation go back more than a decade. In 2012, U.S. track and field gold medalist Sanya Richards-Ross suggested that track and field stars should be paid and allowed to wear uniforms with more than one sponsor’s logo. Dwyane Wade, Hall of Fame NBA champion and Olympic gold medalist, also suggested that he and fellow basketball Olympians should be paid for their time, the tickets and jerseys sold, and overall contributions.

“What makes the Olympics and Paralympics valuable are the athletes,” says Victoria Jackson, a sports historian and associate professor of history at Arizona State University. Several things are true about sport and the Olympics, Dr. Jackson says. First, the Olympics are a quadrennial event, which only temporarily gives some individual athletes a large platform to compete and show their prowess, despite needing to train and sacrifice in between those years. 

“I just know the sacrifices that so many Olympic and Paralympic athletes make in so many sports. There are people living below the poverty line who are the best in the world at what they do who are really struggling or just leaving sport because they can’t afford to stay,” Dr. Jackson says.

Reimagining the Olympic model

One payout every four years likely wouldn’t help in the long run either. From an administrative perspective, the idea of compensating Olympians looks different.

Gene Sykes, chair of the USOPC, says international federations invest money in players how they see fit. “I think they do it thinking about, what is it that motivates the athletes to make the sacrifices to compete and continue to train and be in a position where they can do what they do?” Mr. Sykes says.

Mr. Sykes, a longtime Goldman Sachs executive, assumed his role as chair publicly urging his peers to reimagine the Olympic business model, with thoughts on adequate funding and growth. That reimagining means raising money for athletes through the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Foundation. Mr. Sykes says identifying commercial partners and boosting philanthropy and partnerships to support athletes is key, and that the USOPC is quietly working to do that. The organization helps athletes via stipends, training costs, travel, and other forms of support.

“Our whole strategy is to identify the continuum of an athlete being developed, making the team, being on the team, being motivated to stay on the team, and committing themselves to performing with the team,” Mr. Sykes says. He adds that the USOPC is looking for ways to engage athletes after their playing days are over.

Lastly, Mr. Skyes says that athletes have the opportunity to take advantage of digital and social media to create a brand and reputation.

“In order to be an elite, successful athlete, you need access to facilities, coaching, training, correct diet, all of those things,” Dr. Robinson says, and he adds that the USOPC’s holistic view of supporting athletes does that.

Who can afford to be an amateur?

Prize money from World Athletics is a part of a mindset shift that officially happened in 1988, but was set in motion before that. Olympic organizers once staunchly held to the idea that those competing were amateurs, the same way college athletics viewed its players. 

Olympic organizers strictly adhered to amateur rules and stripped American track and field star, Jim Thorpe, of the gold medals that he won at the 1912 Olympics. The reason? He once received money for playing a different sport, baseball. The legendary Native American athlete’s medals weren’t restored until 1982, long after his death – and long after many complained that the International Olympic Committee had not followed their own 30-day disqualification rule.

The ideal of amateurism was born amid bias, class, and racial segregation. In the 1800s, those who could take advantage of leisure pastimes were wealthy and mainly white. During the start of modern Olympics, the top 5% of the U.S. possessed 30% of the wealth, writes Steven Riess in his three-volume encyclopedia, “Sports in America From Colonial Times to the Twenty-First Century.”

Wealthy people had time and money to establish sporting clubs. Clubs like the New York Athletic Club, founded in 1866, offered athletic competition among a social class that shared values, customs, and lifestyles. They were highly selective in membership and participated in sports such as yachting, hunting, and polo. The club sponsored the first national track and field championships in 1876 and set standards for amateurism.

Other events, such as the Henley Royal Regatta, held in 1878, set limits on amateurism by saying, “No person shall be considered an amateur or sculler ... who is or has been by trade or employment for wages, a mechanic, artisan or laborer.”

Laborers simply didn’t have time to play sports, given that factory work came with low incomes. They lived in urban neighborhoods with few facilities. European migrants from Britain, Germany, and later Ireland gravitated toward boxing. Black Americans, mostly in the South, were segregated by law, and participated in sports via church, political, or fraternal organizations to promote a sense of community.

“It’s a silly thing, and it just makes me laugh,” Dr. Jackson says of the idea of amateurism as an ideal. Dr. Jackson says the nostalgia and purism never truly existed and could be more accurately understood as reflections of socioeconomic class.

“The originators of [the Olympics] all had titles, like lords and barons, and they had eight weeks to just go and play games with each other and declare each other gold medalists,” she argues.

After World War II, the Olympics were commercialized and then democratized, which led to more people without large amounts of wealth being able to participate. As far as amateur versus professional, Olympic basketball perhaps best illustrates how that worked when the first USA “Dream Team,” led by Michael Jordan, dominated competition in 1992. 

The idea of amateurism has endured mostly in the U.S., held on to by organizations like the NCAA. Big money earned in college football helped push the movement forward via competitions, training facilities, stadiums, and quality of opponents, Dr. Jackson says.

“The point is that the only place people talk about amateur sports is in the United States,” she says. “This idea of amateur doesn’t exist anywhere else anymore, because when the Olympic movement abandoned it, everybody else did.”