Olympic Games 2004 Athens

[Nikephoros_Phokas]

I think the Olympic commitee should do something about professional athletes. They should not have the right to represent themselves for the olympics, they kill the olympic spirit and what the olympics are all about.

 

What is the point when people that have a particular sport as their career and are payed millions compete with others that practice their sports as sports rather than as a career. Of course I have in mind sports like basketball, hockey etc... ...

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I just read an excellent study by David C. Young, The Modern Olympics a Struggle for Revival. The modern Olympic movement was destroyed almost completely by the concept of amateurism coupled with Christian bias against the flesh and athleticism. Even in the ancient Olympics athletes were professionals sponsored by rich nobles. The concept of amateurism in 19th Century Europe was a concept of gentleman's amateurs, meaning people who never worked in their life say as a mechanic or laborer, instead of denoting people who were not professional athletes, as we define an amateur today. The only way for people today to understand the snobbish 1800s concept of amateurism that no longer exists is to read about it. Men like Brookes who started the Wenlock Olympics, Coubertin, Evangelis Zappas, etc. and others were against the snobbish concept of amateurism that prevented workers from participating in sporting events along with gentlemen who were rich enough to never work, but competed athletically for money anyway in violation of modern concepts of amateurism. Mahaffy, an incompetent, snobbish Anglo-Irishmen started the modern myth of ancient Olympic amateurism.

 

page 49

... "He[Mahaffy] was the first to assert (quite wrongly) that the ancient Olympic Games were for "amateur" athletes only, inventing the myth of ancient Greek amateurism that became our own and plagued our modern Olympic movement for almost a century.[30]" ...

 

David C. Young even wrote a whole work on the false notion of amateurism called The Olympic Myth of Amateur Athletics.

 

Unexpectedly, in H.L. Mencken's the American Language(3rd revised edition, printed 1930) there is a glimpse into the concept of English snobbish amateurism, that was not as strong as in the more egalitarian United States.

 

Chapter IV American And English Today

Section 3. Honorifics

page 143

... "Gentleman-clerk or gentleman-author would make an Englishman howl, though he uses gentleman-rider and gentleman-player in place of our[American] amateur." ...

 

Even with our concept of amateurism, as in not a professional, I would still be against Olympic amateurism. On a global level televised around the world, competing in stadiums of thousands, is no place for my high school basketball team. It has no basis in ancient Olympic history either. The amateurs have their own smaller, local events.

Edited September 30, 2004 by Nikephoros_Phokas