When and why did the Olympics stop being amateur?

The Olympics began as an amateur event. The IOC's first regulation, voted in 1894, was to allow only amateur athletes to take part. The idea came from an English public-school ethos that greatly influenced Pierre de Coubertin, in which practising or training was thought tantamount to cheating, and those who practised a sport professionally were considered to have an unfair advantage over hobbyists.

Take Jim Thorpe, the 1912 pentathlon and decathlon champion. He lost his Olympic titles after it was found that he had been paid for two seasons of semi-professional baseball before the Games. The IOC awarded the gold medal to the silver medalist, Hugo Wieslander, who refused to accept it because he felt Thorpe was the legitimate owner. Thirty years after Thorpe's death, in 1983, the IOC restored his medals with replicas, ruling that the decision to strip him fell outside the required 30 days.

What ended the rule? In part, the Eastern Bloc. The Soviet Union entered athletes who were nominally students, soldiers or workers but who in reality were paid by the state to train full-time. This greatly disadvantaged American and Western European athletes and was a significant factor in the decline of American medal hauls in the 1970s and 1980s. The Olympics shifted away from amateurism and allowed professional athletes only in the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its influence within the IOC.

A visible symbol of the change was the "Dream Team" of 1992. In 1989, delegates of basketball's governing body FIBA voted 56 to 13 to allow professional players in international events, including the Olympics. The American team that went to Barcelona was the first from the United States to include active NBA players, and it won the gold medal by an average of 44 points.