rainbowgirl28 wrote:The ancient Greeks were well paid professionals. The idea that they weren't is a myth fabricated by the founders of the modern Olympics for the reason mentioned above.
they were mercenaries
Might get burned at the stake for this one but...
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Tim McMichael
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There is something to your criticism of the amateur ideal. Track was elitist during this era, but not exclusively so. Eric Liddell was the son of a missionary to China and hardly rich or elitist. Jim Thorpe grew up on a reservation and was as poor as could possibly be imagined. I don’t think you could call Jesse Owens a member of the aristocracy.
It is true that the ideal was abused. It was used by the IOC to strip Owens and Thorpe of their medals, for instance. There were numerous under the table money deals and all kinds of corruption behind the scenes.
I believe in ideals, however, even unrealistic ones. Just because a cause is lost does not mean that it isn’t worth defending. One of my favorite lines of all of literature runs, "through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat." The ideal of a purer and nobler thing is worth being defeated over. Trust me.
The proposition that money brings corruption is, in my opinion, sound. There is a class of people that follow money, and have no scruples about engaging in graft and theft to obtain it. Money also brings an ulterior motive to any endeavor. It is easy for something that should be done for the love of the thing itself to be degraded through the pursuit of the abstraction of cash.
Finally, professionalism has brought an elitist system of its own. Take the example of the good college senior who makes a high bar and places in the top ten at the USATF championships. She wants to go to Europe to take a shot at reaching the next level, so she gets her parents to buy her a plane ticket and heads overseas. What she will find is a life of scratching and scraping just to find meets that will take her. She will be sleeping on cots in overcrowded youth hostels and begging and bribing officials to let her put her poles in through the window of the baggage compartment in the three minutes before the train leaves the station. She will get stranded between meets and have to find a cheap place to stay for days on end, at her own expense. The water will be bad, and the food worse, and she may end up offering to compete for her plane ticket home. (All of this happened to me at one time or another.)
Now let’s take the experience of an established pro who is already making good money. She has an agent that sets up all the meets and arranges all the travel and shipping of her poles from one city to the next. She travels on chartered airplanes or busses arranged and paid for by meet promoters. She stays in four-star hotels with heated towel racks, and there is a buffet table loaded with good food in the lobby all day long. If she got to this level by taking drugs, she has the money to buy the best substances and get the best supervision and instruction in how to take them. She has a full time professional coach (sometimes the same person helping her take the drugs). The people at Balco did not do what they did for free or out of the goodness of their hearts. This costs multiple thousands of dollars.
This separation between the opportunities afforded to these two athletes is vast. It is a wall made of money that is difficult to breach and easy to get tossed back through. More often than not, athletes who could be great, given a few more years after college, give up in despair for lack of opportunity. I have known people in these circumstances who ended up resorting to drugs just to make the breakthrough to the red-carpet treatment. They intended it to be a temporary boost: “I’ll just take enough to make it to the top, and then I’ll stop.â€Â
It is true that the ideal was abused. It was used by the IOC to strip Owens and Thorpe of their medals, for instance. There were numerous under the table money deals and all kinds of corruption behind the scenes.
I believe in ideals, however, even unrealistic ones. Just because a cause is lost does not mean that it isn’t worth defending. One of my favorite lines of all of literature runs, "through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat." The ideal of a purer and nobler thing is worth being defeated over. Trust me.
The proposition that money brings corruption is, in my opinion, sound. There is a class of people that follow money, and have no scruples about engaging in graft and theft to obtain it. Money also brings an ulterior motive to any endeavor. It is easy for something that should be done for the love of the thing itself to be degraded through the pursuit of the abstraction of cash.
Finally, professionalism has brought an elitist system of its own. Take the example of the good college senior who makes a high bar and places in the top ten at the USATF championships. She wants to go to Europe to take a shot at reaching the next level, so she gets her parents to buy her a plane ticket and heads overseas. What she will find is a life of scratching and scraping just to find meets that will take her. She will be sleeping on cots in overcrowded youth hostels and begging and bribing officials to let her put her poles in through the window of the baggage compartment in the three minutes before the train leaves the station. She will get stranded between meets and have to find a cheap place to stay for days on end, at her own expense. The water will be bad, and the food worse, and she may end up offering to compete for her plane ticket home. (All of this happened to me at one time or another.)
Now let’s take the experience of an established pro who is already making good money. She has an agent that sets up all the meets and arranges all the travel and shipping of her poles from one city to the next. She travels on chartered airplanes or busses arranged and paid for by meet promoters. She stays in four-star hotels with heated towel racks, and there is a buffet table loaded with good food in the lobby all day long. If she got to this level by taking drugs, she has the money to buy the best substances and get the best supervision and instruction in how to take them. She has a full time professional coach (sometimes the same person helping her take the drugs). The people at Balco did not do what they did for free or out of the goodness of their hearts. This costs multiple thousands of dollars.
This separation between the opportunities afforded to these two athletes is vast. It is a wall made of money that is difficult to breach and easy to get tossed back through. More often than not, athletes who could be great, given a few more years after college, give up in despair for lack of opportunity. I have known people in these circumstances who ended up resorting to drugs just to make the breakthrough to the red-carpet treatment. They intended it to be a temporary boost: “I’ll just take enough to make it to the top, and then I’ll stop.â€Â
Last edited by Tim McMichael on Mon Sep 25, 2006 3:41 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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rainbowgirl28
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Tim McMichael wrote:I hope you don’t think I am trying to hammer you, Rainbowgirl. You got me thinking, and I think you can tell that my response is driven by some degree of bitterness and a great deal of idealism that I have held onto at great personal cost.
I don't think that. I admire the idealism, I just don't like it when people look at the past as being ideal, when it was far from it.
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