The idea that athletes should be empowered in the world of sport is relatively recent, but the issue is as old as sport because sports are connected with political power. This is especially true with Olympic sports. However, even recreational sports can be a site for power struggles. We can think, for example, of the decades of battles fought by women who just wanted to ride bicycles, run, and jump, and wear clothing that allowed them freedom of movement, but were restricted by social customs and ideals that prevented them from engaging in physical exercise. Power is even more inherent in sports mega-events, because sports events are a kind of cultural performance in which dominant cultural values are displayed to a public audience through the medium of the body. Thus, sports have historically served as a site for conflicts over what kind of values should be publicly displayed. The bigger the event, the more political elites want to control it. And this means controlling the athletes, too, since they are essentially the performers of the cultural values that are on display. Since Olympic Games are especially important politically, and athletes represent their nation there before a global audience, Olympic athletes can be under a great deal of pressure from powerful institutions, such as their National Olympic Committee, media, television broadcasters, and the International Olympic Committee, as well as from powerful people, which might even include their head of state. So the structure of the entire Olympic system tends toward disempowering athletes and subordinating their needs to a bigger political agenda. Given that this is the situation, the challenge is how to allow athletes a degree of power that is ethical and fair within the limits of the Olympic system.  How can we protect and strengthen athletes’ and coaches’ rights against the massive power of governments, corporations, and the institutions that make up the Olympic system?

In the entire history of the modern Olympic Games, it has only been within the last four decades that a number of changes in the Olympic system gave Olympic athletes a significantly greater degree of empowerment. Today, I will review those changes to analyze what factors contributed to athlete empowerment, in order to draw some lessons for the future about what kinds of factors tend to contribute to the greater empowerment of athletes.

Amateurism and Professionalism

I want to start with the professionalization of Olympic sports that occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It might not be immediately obvious that this was a pivotal moment in modern Olympic history when athletes gained more power, but I would argue that this was the single biggest policy change that gave athletes significantly more power than they had previously. Before professionals were allowed in the Olympics, there were sports that did have professional teams and competitions, but only non-professional athletes in those sports could take part in the Olympics – such as ice hockey, football, basketball, and boxing, which were limited to non-professional players. Tennis, baseball, and golf were not in the Olympics at all for a long period. There were also many sports that did have the financial basis to support professional athletes, such as athletics (track and field), and alpine skiing, but the athletes could not accept payments because they would lose their amateur status. By the 1970s the top athletes in these sports were accepting under-the-table payments from corporate sponsors and meet organizers.

I competed in athletics (track and field) (in the pentathlon until 1981, when it became the heptathlon). My career included a full athletic scholarship to a university, national top ten rankings, representing the US in international competitions, and competing in the 1980 and 1984 US Olympic Trials. Since I had been a child, I had always dreamed of making the U.S. Olympic team, but the closest I came was a seventh place finish in the 1980 Olympic Trials pentathlon. No Americans went to the Olympics that year, however – those were the Moscow Olympic Games boycotted by the U.S. The track and field Olympic Trials were depressing because we already knew that no one would be going to Moscow. This was the era when all Olympic athletes were required to be “amateurs,” and except for a handful of celebrities, most of the U.S.’s Olympic athletes were supported either by university scholarships or part-time, low-level jobs such as restaurant servers or postal delivery. It was a system that was reaching its breaking point because the rivalries of the Cold War had pushed the levels of top competition so high that athletes really needed to train full-time to reach them. Athletes in the USSR and other socialist countries were state-supported, and at the 1980Olympic trials, athletes discussed whether this might be a better system than the U.S. system. This was actually the time at which my interest in socialist sport was sparked, and two years later, when I entered graduate school, Ibecame an expert on the Chinese sports system. In 1980, the athletes engaged inheated discussion about the U.S. government’s sudden intervention in sports,since, in our system, the central government does not directly contribute funding to Olympic sports. I remember from personal experience that American track and field athletes felt unfairly disempowered. We asked, What gave our government, which never gave us any financial support, the right to prevent us from fulfilling the dream of participating in the Olympic Games, for which we had sacrificed so much? The rower Anita DeFrantz, who had been the first blackfemale rower to win an Olympic medal when she took the silver medal in 1976,filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Olympic Committee along with several other prominent athletes. She lost, but the IOC later coopted her as a member.

Bruce Kidd and the Fight for Canadian Government Support of Athletes

In 2021, Bruce Kidd published a memoir, A Runner’s Journey. Many of you know that Bruce Kidd has been one of the strongest advocates for athlete empowerment in the Olympic Movement since he was a world-class long-distance runner in the 1960s and 70s. In his memoir, he recalls that of all his campaigns, the most contentious campaign was the fight in the mid-1970s to gain adequate financial support for Canadian athletes training for the Olympic Games. The IOC had relaxed the rules for Olympic eligibility, but Canadian authorities refused to make any improvements. He observed that Olympic suppliers and workers on the Olympic venues made record revenues and wages while the prospective members of the 1976 Canadian Olympic Team were broke and starving.

In the winter of 1975, he and three other elite athletes surveyed 123 athletes considered “hopefuls” for the Olympic Team about their income and expenses. The results were even more discouraging than they feared. The majority experienced severe financial difficulties. Many were unemployed, living on welfare or Unemployment Insurance, or depending upon parents’ or spouses’ incomes for support. Some were even stealing food. Employed athletes reported that employers were reluctant to give them time away from work to compete abroad, and in some cases fired them when they missed time. Many were extremely bitter:

How can Canada expect me to do my best and train for them? Eating peanut butter sandwiches for breakfast, lunch, and dinner is a bit too much. When the hell are we going to get some respect? Why train when you’re hungry and have no pride!

Athletes who qualify for the Olympics should perform in their own choice of dress and burn their Canadian uniforms in protest.

Kidd and his collaborators, after gaining the support of hundreds of Olympic hopefuls, took a proposal to Sport Canada. They were rejected. Sport Canada said that if Canadian athletes received $200 a month they would quit school or their jobs and become athletic “bums.” With no other option, Kidd and his colleagues took their cause to the media. They said that unless their demands were met, they would continue to take political action, “up to and including a strike of the Olympic Games.” The Canadian Olympic Association became worried about losing sponsors, and finally invited them to negotiate. They got almost everything they asked for, including individualized packages of support and athlete-led administration. Their successful battle was part of a larger struggle that was going on in the Olympic system.

Avery Brundage and Amateurism in the Olympics

Ironically, the person who played the most significant role in upholding Olympic amateurism was an American, Avery Brundage, the only American IOC President the IOC has ever had. He defended amateurism with almost religious conviction. From the time he first became president of the U.S. Amateur Athletic Union in 1928, he conflicted with athletes who thought it was unfair that sports officials made money from the athletes but the athletes received none of it. In 1936 Brundage became an IOCmember and in 1945 a vice president. In 1952 he became IOC president, aposition he held for 20 years until 1972.  He believed that the true “Olympic spirit” involvedparticipating in sport purely for the “love of the game” and without monetary reward. Amateur sport required sacrifice, and that included financial sacrifice. He believed incorrectly that ancient Greek athletes had been amateurs, and that their spirit had been passed down through history to the modern era. Meanwhile, he himself was a very wealthy man, a self-made man from the working class who became rich through his construction firm. He did not seeanything wrong with the fact that he stayed in five-star hotels in Olympiccities while the athletes who made the games possible barely had enough to eat.He once said, “As soon as you take money for playing sport, it isn't sport,it's work.”

The point of recalling this history is to remember that professionalism entered the Olympic Games after decades of conflict between athletes and sports officials in the IOC as well as some NOCs, in particular as the American AAU and British Olympic Association. It was a sometimes nasty conflict. Athletes were deprived of medals, such as Jim Thorpe, the first American Indian to win a gold medal who was later deprived of his 1912Olympic medal for playing professional baseball. At one point the IOC even threatened to cancel the St. Moritz 1948 Winter Games in an attempt to eliminate the under-the-table payments to Alpine skiers from ski equipment manufacturers. The conflict was particularly strong in track and field, in which under-the-table payments from shoe companies had become commonplace in the sport. Some of the greatest-ever track athletes conflicted with the IOC, such as Babe Didrickson, Paavo Nurmi, and Steve Prefontaine. Prefontaine even threw a shoe at Avery Brundage at the1972 Olympics. However, for half a century, the athletes were the losers in this conflict. It was not until Brundage was replaced by Killanin as IOC president that the IOC finally began to relax its policies, although it required another decade and another IOC President, Juan Antonio Samaranch, before the Olympic Games were opened to professionals.

We would be naïve if we thought this battle was only a battle about the meaning of the Olympic spirit as Brundage claimed. It was a power struggle, and athletes were in a weak bargaining position because they lacked financial independence. Their careers were short because they needed to move ahead and find regular jobs and there was little long-term benefit in continuing as an amateur athlete past age 30. As a result, Olympic athletes tended to be young. Figure skating, for example, offered the opportunity to earn money from ice shows, and as a result, until the mid-1990s the Olympic medalists from the U.S. were typically 18 or 19 years old. After winning one medal, they retired and became professional. Michelle Kwan was the first to break the trend and keep competing for two more Olympic Games after her silver medal in 1998. Athletes not only lacked financial independence, they were young and left the sport in their late teens or early twenties. All of this meant that they did not have enough power to overcome the resistance of the IOC until the economic infrastructure of the Olympic Games changed and forced the IOC to change. While sports administrators did not explicitly state that their goal was to keep athletes in a subordinate position, this was the effect of the policies. Brundage and other officials cannot have been unaware of that. If an athlete wanted to have power in the sports world, then he or she would have to wait until after they retired from the sport to become an administrator and begin to climb up the ladder of power. As sports administrators they would protect their power by keeping athletes subordinate, and the whole cycle would be repeated.

These policies kept the world’s most famous professional athletes out of the Olympic Games, such as the top football (soccer) players; NBA basketball players; and professional ice hockey, tennis and golf players. Maybe one motivation for keeping them out was that the IOC and the Olympic Movement recognized that they were not powerful enough to control the professional leagues and athletes if they were incorporated into the Olympic system. Brundage and others did not say this, but it would have been true.

Only when a political and financial crisis forced the IOC to change its policies did athletes’ demands for professionalization finally start to be met. The financial catastrophe of the Montreal 1972 Olympic Games and the boycotts of 1980 and 1984 led Samaranch to initiate the transition toward a market-based financial model rather than a government-dominated model. In the new model, television broadcast revenues and corporate sponsorships generated ever greater revenues to support the growth of the Olympic Games and this gave athletes a new level of celebrity. We all know that this transition toward commercialization in the 1980s was a pivotal moment in Olympic history with respect to the organization of the games. But it was also a pivotal moment in the empowerment of athletes. Their voice in the media became an important source of power.

Professionalism and the Anti-Doping Campaign

When Olympic athletes became professionals, other types of empowerment followed. If they paid their coaches directly, they had more power over the coach. They had agents who looked after their best interest with respect to marketing their name and image. Athletes were more concerned about fair results because sports were their livelihood over a long period of time. Medals equaled money, and so they wanted fairness in the Olympic Games. They were more protective of their rights. They were more savvy about using the media to support their demands. When social media became popular, they had a platform to express their voice. Of course, there are many Olympic sports that do not have a big enough public audience to support professional leagues, and still today those athletes may still have to support themselves with jobs outside of the sport, or they may have to rely on government support. But the presence of the professional athletes with a big media influence has effects across all Olympic sports that can also benefit the athletes in minor sports.

In my opinion, stronger doping control was one of the results of athlete empowerment. After the professionalization of Olympic sports, the IOC and the International Sports Federations finally started to get serious about controlling doping. When I was a track and field athlete in the 1980s, doping was rampant and many athletes who were doping talked openly about it. In the U.S. there was almost no testing. We knew that the athletes from the Soviet Union and East Germany were doping. Sometimes they even talked with American athletes about it during competitions. But during the Cold War, the attitude of sports administrators seemed to be that there was no way to enforce doping control in the socialist bloc, and so they just ignored the problem. Some American athletes publicly accused their socialist competitors of doping in the media, and they were criticized for poor sportsmanship and for not accepting their defeat. The message was that athletes should just keep their mouths shut.

Of course, it is now public knowledge that in East Germany, athletes were subjected to doping regimes that they had to follow whether they liked it or not, and often they were lied to and told they were taking “vitamins.” But pressure and deception were not limited to the socialist bloc. Several of my fellow heptathlon competitors in the 1980 strained under a coach who was later banned for life by the U.S. Track and Field Association for requesting his athletes to take pills that he said were vitamins, but in fact were steroids. Empowering athletes to speak up about doping is probably the most important anti-doping measure. From experience I saw that in the 1980s a code of silence disempowered athletes while sports administrators stood by and failed to take action, which enabled the spread of doping throughout the global sports system. And for the past two decades we have been fighting to undo the damage that was done then. Education is a very important way in which athletes can be empowered to oppose doping. Forty years ago, we received almost no education about doping at all. No one even told us that doping was cheating. We just heard rumors from other athletes. We needed information about the potential negative health effects, and we needed to hear the ethical argument against doping. In addition, we needed a platform to amplify the voices of those athletes who were opposed to doping so that those of us who were not doping would not have felt that we were a voiceless minority.

However, by the 1990s, after nearly ten years of professionalization, the athletes were no longer as obedient as they had been. They would not keep their mouths shut. After the Barcelona 1992Olympics, when Chinese swimmers suddenly performed very well, U.S. swimmers and coaches began a public attack on Chinese swimmers, accusing them of doping. In the 1994 Asian Games in Hiroshima, 11 Chinese athletes had positive doping tests, including seven swimmers. In the lead up to the Sydney 2000 Olympics there was another doping scandal involving Chinese swimmers. After that the Chinese State General Administration for Sport clamped down on doping, and it continued on to exercise very tight control through the 2008 Olympics because they were held in China and the authorities did not want their games to be tainted by a doping scandal. However, U.S. Swimming continued its public accusations long after the Chinese authorities took action. This was a big change compared to the Cold War period because the anti-doping effort was coming from the grassroots level as athletes were pressuring the IOC and the IFs to take action. When prominent athletes made public accusations, the mediawere all too ready to publish them in sensationalized articles. The IOC and IFs understood that this damaged the image and the credibility of the Olympic Games and the individual sports, so it put pressure on the IOC to act.

Fair Judging in Figure Skating

Doping is not the only area in which athletes have demanded reforms in recent decades. Canadian ice dancers ShaeLynn Bourne and Victor Kratz started complaining openly about the fixed judging in their sport several years before a scandal erupted at the Salt Lake City 2002 Olympic Games. Unfortunately, many people had felt that Bourne and Kratz were just sore losers before it was revealed that judges from different countries really had been trading favors for their athletes. As a result, the entire scoring system was replaced with the old 6.0 system being replaced by the International Judging System (IJS). In this case, the athletes’ voice probably did not gain as much attention as it should have, but at least they dared to speak out.

Athlete Empowerment in the Nasser Sexual Assault Case

Other areas in which athletes have found their voice in recent years are in demanding more equal funding of women’s and men’s teams, establishing fair sex testing, opposing sexual and physical abuse, and in paying more attention to athletes’ mental health.

On April 23^rd, the U.S. government agreed to pay out $138.7 million dollars to 139 female athletes in a settlement over the FBI’s failure to investigate allegations of sexual assault by gymnasts against the trainer Larry Nassar. Nassar worked as the athletic trainer at Michigan State University and also served as a team doctor for USA Gymnastics. He is now serving decades in prison for inappropriate behavior with 300 female athletes over two decades, which continued for years even after gymnasts had reported him to Michigan State University, USA gymnastics, the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee, and the FBI. These three organizations have paid out more than $1 billion to more than 300 women and girls who were assaulted. USA Gymnastics and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee made a $380 million settlement. Nasser might never have been exposed if not for the fact that several top gymnasts persisted in trying to get action even when the authorities did not act. The case finally exploded when a journalist investigated the story. The gymnasts included medal-winning Olympic gymnasts such as Aly Raisman and Simone Biles.

During the Tokyo Olympics, Simone Biles told the media that she had considered retiring from elite sport because she did not want to represent the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee. Simone offered sharp criticism because they had failed to protect American gymnasts from a sexual predator, and had failed to act when his abuse was brought to their attention. She said, “You had only one job to do, and you didn’t do it. ”The leadership of USA gymnastics was rightfully replaced in the wake of this scandal. This is a good example of athletes holding their sports association accountable. It would be good if all athletes were empowered to do this, but we have to look at this situation honestly. Simone Biles is a global superstar who has already stayed in her sport longer than most gymnasts do, including competing in two Olympic Games. She has reached a level of maturity and celebrity that allows her to make demands and state criticism. Before Simone, when other athletes reported Nasser, they were not taken seriously, or were even criticized.

Athlete Empowerment and Good Governance

One of the lessons from these past forty years of Olympic history is that athlete empowerment is one component of good governance. By the 1970s the grassroots foundation of Olympic sport was really struggling, but the IOC was out of touch. Athletes are the grassroots foundation; sports administrators should engage with athletes and athletes should play a role in decisions that affect them. Coaches need to be at the table, too. By the 1970s, the political and financial infrastructure of the Olympic Games had become unsustainable for athletes in many sports, but it was not until the whole system was thrown into crisis and the IOC itself was jeopardized in the 1980s that the IOC reacted. Of course, one of the problems from 1952 to 1972 was that the IOC had a very authoritarian president, Avery Brundage, who often made decisions without input from the Executive Board or IOC Session. Good governance requires a mechanism to balance the executive power of the President and ensure that there is broad input into policies. Most importantly, there should be seats for athletes at the table where decisions are being made.

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