So...why is it ok for the U.S. Olympic athletes to do commercials while their still competing?

Didn't that used to be against the whole "amateur standing" thing?

I'm just wondering how this got to be ok...if anybody knows....

than paying them. All the atheletes have some sorts of "sponsors" to help pay for them to be able to compete.

That hasn't been a requirement for several Olympiads now. The rules against professionals were loosened in the 1980s and abandoned by the 1992 Olympics.

Wow, had no idea.

onedit: Maybe seeing NBA players compete should have been my first clue :silly:

Some refused to stay in the Olympic Village.

and many of the Dream Teamers were on team Nike. IIRC, some of them draped a flag over the shoulder of their warm-ups during the medal ceremony so they wouldn't be photographed wearing the Reebok.

That was at Barcelona, right?

I've always thought it was incredibly childish that the U.S. insisted on having an all-NBA star Olympic team. It was part of the silly bitterness about losing the gold to the Soviets in '72. At some point, we've gotta let go of that one. Truth is, we lost fair and square in Munich and at some point we should finally accept that.

It's one of the primary reasons baseball was dropped. Oh, and the US won gold in Barcelona, Atlanta, Sydney, & Beijing. Bronze in Athens. All previous teams were college players.

No team came within 30 points of beating them. I thought it was :boring:

The U.S. team has never finished fourth, actually--they've won a medal every year that basketball has been part of the Olympics, and other than the silver you mentioned in '72, the bronze in '88, and the bronze in 2004, it's always been gold.

"I've always thought it was incredibly childish that the U.S. insisted on having an all-NBA star Olympic team. It was part of the silly bitterness about losing the gold to the Soviets in '72. At some point, we've gotta let go of that one. Truth is, we lost fair and square in Munich and at some point we should finally accept that."

The resentment about 1972 was only a small part of it, really. More important was the bronze medal of 1988, in which the U.S. amateurs finished third behind teams from the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, both of which had numerous players from European professional leagues. At the time, professionals in European leagues were allowed to play in the Olympics, but NBA players were not.

The 1988 Olympic tournament made it clear how far European professional leagues had come ... in fact, it made it clear to NBA teams that there was talent in Europe worth having, and several of the players on the Soviet and Yugoslavian teams would go on to play in the NBA. However, these players were important to their national teams, and if they went to the NBA then they would no longer be eligible to play for those national teams in international competition. So FIBA (the governing body of international basketball) changed the rules to make NBA players eligible--not just so the U.S. would be able to dominate, but to give European players access to the NBA (and vice versa).

I guess what bothered me about the "Dream Team" thing was the assumption behind it that no other country has any right to win the gold at basketball. What right to we have to say or think that? Any country has the right to win if they have the best team or play with the most heart.

pretty much all professionals. Think the no professionals rule died a long time ago.

Amateur died ages ago. Indeed if you compare the 1968 charter to the one today, you wouldn't recognize the IOC.
From they let the pro basketball players into the games, amateur was dead even though most of it was shamateur anyway.

Their you are!

I'm wearing my back-up specs 'til my next eye exam.

were basically supporting their athletes. Rules were eventually changed. This from wikipedia:

"Through most of the 20th century the Olympics nominally only allowed amateur athletes to participate. The amateur code was strictly enforced. Jim Thorpe was stripped of track and field medals for having taken expense money for playing baseball in 1912.

Later on, however, successful Olympians from Western countries often accepted endorsement contracts from sponsors. Complex rules involving the payment of the athlete's earnings into trust funds rather than directly to the athletes themselves, were developed in an attempt to work around this issue, but the intellectual evasion involved was considered embarrassing to the Olympic movement and the key Olympic sports by some. In the same era, the nations of the Communist bloc entered teams of Olympians who were all nominally students, soldiers, or working in a profession, but many of whom were in reality paid by the state to train on a full time basis. (Cuba, North Korea, and to some extent China still do this; although China allows professionalism in popular team sports, it can be assumed that athletes in disciplines such as gymnastics from these countries are trained in state academies and have state-given stipends.)

After the 1972 retirement of IOC President Avery Brundage, the Olympic amateurism rules were steadily relaxed and in many areas amount only to technicalities and lip service. In the United States, the Amateur Sports Act of 1978 prohibits national governing bodies from having more stringent standards of amateur status than required by international governing bodies of respective sports.

Olympic regulations regarding amateur status of athletes were eventually abandoned in the 1990s with the exception of boxing, where the rules for participation still require amateur status rather than professional status for the safety of the participants."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_sports