Wealth & Money Quote by Avery Brundage

Brundage’s line lands like a moral ruling disguised as plain talk: the moment money enters the picture, play becomes labor, and labor is presumed to taint purity. It’s a neat binary - sport or work - that sounds commonsense until you notice what it’s doing culturally. It’s not just defining sport; it’s policing who gets to participate in “real” sport, and on what terms.

As an athlete-turned-powerbroker and longtime Olympic chief, Brundage was the era’s loudest apostle of amateurism, a doctrine that protected the Games’ patina of nobility while keeping athletes financially exposed. The subtext is class-coded. If you’re independently wealthy, you can afford to remain “pure.” If you’re not, taking money isn’t greed; it’s rent. Calling that “work” isn’t an insult to work so much as a way to demote paid competitors from the realm of honor into the realm of commerce.

The irony is that Brundage’s clean separation never existed. Even in his time, the Olympics ran on sponsorship-adjacent prestige, national subsidies, and under-the-table “broken time” payments. Meanwhile, athletes were asked to perform like professionals - train year-round, travel, represent nations - while being denied professional rights and protections. The quote’s intent is to preserve a romantic ideal of sport as character-building play; its function is to maintain control over bodies, branding, and spectacle by insisting the labor at the center of it all isn’t labor.