Avery Brundage policed Olympic amateurism while getting rich from construction
For twenty years Avery Brundage ran the International Olympic Committee as the fiercest defender of the unpaid amateur athlete. He never took a cent from sport himself; his fortune came from building Chicago. His rigid principles, and his choices at the 1936 and 1972 Games, left a deeply contested legacy.
Born in Detroit on September 28, 1887, Brundage moved to Chicago at five, and his stonecutter father soon deserted the family. Aunts and uncles raised him. He rode 7 miles to school after finishing a newspaper round, and because the school had no sports facilities he forged his own shot and hammer in its workshop. He earned an honours degree in civil engineering from the University of Illinois in 1909.
At the 1912 Stockholm Olympics he came sixth in the pentathlon and quit the decathlon after eight events, a decision he always regretted. Jim Thorpe won both but was stripped of his medals for having played semi-professional baseball. As IOC president Brundage refused to seek their return, fuelling claims of a grudge; the committee restored them in 1982, after both men had died. Meanwhile he supervised 7.5 million dollars of Chicago construction for Holabird and Roche, founded his own firm in 1915 and won the national all-around title in 1914, 1916 and 1918.
Administration followed. He took over American Olympic bodies in 1928 and fought hard against a US boycott of the 1936 Berlin Games despite Nazi persecution of Jews, joining the IOC that year and becoming its president in 1952, the first non-European in the role. State-backed athletes from the Eastern Bloc steadily undercut his ideal of the self-funded amateur.
His final Games, Munich in 1972, were shattered when eleven members of Israel's team were killed by terrorists. Brundage insisted the competition continue, a decision applauded at the memorial and harshly criticised since. He died in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in 1975, aged 87.
Source: Avery Brundage
