This had nothing to do with selling out. Olympic athletes were supposed to be amateurs and not professionals.

If you were paid to be an athlete then you had a competitive advantage, or so was the thinking.

The amateur/pro separation is spelled out most clearly in the early history of cycling, and it has very little to do with the punk rock idea of selling out: gentlemen with a family name so big they likely had minor celebrity status even before sports showing off how far and fast they could go starting to hire a series of pacemakers to draft behind. Then one day, particularly strong pacemakers got sponsorship, starting in their own name, with their own relay of pacemakers, and they took the prestigious titles. Gentlemen were not amused and started their own racing series. Members only. (right before falling in love with the speed provided by the internal combustion engine)

In the UK we have the split between Rugby Union and Rugby League, now two distinct sports. The history of that split gets to the heart of British class distinction and is more interesting that you might at first think.

There's a good description of it here[1] but the TL;DR is:

In the South of England rugby was played by independently rich amateurs and in the North of England it was played by the working class men who needed to support themselves and their families and wanted it to become professionalised.

The groups couldn't agree and so split. With the rules of Rugby League supposedly changed to make it more appealing to paying crowd.

1. https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/sport/2019/10/split-bet...

That might have been the thinking, but it was also totally associated with selling out, and being an inferior athlete, morals wise.

While it certainly sounds more honest and less commercialised, it also means that high level sports is mostly a rich-people's game. Poor people often can't afford to say no to money.

At some point, they even found it dishonest to train for event specifically.

Especially if you were Native American

Did you see they restored the 2 Olympic medals for the pentathlon and decathlon to Jim Thorpe just the other day. Long overdue.

The parent comment I responded to referenced this, but inaccurately portrayed it as an issue of amateurism rather than that being the cover story for blatant racism