$50K Olympic track prize the latest in a long, conflicted relationship between athletes and money

. The games were supposed to celebrate sport for sport's sake. But the price athletes paid to be any good was far too high, and it took virtually no time for the concept of amateurism that the Olympics rested on to be viewed as unrealistic, if not an all-out ruse. This week's news that track's international federation will pay $50,000 to gold-medal winners at the Paris Games was the latest step in a century's worth of unraveling the myth of amateurism at the Olympics.

The IOC began tinkering with its Rule 26, the rule that inscribed the amateur imprimatur to the Olympics, in the mid-1970s. An IOC member involved in the changes, Willi Daume, put it best when he pointed to the billion-dollar business the Olympics had become: “It is only the athletes that have to make sacrifices and show proof of asceticism,” he said. The IOC began letting individual sports federations write their own rules about amateurism.

When Juan Antonio Samaranch became IOC president in 1980, he made it clear he wanted the best athletes at the Olympics. The IOC worked hard with soccer, ice hockey and tennis , which for various reasons had fought the amateurism rules. By the start of the 1990s, amateurism was written out of the Olympic charter. The 1992 Olympics, which brought NBA stars and the Dream Team to the Barcelona Games, is widely viewed as the start of the professional era at the Olympics.

Most countries now establish prize pools — such as Team USA's “Project Gold” — for their top athletes at the Olympics, while also funding training and living expenses. The U.S. is one of the few outliers, in that its government does not provide funding for the Olympic team. More than a generation into the professional era, tension remains not over whether the athletes can receive money but how much of the pie they really share in.

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