Olympians commemorate landmark Baden-Baden congress

By Guenter Deister Sep 27, 2011, 9:43 GMT

Baden-Baden, Germany - The phrasing of the final document of the Olympic Congress in 1981 was cautious but at long last opened the door for professional athletes to the Olympics.

While continuing to refer to the amateur rule in the Olympic Charter, the document does say that 'compliance with this rule should not create inequalities between competitors.'

It was now up to the sports federations to determine the eligibility of their top athletes, and three years later professional footballers made their debut at the 1984 Games.

Once the super-rich tennis pros had played for medals in 1988 as well the International Olympic Committee finally dumped the amateur rule for good after more than 80 years.

The softening of the amateur rule was just one milestone at the Congress September 23-28 in Baden-Baden, which Olympic officials led by IOC president Jacques Rogge will commemorate on Wednesday in the southern German spa.

The six-day meetings of 469 delegates from 144 countries also saw the installation of the IOC athletes' commission, the first signs of commercialism and the first election of women into the IOC.

German IOC vice-president Thomas Bach, a former fencer and member of the inaugural athletes' commission, simply speaks of 'ground-breaking decisions' taken by the IOC at the time.

Bach was among the 30 invited athletes (of which six were allowed to address the congress) who called for the end of the amateur rule and a bigger saying in Olympic matters, along with British middle-distance runner Sebastian Coe (now chief organizer of the London 2012 Games).

'We need a rule that allows us honesty and to perform under humane conditions,' Bach told the delegates in 1981.

Coe, like Bach also set to be present on Wednesday, said: 'We are not robots incapable of thinking.'

The Congress and the ensuing IOC Session were the first major events of IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch, elected the previous year at the boycott-marred Moscow Games in succession to Lord Killanin of Ireland and eventually running the show for 21 years.

Samaranch stamped his authority on the IOC by declaring it the leader in world sport, which also ended ambitions of the Soviet Union-led communist countries to turn the IOC into something like a United Nations for sport.

The softening of the amateur rule was also a blow for the Eastern Bloc, whose so-called 'state amateurs' were seen as de facto professional athletes.

Baden-Baden also saw the first signs of a changed view of commercialism after years of financial problems within the IOC and around Olympic Games.

'I may be hanged for this when I say that we have 10 million dollars in the bank, we no longer have to live from borrowed money,' said then general director Monique Berlioux.

By the time Rogge and Bach became IOC members in 1991, the changes were staggering.

Steffi Graf had completed her historic tennis Golden Slam at the 1988 Olympics, the imminent performance of the American basketball Dream Team in the 1992 Games marked the end of amateurism for good, and the IOC had achieved its first turnaround of more than a billion dollars.

Read more about Olympics IOC