I recall that back in the 1970s and 80s most of the players on the Soviet national hockey team played domestically for the Red Army team. Officially they were military officers, not professional athletes, though everyone knew their duties consisted mainly of playing hockey rather than protecting the motherland. I’m curious as to how the pretense of amateurism was maintained for other top Soviet athletes. Surely they could not all have been in the military. My WAG is that those who weren’t were technically employed by enterprises which “sponsored” their respective sports clubs. So, for example, the players on the Minsk Widget Works hockey team were company employees, though they spent more time playing hockey than making widgets. Can any dopers either confirm or refute this?
Moved to the Game Room.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
You do realize that what you described was not really different from what happened in other countries wrt to “Amatureism”.
The hockey team would have members of DOSAAF which was the sports organization for the military. There were several other similar organizations most of which could trace their roots back to Imperial Russia. Teams such as Spartak Moscow still retain the name.
Basically, they had sports leagues where the quality of play was at what we’d consider a professional level, but they were organized through the military or other organizations, and technically, the players weren’t being paid to play; like others have said, they were army officers and not pro hockey players, even though their military job was to be a hockey player.
So I suppose by the Olympic rules, they were technically amateurs, although clearly more skilled than a lot of other “amateurs.”
There also could have been some Communist mumbo-jumbo in there about the pro/amateur status and pro sports being bourgeois or some such BS, but I don’t know.
This sort of thing is the reason the Olympics is no longer only for amateurs: the Communists didn’t have professional athletes, because they declared them amateurs even though they did it full time, and the American college athletics system did the same thing, athletes who train full time but are nominally amateurs. Similar shenanigans went on in the early days of (association) football, with players being given generous “expenses” and jobs with affiliated businesses, while payments were banned.
What name? Spartak Moscow are named after Spartacus and Moscow.
The Olympics were set up with only amateurs being allowed to complete to keep the lower classes out of them; only the upper class and aristocrats could afford to not work and train for the events. The lower classes would have sullied the rich boys club the olympics were set up to be. So the amateur clause was brought in to ensure they stayed out. The communists and others did the work for the army/state compete for yourself to get around this.
Not quite. Spartak Sports Society (an umbrella sports organization for Trade Unions) was named after Kirk Douglas, and Spartak Moscow was their Moscow based team. There was also a Spartak Leningrad, for example.
It wasn’t just the Soviets. Jean-Claude Killy was employed by the French government as a customs inspector. I seriously doubt he was looking through luggage.