What happened to amateurism in sport?
It was abandoned, and the history reveals that the amateur ideal was less noble in origin than it is usually remembered.
What amateurism required. Competitors could not receive payment for competing, coaching or teaching sport, and in some codes could not have earned money from any sport at any time. Breaching it meant permanent disqualification.
The origin is the uncomfortable part. The rules emerged in nineteenth-century Britain, and were substantially about social class. If you could not be paid, only those with independent means or leisure time could compete seriously. Some early definitions explicitly excluded anyone who was a "mechanic, artisan or labourer", making the class basis unambiguous. Rowing's original amateur definition is the most-cited example.
Amateurism, on this reading, was a mechanism for keeping working-class competitors out of elite sport while appearing to uphold a principle.
Where it caused famous damage:
Jim Thorpe was stripped of his 1912 Olympic gold medals for having been paid small sums for semi-professional baseball. They were restored decades after his death.
The 1981 film Chariots of Fire dramatises the class tensions of the era directly.
Rugby's 1895 split into union and league occurred substantially over broken time payments — compensating working men for wages lost by playing — which the amateur establishment refused. Union remained amateur until 1995.
Shamateurism. In practice, payment continued covertly — through inflated expenses, sinecure jobs, and state support in Eastern Bloc countries, where full-time athletes were nominally soldiers or students. This made the rule farcical, since it penalised honesty rather than payment.
How it ended. The IOC removed "amateur" from the Charter in the 1970s and progressively opened the Games; professionals were admitted in most sports through the 1980s, with the 1992 US basketball Dream Team the symbolic moment.
Where amateur status survives: college sport in the US — itself heavily contested and now substantially eroded by name, image and likeness rules — and some governing bodies' distinctions in golf and boxing.