Amateur sports are sports in which participants engage largely or entirely without remuneration. The distinction is made between amateur sporting participants and professional sporting participants, who are financially remunerated for the time they spend playing or training. In the majority of sports which feature professional players, the professionals will participate at a higher standard of play than amateur competitors. However, the majority of wordwide sporting participants are amateurs. Sporting amateurism was a zealously guarded ideal in the 19th century, especially among the upper classes, but faced steady erosion throughout the 20th century with the continuing growth of pro sports and monetisation of amateur and collegiate sports, and is now strictly held as an ideal by fewer and fewer organisations governing sports, even as they maintain the word "amateur" in their titles.
Read more about Amateur Sports: Background, Present Day, North American Collegiate Athletics, Olympics, Association Football, American Football, Sailing, Figure Skating, High School Sports, Other Sports
Famous quotes containing the words amateur and/or sports:
“I have been reporting club meetings for four years and I am tired of hearing reviews of the books I was brought up on. I am tired of amateur performances at occasions announced to be for purposes either of enjoyment or improvement. I am tired of suffering under the pretense of acquiring culture. I am tired of hearing the word “culture” used so wantonly. I am tired of essays that let no guilty author escape quotation.”
—Josephine Woodward, U.S. author. As quoted in Everyone Was Brave, ch. 3, by William L. O’Neill (1969)
“In the past, it seemed to make sense for a sportswriter on sabbatical from the playpen to attend the quadrennial hawgkilling when Presidential candidates are chosen, to observe and report upon politicians at play. After all, national conventions are games of a sort, and sports offers few spectacles richer in low comedy.”
—Walter Wellesley (Red)