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In 1981 a second trust fund was authorized for track-and-field athletes, to hold "other proceeds," including prize money and, presumably, those forbidden appearance payments. Consulting contracts have now been allowed, and since these do not have to be spent on training, travel or living expenses, they amount to outright salary. "We are quite liberal on what we allow as training expenses," concedes an official of the Athletics Congress, the governing body of U.S. track and field. After his amateur career, the athlete gets the whole wad in the trust funds.
A flesh-and-bucks measure of the change is Paul Cummings, the 30-year-old distance runner who won the 10,000-meter race at the Olympic trials in Los Angeles last month. He had starred in track at Brigham Young University, and when he graduated in 1977 he wanted to continue racing. "But the rules were so strict that you couldn't even coach track at the local high school and remain an amateur," he recalls. "So I quit running, dropped thoughts of coaching and went to work in a steel plant."
This seems to be what the inventors of Olympic amateurism had in mind. No steelworkers need apply. But in 1981 Cummings got laid off from his mill job, "and that was probably the best thing that ever happened to me, as it turned out." The rules on amateurism had loosened in the direction of good sense, and Cummings went back to running. Today, he says, "there are marathon races with million-dollar budgets and first-prize money up in the $40,000 range. Now you can make good money as a consultant. That doesn't diminish the joy of competing. But it's made it possible for me to continue in it and earn a decent living for my wife and four children. What's wrong with that?"
What is wrong, a considerable number of penniless athletes might answer, is that among U.S. team members at the Olympics, the new prosperity applies almost exclusively to competitors in track and field.
There are beginning to be some exceptions; the men's and women's bi cycling teams, for instance, are now receiving useful amounts from such sponsors as 7-Eleven and Raleigh bicycles. Boxing is a reliable source of medals, and some months ago the U.S.O.C. began to keep its boxers, many of them impoverished black youngsters with no way of support ing themselves while training, in almost permanent residence at the Amateur Boxing Federation training camp in Colorado Springs, Colo.
But many athletes are pursuing the less heralded laurels whose publicity or retail value is low. For these contestants, something of the imagined amateur purity necessarily survives. Here is a selection from the U.S. Their years of anonymous, isolated commitment will not lead even to a medal in some cases. But they have won their moment on the Olympic stage and a chance for personal satisfaction and glory no less than what Carl Lewis or Mary Decker might feel.