Avery Brundage

Avery Brundage (born September 28, 1887, Detroit, Michigan, U.S.—died May 8, 1975, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, West Germany) was an American sports administrator who was the controversial and domineering president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) from 1952 to 1972 and did more to set the tone of the modern Olympic Games than any other individual.

Brundage competed in the pentathlon and decathlon at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm and was the U.S. champion in the all-around, which is similar to the decathlon, in 1914, 1916, and 1918. In the meantime, he had founded his own construction company and eventually became a multimillionaire. His interest in amateur sports, however, never abated. He served seven years (1928–33, 1935) as president of the Amateur Athletic Union and was president of the U.S. Olympic Association and Committee from 1929 to 1953. In 1936 he was elected to the IOC and served as vice president (1945–52) and president (1952–72). In 1954 he contributed the article “Olympic Games” to the 14th edition of Encyclopædia Britannica.

Brundage was so convinced of the need to preserve amateur competition in all its purity that he threatened or punished athletes for even relatively minor infractions of his stringent rules. In addition, he created a furor more than once by dismissing highly significant political events as unrelated to Olympic competition. He refused to boycott the 1936 Games in Nazi Germany and insisted, in the face of heavy criticism, that the 1972 Olympics in Munich, West Germany, be continued despite the murders of 11 Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists. During his tenure as IOC president, Brundage oversaw (often to his regret) a period of significant growth in the size and commercialism of the Games, in part a consequence of their worldwide exposure through television broadcasting.