section_path: Presidents/Avery Brundage (1952–1972)
section_name: Avery Brundage (1952–1972)
paragraph_text: Avery Brundage (1952–1972)
  
  Avery Brundage became vice-president of the IOC in 1945 and was subsequently elected president in 1952, at the 47th IOC Session in Helsinki, succeeding J. Sigfrid Edström. While he was being considered for this honor, Brundage fathered two sons with a woman to whom he was not married; in order to avoid a political scandal, he requested that his name be kept off the birth certificates.
  
  During his tenure as IOC president, Brundage strongly opposed any form of professionalism in the Olympic Games. Gradually, this opinion became less accepted by the sports world and other IOC members, but his opinions led to some embarrassing incidents, such as the exclusion of Austrian skier Karl Schranz from the 1972 Winter Olympics. Likewise, he opposed the restoration of Olympic medals to Native American athlete Jim Thorpe, who had been stripped of the medals when he was found to have played semi-professional baseball before taking part in the 1912 Summer Olympics (where he had beaten Brundage in the pentathlon and decathlon). Despite this, Brundage accepted the "shamateurism" from Eastern Bloc countries, in which team members were nominally students, soldiers, or civilians working in a non-sports profession, but in reality were paid by their states to train on a full-time basis. Brundage claimed that it was " their way of life ". Thorpe's amateur status was restored by the Amateur Athletic Union in 1973, following Brundage's retirement. The IOC officially pardoned Thorpe in 1982 and ordered that his medals be presented posthumously to his family. After his death in 1975, it was revealed that Brundage had notified the IOC that Thorpe had played semi-professional baseball years before.
  
  Brundage also opposed anything that he viewed as politicizing sport. At the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, U.S. sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists to show support for the Black Power movement during their medal ceremony. Brundage ordered the USOC to expel both African-American men from the Olympic Village and have them suspended from the U.S. Olympic team. When the USOC refused, he threatened to ban the entire U.S. Olympic team. However, Brundage made no objections against Nazi salutes during the Berlin Olympics.
  
  He may be best remembered for his decision during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany, to continue the Games following the Black September Palestinian terrorist attack which killed eleven Israeli athletes. While some criticized Brundage's decision—including L.A. Times columnist Jim Murray, who wrote "Incredibly, they're going on with it. It's almost like having a dance at Dachau" —most did not, and few athletes withdrew from the Games. The Olympic competition was suspended on 5 September for one complete day. The next day, a memorial service of eighty thousand spectators and three thousand athletes was held in the Olympic Stadium. Brundage gave an address in which he stated:
  
  "Every civilized person recoils in horror at the barbarous criminal intrusion of terrorists into peaceful Olympic precincts. We mourn our Israeli friends victims of this brutal assault. The Olympic flag and the flags of all the world fly at half-mast. Sadly, in this imperfect world, the greater and the more important the Olympic Games become, the more they are open to commercial, political, and now criminal pressure. The Games of the XXth Olympiad have been subject to two savage attacks. We lost the Rhodesian battle against naked political blackmail. I am sure that the public will agree that we cannot allow a handful of terrorists to destroy this nucleus of international cooperation and goodwill we have in the Olympic movement. The Games must go on...."
  
  Brundage strongly opposed the exclusion of Rhodesia from the Olympics due to its racial policies. After the attacks in Munich, Brundage drew a comparison between the massacre of the Israeli athletes and the barring of the Rhodesian team, for which he later apologized.
  
  Brundage is also remembered for proposing the elimination of all team sports from the Summer Olympic Games, fearing that the Games would become too expensive for all but the wealthiest nations to host; he also proposed the elimination of the Winter Olympic Games entirely due to its association with commercialism.
  
  Brundage retired as IOC president after the 1972 Summer Games, having held the post for twenty years, and was succeeded by Lord Killanin.