With the rise of numerous regional championships, as well as the growth in Olympic-style multi-sport events (such as the Commonwealth Games and the Pan-American Games), competitions between international track and field athletes became widespread. From the 1960s onwards, the sport gained more exposure and commercial appeal through television coverage and the increasing wealth of nations. After over half a century of amateurism, the amateur status of the sport began to be displaced by growing professionalism in the late 1970s. As a result, the Amateur Athletic Union was dissolved in the United States and it was replaced with a non-amateur body solely focused on the sport of athletics: The Athletics Congress (later USA Track and Field). The IAAF abandoned amateurism in 1982 and later removed all references to it from its name by rebranding itself as the International Association of Athletics Federations. While Western countries were limited to amateurs until the early 1980s, Soviet Bloc countries always fielded state-funded athletes who trained full-time, putting American and Western European athletes at a significant disadvantage. 1983 saw the establishment of the IAAF World Championships in Athletics—the first ever global competition just for athletics—which, with the Olympics, became one of track and field's most prestigious competitions.