Sport profesionnel

INTRODUCTION

A sport is said to be professional when its practitioners live off their sporting activity. An athlete is considered professional when he receives a salary from his club or his sponsor to practice a sports discipline. When this salary is insufficient to live sport, we will talk about a semi-professional. Many sports events reward the best competitors with a reward that can be pecuniary without being taxed professionals.

DEVELOPMENT

1. Antiquity

In 580 BC AD in Athens, Solon promulgates a law stating that each Athenian winner of the Olympic Games will receive 500 drachmas. This measure, which aims to motivate Athenian athletes, formalizes the professionalism already widespread throughout ancient Greece. Money is an innovation less than a century old. The cities are thus more generous than others, covering with gold and honor the champions who wore their colors. Transfers of athletes from one city to another become widespread during this period, to the great anger of citizen-supporters who manifest, sometimes very violently, their discontent with these authentic betrayals.

Same phenomenon in Rome with considerable sums devoted to athletes. Thus, in 146 on the death of the famous Roman charioteer Diocles (104-146) we learn that in 24 years of career, this "hispanus lusitanus" took part in 4257 races for 1462 victories and its financial gains in racing, victory or transfer amount to 35 863 120 sesterces. This is more than the fabulous heritage of Nero (30 million sesterces). The transfer of the Fuscus charioteer from the blue faction to the whites brought 400,000 sesterces to the young coachman.

1. From François 1er to Pierre de Coubertin

November 9, 1527, by letters patent of the King of France François Ier sports professionalism is made official in France, in particular game of palm6. This revolutionary text puts on the same level the gains of a palm player and the fruits of work. For a long time now, Paris and stakes have in fact transformed this sporting activity into a profession for many. There are still 29 professional players of tennis in Paris in the mid-1780s.

On both banks of the Channel, horse racing jockeys are paid from the seventeenth century, but it was not until 1846 to witness the professionalization of a team sport: cricket. This year is marked by the foundation of the English professional club "All-England Eleven". This formation makes tours which do a lot for the popularization of the game. In the United States, it is the baseball which is the first collective sport to cross the Rubicon in 1864 with the first known case of professionalism: AJ Reach perceives indeed a salary when he leaves the Philadelphia Athletics to join Brooklyn. On March 15, 1869 is held the first baseball game involving a professional club: the Cincinnati Red Stockings. This choice allows the club to recruit the best players and the results are not long: on March 15, Antioch College is swept 41 to 7. May 4, 1871, Fort Wayne Kekiongas wins 2-0 against Cleveland's Forest City Club on the occasion of the first professional league baseball game (National

Association). The foundation in Havana of the first Cuban professional baseball league took place on December 29, 1878.

The new individual sports are also affected by this movement of professionalization from the mid-nineteenth century. Thus, since the 1850s, British golf tournaments are endowed with cash prizes. In France, foot races are also endowed with cash prizes as of 18538. For three decades, French professional runners have nicknames such as "Flying Deer", "The Lightning Man" or "The Steam Man". In the mid 1880, Georges de Saint-Clair and Ernest Demay launched a campaign to "cleanse" French athletics and banned these professional races. In reaction to the policy of "purification" of French athletics conducted since the mid-1880s by the ban on races with cash prizes, the Union of Professional Athletics Societies was created in Paris8. A federation of the same type is created in Paris in the wake of swimming.

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