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- Early Life and Athletic Career
- Sports Administrator
- IOC President
- Retirement and Death
- Personal Life and Business Career
- Legacy
- References
- External Links
Avery Brundage was born in Detroit, Michigan, on September 28, 1887, the son of Charles and Minnie (Lloyd) Brundage. Charles Brundage was a stonecutter. The Brundages moved to Chicago when Avery was five, and Charles soon thereafter abandoned his family. Avery and his younger brother, Chester, were raised mostly by aunts and uncles. At age 13 in 19...
Rise to leadership
As Brundage approached the end of his track career, he began to involve himself in sports administration, at first through the CAA, then through the Central Association of the Amateur Athletic Union (of which the CAA was a member) and then, beginning in 1919, in the AAU. That group was involved in an ongoing battle for dominance over US amateur sports with the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). Athletes were often used as pawns in the battle, with one organization threatening to...
Road to the IOC presidency
Brundage's first IOC session as an incumbent member was at Warsaw in June 1937. The vice president of the IOC, Baron Godefroy de Blonay of Switzerland, had died, and Sweden's Sigfrid Edström was elected to replace him. Brundage was selected to fill Edström's place on the executive board. Edström had been a Brundage ally in the boycott fight, writing to the American that while he did not desire the persecution of the Jews, as an "intelligent and unscrupulous" people, "they had to be kept withi...
Amateurism
Throughout his career as a sports official, according to Guttmann, Brundage "was unquestionably an idealist." He often concluded speeches by quoting from John Galsworthy: This ideal was best realized, Brundage believed, in amateur sports. The athlete, he stated, should compete "for the love of the game itself without thought of reward or payment of any kind," with professionals being part of the entertainment business. Amateurism, to Brundage, expressed the concept of the Renaissance man, wit...
Olympic administration; challenges to leadership
Unpaid as IOC president, even for his expenses, Brundage sometimes spent $50,000 per year to finance his role. In 1960, the IOC had almost no funds. Brundage and the IOC had considered the potential of television revenue as early as the Melbourne Games of 1956, but had been slow to address the issue, with the result that television rights for the 1960 Games were in the hands of the Rome organizing committee; the IOC received only 5% of the $60,000 rights fee. Accounts submitted by the Rome or...
Political demonstration at Mexico City
The year 1968 had seen turmoil in the United States, including hundreds of riots, both before and after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and continuing after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Prior to the Olympics in Mexico City in October 1968, some African Americans, led by activist Harry Edwards, had urged a boycott of the Games, but found little enthusiasm among athletes, reluctant to waste years of effort. The atmosphere was made more tense by unrestin Mexico City before...
Brundage retired as IOC president after the 1972 Summer Games. There were differing accounts of Brundage's state of mind during his retirement. IOC director Berlioux stated that Brundage would come to the Château de Vidy and take telephone calls or look at correspondence while he waited for Lord Killanin to turn to him for help. According to Berlio...
Relationships
In 1927, at the age of 40, Brundage married Elizabeth Dunlap, who was the daughter of a Chicago banker. She was a trained soprano, which was a talent that she exhibited to people who visited the Brundage home. She had a strong interest in classical music. This interest might not have been fully shared by her husband, who said that a performance of Wagner's Die Walküre "started at 7 o'clock, at 10:00 pm I looked at my watch and it registered exactly 8 o'clock".Elizabeth died at age 81 in 1971....
Construction executive
After its founding in 1915, a large source of the Avery Brundage Company's business was wartime government contracts. Brundage, who applied for a commission in the Army Ordnance Corpsbut was rejected, in the postwar period became a member of the Construction Division Association, composed of men who had built facilities for the military, and later became its president from 1926 to 1928. In the 1920s, Brundage and his company became very active in constructing high-rise apartment buildings in...
Art collector and benefactor
Brundage's interest in Asian art stemmed from a visit he made to an exhibition of Chinese art at the Royal Academy in London in early 1936, after the Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Brundage stated of the experience, "We [his first wife Elizabeth and himself] spent a week at the exhibition and I came away so enamored with Chinese art that I've been broke ever since." He did not begin active collecting until after the Brundages' two-week visit to Japan in April 1939, where they visi...
In May 2012, The Independent dubbed him "The ancient IOC emperor, anti-Semite and Nazi sympathiser bent on insulating the Games from the meddlesome tentacles of the real world." The Orange County Register stated that Brundage's "racism and anti-Semitism are well documented", and the New York Daily News averred that Brundage "admired Hitler and infa...
Works cited
Books 1. Espy, Richard (1981). The Politics of the Olympic Games. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-04395-4. 2. Guttmann, Allen (1984). The Games Must Go On: Avery Brundage and the Olympic Movement. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-05444-7. 3. Hilton, Christopher (2008). Hitler's Olympics: The 1936 Berlin Olympic Games (revised ed.). Stroud, UK: Sutton Publishing Limited. ISBN 978-0-7509-4293-5. 4. Large, David Clay (2007). Nazi Games: The Olympics of...
Image Available. On View. Collection Info. In 1959, Chicago industrialist Avery Brundage agreed to donate his vast collection of Asian art to San Francisco on the condition that the city build a new museum to house it. In total, Avery Brundage donated more than 7,700 Asian art objects to the City of San Francisco—all housed at the Asian Art ...
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Avery Brundage was born on 28 September 1887 in Detroit, Michigan, but his family moved to Chicago when he was young. He attended the University of Illinois, graduating with a civil engineering degree in 1909. While in college he competed on the track & field team, winning the conference discus championship in his senior year.
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