What Is the USOPC? Team USA's Governing Body Explained

The United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, the USOPC, is a private nonprofit corporation with a charter from Congress and headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colorado. It is the national Olympic committee of the United States and, unusually, its national Paralympic committee too. It does not coach athletes, write the rules of any sport or stage the Games. It recognizes the governing body for each sport, funds and oversees those bodies, protects the Olympic trademarks in the American market, and is the only entity that can send an American team to an Olympic or Paralympic Games.

Its hand shows in small things. When the American delegation floated down the Seine on July 26, 2024, the flag at the front of the boat was held by LeBron James and Coco Gauff. No president or cabinet secretary picked them. The other athletes on the team did, in a vote run by the committee, the same organization that had entered every one of those athletes in the Games, dressed them, flown them to Paris and assigned them their beds in the village.

What the USOPC is: a chartered nonprofit with two jobs

Start with the USOPC meaning in plain terms. The International Olympic Committee does not deal with governments or with individual athletes. It recognizes one national Olympic committee in each country and works through it. In the United States that committee is the USOPC. The International Paralympic Committee does the same thing with national Paralympic committees, and in the United States that is also the USOPC. One board, one chief executive, one headquarters, two international memberships.

"Team USA" is the name the committee gives the athletes it sends, and a brand it licenses to sponsors. It is not a separate organization. No entity called Team USA has offices or a board, and an athlete is part of it only for as long as he or she is on a delegation the committee has entered. The same committee is the American member of the body that runs the Pan American Games, so it enters U.S. teams there and at the Parapan American Games as well.

It is not a government agency, though it is often mistaken for one. The confusion is understandable. The committee exists under a federal statute, its powers are listed in the United States Code, and its athletes compete in the national colors under the national flag. But it has no federal employees and draws no appropriation for its Olympic work. It is exempt from tax as a 501(c)(3) charity, files a public return like any other, and pays its bills with broadcast, sponsorship and donated money, an arrangement set out in our guide to how Team USA is funded.

The Supreme Court has said as much. In a 1987 trademark case, a narrow majority held that the committee is not a governmental actor and that constitutional limits on government therefore do not bind it, even though Congress chartered it and granted it special rights.

A federal charter of this kind is an old device. Congress has issued them to the American Red Cross, the Boy Scouts, the American Legion and dozens of other patriotic and civic organizations. The charter gives recognition and, in this case, some unusual legal powers. It does not make the body part of the state.

What the Ted Stevens Act hands the committee

The charter is the Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act, found in Title 36 of the U.S. Code. It began as the Amateur Sports Act of 1978 and was renamed in 1998 for the Alaska senator who wrote much of it. Three grants in the law make the committee what it is.

Exclusive jurisdiction. The Act gives the committee authority over all matters concerning American participation in the Olympic Games, the Paralympic Games, the Pan American Games and the Parapan American Games, and over the organization of those Games when they are held in the United States. No state, university, league or rival body can send a team. If an American is at the Olympics, the USOPC entered that athlete.

The marks. The committee holds the exclusive American right to the word "Olympic," related words, and the five-ring symbol, and can sue anyone who uses them commercially without permission. This is the commercial foundation of the whole enterprise.

The power to recognize. For each sport on the program, the committee may recognize one organization, and only one, as the national governing body. Recognition is what makes USA Swimming the body for swimming and not merely a large swim club association. The Act lists what an organization must do to qualify: govern its sport independently, keep membership open, give athletes a share of its board seats, accept binding arbitration of disputes, and impose no eligibility rule stricter than the international federation's.

The law also spells out purposes that go well beyond sending a team. The committee is told to coordinate amateur athletic activity, to promote physical fitness and public participation, to assist in resolving conflicts between sports organizations, and to encourage opportunities for women, for minorities and for athletes with disabilities. Critics have long observed that the organization concentrates on the elite end of that list. The observation is fair. A body that lives on revenue generated by the Games every two years has every incentive to spend on the Games.

In exchange the Act imposes duties. The committee must report to Congress, keep an athlete ombuds, give athletes a third of the seats on its board, and maintain procedures for resolving complaints quickly.

USOPC vs national governing bodies: who runs a sport day to day

The governing bodies do. This is the distinction that explains most of what the committee is and is not responsible for.

A national governing body is a separate nonprofit with its own board, staff, members and money. USA Track and Field, USA Gymnastics, U.S. Figure Skating, USA Hockey: each writes the domestic rules of its sport, registers athletes and clubs, certifies coaches and officials, runs the national championships, picks national team coaches and belongs to the sport's international federation. The committee does none of that.

Job	Who does it
Writing a sport's domestic rules	National governing body
Running national championships	National governing body
Hiring and firing national team coaches	National governing body
Drafting Olympic selection procedures	National governing body
Approving those selection procedures	USOPC
Naming athletes to the team	National governing body nominates, USOPC confirms
Entering the team in the Games	USOPC
Recognizing, funding and auditing the governing body	USOPC

Selection is the place where the two meet most visibly. Each governing body drafts the procedure by which athletes make the Olympic team, whether that is a Trials meet, a ranking list or a coach's decision. The committee reviews and approves the document, and later confirms the names. The sport-by-sport methods are laid out in our guide to how the U.S. Olympic Trials work.

Probation and decertification

The committee's hold over a governing body is that it can take recognition away. A federation that fails to meet the Act's requirements can be placed on probation with conditions attached, or have its recognition revoked after a hearing, at which point the committee can recognize a replacement or run the sport itself for a time. The 2020 reforms added a regular certification review, so that governing bodies are now audited against standards on a cycle instead of only when something goes wrong.

Revocation is rare, but it is not theoretical. The committee withdrew recognition from the federation that ran team handball in 2006 and recognized a new body for the sport two years later. In taekwondo it forced a wholesale restructuring under the threat of the same thing.

The largest case never finished. In November 2018, after the Larry Nassar abuse scandal, the committee began proceedings to revoke the recognition of USA Gymnastics. A month later the federation filed for bankruptcy protection, which froze the process. It emerged years afterward with a settlement for survivors, new leadership and its recognition intact.

That episode also exposed the weakness in the arrangement. For years the committee had treated governing bodies as independent organizations whose internal affairs were their own business. It had the power to intervene and a habit of not using it. Congress concluded that the hands-off approach had contributed to the failure, and wrote the 2020 law to make oversight a duty.

USOPC vs IOC vs the organizing committee: three bodies people mix up

A viewer watching the 2028 Games in Los Angeles will see the work of three separate organizations, plus a fourth for the Paralympics, and the logos do not make it obvious which is which.

Body	Based in	What it is	What it controls
International Olympic Committee	Lausanne, Switzerland	The private international association, founded in 1894, that owns the Olympic Games	The Games themselves, the sports program, the choice of host, worldwide broadcast and sponsorship rights
International Paralympic Committee	Bonn, Germany	The international body that owns the Paralympic Games	The Paralympic program, classification rules and its own membership
USOPC	Colorado Springs, Colorado	The national Olympic and Paralympic committee for the United States	The American team, the Olympic marks inside the U.S., recognition of governing bodies
LA28 organizing committee	Los Angeles, California	A temporary private nonprofit created to stage one Games	Venues, tickets, volunteers, operations and the local budget for 2028
International federations	Various	The world governing body of each sport	Competition rules and Olympic qualifying systems for that sport

The USOPC vs IOC question comes down to ownership. The IOC owns the event and decides who hosts it and which sports are in it. The American committee is, in the IOC's structure, one of more than 200 national committees, each with the same basic right to send a team. It carries more weight than most because the American television market pays for a large part of the movement. It has no vote to show for it: IOC members, not national committees, do the voting.

The organizing committee is the one that disappears. LA28 exists to deliver a single Olympic and Paralympic Games, will spend several billion dollars doing it, and will wind down afterward. The USOPC is a party to the host contract along with the city, and it pools its sponsorship rights with the organizers for the period, but it does not build venues or sell tickets. Its job in 2028 is the same as at any other Games: the American team. The sports that team will contest for the first time are covered in our guide to the new sports at the Los Angeles Olympics.

What the committee does at a Games

From the outside, Team USA appears at the opening ceremony fully formed. The work behind it starts years earlier and follows a fixed order.

1. 1Approve selection rulesThe committee signs off on each governing body's selection procedure before any qualifying event is held.
2. 2Confirm the nomineesGoverning bodies submit their athletes, and the committee checks eligibility and approves each name.
3. 3Enter the teamThe committee files the entries with the organizers by the deadline. Only a national Olympic committee can do this.
4. 4Outfit the delegationEvery athlete passes through team processing to collect competition kit, village wear and ceremony uniforms.
5. 5Run the village operationCommittee staff manage housing, medical care, transport, security liaison and a training base outside the village.
6. 6Lead the delegationA chef de mission represents the team to the organizers and the IOC and handles disputes and discipline.
7. 7Stage the flag voteAthletes on the team vote for the flag bearers at the opening and closing ceremonies.

The committee's Games responsibilities under the Olympic Charter and its own bylaws, in the order they happen.

The delegation is larger than the team. For a Summer Games the United States sends close to 600 athletes and several hundred support staff: coaches, physicians, physical therapists, team leaders, press officers, security staff. The committee appoints the chef de mission, the delegation's formal head, who is the person organizers call when there is a problem with an American athlete.

Much of the operation is logistics that no one notices unless it fails. The committee books the charter flights and the freight. It runs a medical clinic. It sets up a high performance center outside the village, with training space, recovery facilities and food the athletes are used to, because a village dining hall serving ten thousand people is not built around any one team's preferences. It works with the State Department's Diplomatic Security Service on protecting Americans abroad. It also opens a hospitality house for sponsors, donors and athletes' families, which doubles as a fundraising venue.

Uniforms run through the committee's sponsorship contracts. The parade outfits worn at the ceremonies have been made by the same American fashion house since 2008, and athletes receive them, along with several bags of other gear, in a day-long session known as team processing.

How the flag bearers are picked

Nominees are put forward from the individual sports, and the team's athletes vote. Since the Tokyo Games the IOC has allowed two flag bearers at the opening ceremony, one man and one woman. In Paris the vote produced James, the first men's basketball player to carry the American flag, and Gauff, the first tennis player. Katie Ledecky and the rower Nick Mead carried it at the closing ceremony.

The committee also pays the medal awards afterward. The amounts and their history are in our guide to the U.S. Olympic medal bonus.

Who runs it: the board, the chief executive and the athletes' third

The committee is governed by a board of directors and run day to day by a chief executive the board hires. The chair is a volunteer. The chief executive is a paid professional with a staff of several hundred.

The board is built from constituencies. Some directors are independent, chosen for business, legal or nonprofit experience and holding no position in any sport. Some are put forward by the council that represents the national governing bodies. Some are athletes, elected through the Team USA Athletes' Commission, the body of athlete representatives from every sport. The American members of the IOC sit on the board by virtue of that office.

The athlete share is fixed by federal law, and it has grown.

Before the 2020 law20%

Since the 2020 law33.3%

The minimum athlete representation the Ted Stevens Act requires on the USOPC board and on governing-body boards and committees, before and after the 2020 amendments.

Show the numbers

Share of board and committee seats reserved for athletes under federal law

Item	Value
Before the 2020 law	20%
Since the 2020 law	33.3%

The one-third rule applies well beyond the committee's own boardroom. Every national governing body must give athletes a third of the seats on its board and on its committees, including the committees that write selection procedures and hear disciplinary cases. The law defines who counts. The core category is the "10-year athlete," someone who has represented the United States in the Olympics, Paralympics, Pan American Games or a world championship within the previous decade. The 2020 amendments widened the definition somewhat so that longer-retired athletes could fill part of the allocation, on the theory that an athlete still competing is poorly placed to challenge the federation that controls her selection.

Leadership has turned over sharply once in recent memory. The chief executive who had led the committee since 2010 resigned in February 2018 as the Nassar scandal widened. Sarah Hirshland, hired that summer from the U.S. Golf Association, took over in August.

One structural point is easy to miss. The committee has no members in the ordinary sense, no shareholders and no electorate. The board is accountable to the constituencies that nominate it, to the IOC and IPC through their charters, and, as the next sections show, to Congress.

The training centers at Colorado Springs and Lake Placid

The committee operates two residential training campuses.

The Colorado Springs Olympic and Paralympic Training Center has stood since the late 1970s on the grounds of the former Ent Air Force Base, at an elevation of about 6,000 feet. It has dormitories and a dining hall, sports medicine and sport science facilities, a strength and conditioning center, an aquatics center, gymnasiums and an indoor shooting range, with a velodrome nearby. The altitude is part of the appeal for endurance sports. The concentration of expertise is the larger part: more than twenty national governing bodies keep their headquarters in the city, which markets itself as Olympic City USA and is home to the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Museum, a separate nonprofit that opened in 2020.

Lake Placid, New York, is the winter campus. The village hosted the Winter Games in 1932 and again in 1980, the year of the hockey game we cover in our guide to the Miracle on Ice. The committee opened its training center there in the early 1980s to make use of what the Games left behind. Bobsled, luge, skeleton, biathlon and freestyle skiing athletes are the regulars. The sliding track, the ski jumps and the rinks themselves belong to a New York State authority, not to the committee, which runs the residence and the support services.

What a resident athlete gets

Housing, meals, coaching space, medical treatment and access to sport scientists, at no cost to the athlete. For someone in a sport with no professional circuit, that package is the difference between training full-time and not. Places are limited and the committee does not hand them out directly. Each governing body nominates athletes for its resident program, usually on the strength of results, and most athletes at the centers at any moment are there for a camp of a few days or weeks.

The great majority of American Olympians never live at a training center. Swimmers train with college or club programs. Track athletes work with private coaches around the country. Gymnasts stay in their home gyms.

The center that changed hands

A third campus opened in 1995 in Chula Vista, California, south of San Diego, as a warm-weather site for sports such as track and field, archery, rowing, canoeing, BMX and rugby. At the start of 2017 the committee transferred ownership to the city of Chula Vista, which now runs it as the Chula Vista Elite Athlete Training Center. American teams still train there under an agreement with the committee. The transfer took the cost of owning a large facility off the committee's books, and it is part of a wider pattern: the organization also designates training sites it does not own, at universities and private facilities, where a governing body bases a national team program.

Athlete protections built into the structure

Three protections are written into the law or the bylaws. They were added at different times, each after a failure.

The Athlete Ombuds. Created by the 1998 amendments, the ombuds office gives athletes free, confidential advice about their rights: selection disputes, eligibility, anti-doping cases, SafeSport matters, conflicts with a governing body. The office does not represent athletes as a lawyer would, but it explains the options and can help mediate. The 2020 law strengthened its independence, barring the committee's leadership from interfering with it and protecting the confidentiality of what athletes tell it.

The right to compete. Under Section 9 of the bylaws, an athlete who claims to have been wrongly denied the chance to take part in a protected competition can file a complaint and, if it is not resolved, demand arbitration before a neutral arbitrator. Cases are heard fast, sometimes within days, because the event will not wait. The statute adds a rule aimed at the courts: in the three weeks before a Games begins, a court may not issue an injunction against the committee over team selection if the committee certifies that it cannot resolve the dispute in time. Arbitration is the route, and the law keeps it that way.

The U.S. Center for SafeSport. The center opened in Denver in 2017 as an independent nonprofit, and a federal law signed in February 2018 gave it exclusive authority to investigate and resolve allegations of sexual misconduct anywhere in the Olympic and Paralympic movement. Governing bodies are no longer allowed to investigate such complaints against their own coaches. Adults in the movement are mandatory reporters of suspected child abuse. The center keeps a public database of people it has sanctioned or suspended. The committee is required by law to fund it, at $20 million a year, and is forbidden to control it.

Anti-doping follows the same pattern of separation. Testing and prosecution of American athletes has been handled since 2000 by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, an independent body, so that the organization whose revenue depends on medals is not also the one deciding whether a medalist cheated. Our explainers on how WADA and the anti-doping system are organized and on how drug testing works in sport cover that side.

The logic running through all of these is distrust of self-policing. Each function was once done in-house, was done badly, and was moved outside. It took a long time. SafeSport's own performance has been criticized for slow investigations and a backlog of cases, which is a reminder that an independent body is a necessary fix and not a sufficient one.

Congress's hold over a private body

On April 12, 1980, the committee's delegates met at a hotel in Colorado Springs and voted, by a margin of about two to one, not to send a team to the Moscow Olympics. The vote came after weeks of pressure from the Carter administration, which wanted a boycott in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and had made clear what it was prepared to do to get one. Athletes sued. A federal court ruled that the committee had the authority to decline an invitation to the Games and that the athletes had no enforceable right to compete in them.

The episode showed the real position of a "private" national Olympic committee. Legally the decision belonged to the committee. Practically, an organization holding a congressional charter and a statutory trademark does not defy the White House on a matter of foreign policy.

Four decades later Congress made its leverage explicit. Following the Nassar scandal, two Senate subcommittee leaders, Jerry Moran of Kansas and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, ran an 18-month investigation whose 2019 report concluded that the committee and USA Gymnastics had known of the allegations and failed to act. An independent law firm report commissioned by the committee itself reached a similar finding about its senior leadership.

The Empowering Olympic, Paralympic, and Amateur Athletes Act, signed on October 30, 2020, was the response.

• Congress may dissolve the committee's entire board of directors by passing a joint resolution.
• Congress may by the same method terminate the recognition of a national governing body.
• The committee must certify governing bodies against published standards and report on the results.
• Athlete representation rises to a third of every board and committee.
• The committee must fund SafeSport and may not interfere in its work.
• A commission was created to review the whole system and report back, which it did in 2024.

In its first five years the dissolution power was not used. It was written as a threat. It also sits awkwardly beside the Olympic Charter, which requires national Olympic committees to preserve their autonomy and resist political pressure, and under which the IOC has suspended committees in other countries for government interference. The United States has in effect told the IOC that its own committee's board serves at the pleasure of the legislature. So far the IOC has let it pass.

Congress shapes American sport through other statutes as well, most of all the one covered in our guide to Title IX, but the Stevens Act is the only one that reaches inside a single organization's boardroom.

The Paralympic half of the name

The United States Olympic Committee took on the role of national Paralympic committee in 2001, when it created a division called U.S. Paralympics. The 1998 amendments to its charter had already written the Paralympic Games into its mission. For eighteen years the organization did both jobs under a name that mentioned one.

That ended on June 20, 2019, when the board approved the change to United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee. It was the first national Olympic committee anywhere to put the word in its title. The Colorado Springs and Lake Placid campuses became Olympic and Paralympic Training Centers at the same time.

A change with more practical effect had come a year earlier. In 2018 the committee announced that Paralympic medalists would receive the same medal payments as Olympic medalists, where they had previously been paid a fraction of the Olympic rate, and it applied the increase retroactively to the Winter Paralympics held that March.

The combined model is unusual. Most large sporting nations keep two organizations.

Country	Olympic committee	Paralympic committee
United States	USOPC	USOPC
Netherlands	NOC*NSF	NOC*NSF
Great Britain	British Olympic Association	British Paralympic Association
Canada	Canadian Olympic Committee	Canadian Paralympic Committee
Australia	Australian Olympic Committee	Paralympics Australia
Germany	German Olympic Sports Confederation	German Disabled Sports Association

Each arrangement has its defenders. A single committee can give Paralympic athletes the same training centers, medical staff, health insurance and sponsorship machinery as Olympians without duplicating any of it. A separate committee has no competing priority and no larger sibling to be overshadowed by. American Paralympic advocates have at times argued that the combined body treated their half as an afterthought, which was a large part of the case for the new name.

The committee's role on the Paralympic side is also more hands-on. For several Paralympic sports, track and field, swimming and cycling among them through the Paris 2024 cycle, U.S. Paralympics itself has acted as the governing body, running the national team directly. Which sports sit inside the committee has changed over time. Other Paralympic sports are run by the same federation that handles the Olympic discipline, or by a specialist organization such as the body for wheelchair basketball. So on the Paralympic side the committee does some of the day-to-day work that on the Olympic side it leaves to others.

Los Angeles will be a first here as well. The city has hosted the Olympics twice and has never hosted the Paralympic Games.

Bringing the Games home: how an American host city is chosen

Under the Olympic Charter a city cannot bid for the Games on its own. Its national Olympic committee has to put it forward. In the United States that gives the USOPC a gatekeeper's role: no American city reaches the IOC without the committee's endorsement, and the committee can back only one for any given Games.

For most of the modern era this meant a domestic contest before the international one. Cities competed for the committee's nomination, and the winner then spent years and tens of millions of dollars campaigning for IOC members' votes. New York was the American candidate for 2012 and lost. Chicago was the candidate for 2016 and lost in the first round.

The road to 2028 was messier than the result suggests. In January 2015 the committee chose Boston as its candidate for the 2024 Games, over Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington. Public support in Boston collapsed over fears about cost, and the bid was withdrawn that July. The committee turned to Los Angeles weeks later. By 2017 only Los Angeles and Paris remained in the race, and the IOC awarded both Games at once at its session in Lima that September: Paris for 2024, Los Angeles for 2028.

The Winter Games followed a different path. In December 2018 the committee selected Salt Lake City over Denver as its candidate for a future Winter Olympics. By then the IOC had abandoned contested votes in favor of a process of private dialogue with preferred hosts, and in July 2024 it awarded the 2034 Winter Games to Salt Lake City and Utah without a rival on the ballot.

• 4Summer Games hosted
• 4Winter Games hosted
• 2Awarded, not yet held

Summer Games in St. Louis, Los Angeles twice and Atlanta; Winter Games in Lake Placid twice, Squaw Valley and Salt Lake City. The two awarded are Los Angeles 2028 and Salt Lake City and Utah 2034.

Year	Host	Season
1904	St. Louis, Missouri	Summer
1932	Lake Placid, New York	Winter
1932	Los Angeles, California	Summer
1960	Squaw Valley, California	Winter
1980	Lake Placid, New York	Winter
1984	Los Angeles, California	Summer
1996	Atlanta, Georgia	Summer
2002	Salt Lake City, Utah	Winter
2028	Los Angeles, California	Summer
2034	Salt Lake City and Utah	Winter

Once a city is chosen, the committee's involvement becomes contractual. It signs the host agreement alongside the city and the organizers. It merges its domestic sponsorship rights with the organizing committee's for the years around the Games, so that companies buy one package. And it takes a seat on the organizing committee's board.

What it does not do is guarantee the cost. The IOC requires a financial backstop from the host, and in the American system that has come from city and state governments, not from the committee or, directly, from Washington. The federal contribution is security.

From a volunteer committee in New York to Colorado Springs

The organization dates its founding to 1894, the year the IOC itself was created at a congress in Paris. William Milligan Sloane, a Princeton history professor and one of the IOC's founding members, went home and assembled a committee to get American athletes to the first modern Games. Fourteen went to Athens in 1896, most of them from Princeton and the Boston Athletic Association, and they won 11 events. James Connolly's victory in the triple jump made him the first Olympic champion of the modern era.

For decades the American Olympic Committee was a part-time body of volunteers, dominated by the Amateur Athletic Union and by a succession of strong-willed presidents. General Douglas MacArthur led it for the 1928 Games. Avery Brundage held the presidency for a quarter of a century and went on to become the only American president of the IOC.

1. 11894William Milligan Sloane forms an American committee to send athletes to the first modern Olympic Games.
2. 21921The body is reorganized with a formal constitution as the American Olympic Association.
3. 31950Congress grants a federal charter, giving the association legal standing and the right to solicit tax-deductible gifts.
4. 41961The organization takes the name United States Olympic Committee.
5. 51978The Amateur Sports Act makes it the coordinating body for Olympic sport, and it moves from New York to Colorado Springs.
6. 61998Congress renames the law for Senator Ted Stevens and adds the Paralympic Games and the athlete ombuds.
7. 72019The board adds Paralympic to the name, creating the USOPC.
8. 82020Congress gives athletes a third of the board and takes the power to dissolve it.

The main dates in the organization's legal history, from its own published account and the federal statutes.

The 1978 Act was the hinge. Before it the committee was little more than a travel agency for the team, assembled every four years, with no authority over the feuding organizations that controlled American amateur sport. The Act made it a permanent coordinating body with the power to recognize a governing body for each sport and to settle disputes among them. In the same year it left its offices on Park Avenue in New York for Colorado Springs, where the city had offered the closed Air Force base that became the training center.

The move said something about what the organization intended to be. An office in Manhattan suited a committee whose business was fundraising dinners and steamship bookings. A campus at altitude with dormitories and a sports medicine clinic suited one that meant to be involved in how athletes trained. Whether it has struck the right balance between those two identities, the commercial rights-holder and the servant of athletes, is the argument that has followed it ever since, through the boycott, the 1984 windfall, the revenue fights with the IOC and the reckoning after 2018. The name on the building has changed more than once. That argument has not.

For more on how American sport is organized, from the pro leagues to the college game, see our United States hub.