Jimmy Carter’s Significant Impact on Sports and the Law

Former President Jimmy Carter, who died Sunday at the age of 100, played an instrumental role in sports law by signing the Amateur Sports Act of 1978 and leading the boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow.

Carter served as the 39^th President, serving one term between 1977 and 1981. He defeated incumbent President Gerald Ford in the 1976 election but lost to former California Gov. Ronald Reagan four years later. A recipient of numerous awards, including the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, Carter had been in hospice care since 2023. 

As president, Carter established the Department of Education, spearheaded efforts to deregulate the airline, trucking, telecommunications and other industries, promoted initiatives—including an expansion of national parks—to protect the environment, and eased tensions between Israel and Egypt through the Camp David Accords. His administration was also besieged with high levels of inflation and unemployment and a hostage crisis when militant college students overtook the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held the staff hostage. 

The Amateur Sports Act, also called the Ted Stevens Amateur Sports Act in honor of the late Alaska senator who sponsored the bill, transformed amateur sports in America. Among other effects, the Act designated the U.S. Olympic Committee (later the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee) as a federally chartered corporation and coordinating entity for amateur sports. One key purpose of the Act was to advance U.S. interests in the Olympics at a time when the Olympics held added significance given the geopolitical rivalry between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

The Act also empowered national governing bodies to oversee specific sports, such as USA Hockey and USA Track and Field. At the same time, the Act limited these NGBs’ authority by excluding oversight over high school and college sports. State athletic associations and the NCAA (and NAIA), respectively, were effectively given control over those areas of sports.

In signing the Act, Carter said he hoped a new framework would rectify “frequent disputes between some of our amateur sports organizations [that] have hindered the grassroots development of amateur sports as well as the performance of United States athletes in international and Olympic competition.” He also highlighted that the USOC would use arbitration to resolve disputes; since that time, arbitration has played a major role in the U.S. sports industry.

Carter’s use of the Olympics to send a political message proved key crucial later in his presidency as well. At the urging of Carter and Congress—with the House voting 386 to 12 and Senate voting 88 to 4 in favor of nonbinding resolutions—the USOC declined to send U.S. teams to the 1980 Olympics. The move was a boycott in response to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Sixty-four other countries joined the U.S, and only 80 countries participated that year. More than two dozen U.S. athletes sued the USOC over the boycott in hopes of obtaining an injunction to play. However, a court dismissed the case failing to state a plausible claim. Four years later, the Soviet Union and 14 allies including Vietnam, Cuba and Angola, boycotted the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles as retaliation for the 1980 boycott.

Carter, who also served as governor of Georgia and was a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, spoke of his love of sports while he was in the White House. In an interview with Sports Illustrated in 1978, Carter acknowledged that while he had “never been a really good athlete,” he stressed the value of running for working adults who want to stay in good shape. 

“It’s not time-consuming,” he said. “I can go out and run, for me, a fairly fast two miles in about 15 minutes, or run three miles in 25 minutes, or take a slower pace—10 minutes to a mile—and run seven miles. Then I can come back in and go back to work shortly.”

Carter also recalled how as a child he built a pole-vaulting pit in his backyard to practice jumping and pole-vaulting. 

“As a child,” he recalled, “I had dreams of someday being a famous athlete, but that never did happen.”

It didn’t happen, but he did become president of the United States. He was also the longest-lived president in U.S. history.