I don't know. I think that can cut both ways. The origin of "amateur" sports was rooted in class rules. Upper class and titled people who did not have to work for a living and who could put their children into fancy boarding schools with athletic programs could dabble in sports if the fancy struck them. For the lower classes, if they were good enough at say, boxing, they could eke out a living by renting themselves out as a punching bag in local dives. Quite naturally you can't expect the son of the lord of the manner to rub shoulders with commoners, so amateur and professional competitions had to be strictly segregated.
The founder of the modern Olympic movement was Baron Pierre de Coubertin. He was succeeded as IOC president by Count
Henri de Baillet-Latour, then by J Sigfried Edstrom (Order of the White Rose of Finland), and later Michael Morris Lord Killinin and Juan Antonio Marquess of Samaranch.
( In between was the staunchest and most unyielding of all champions of amateurism, America's Avery Brundage. Born to a working class family in working class Detroit, he was abandoned by his father and raised as a semi-orphan by relatives. He was also a teammate of Native American athlete Jim Thorpe at the 1912 Olympics. The IOC deprived Thorpe of his medals because he had once accepted a small amount of cash to play on a barn-storming football team. Decades later Thoirpe's medals were restored posthumously.)
