Re-birth of the modern Olympic Games

In response to the National Olympian Association Festival, the Amateur Athletic Club, later to become the Amateur Athletics Association and now Britain's ruling athletics body, was hastily formed by an elite who were determined that British sport should be restricted to "amateurs and gentlemen", in other words athletes from the public schools and the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and should be under their control with its base in London. The NOA faced powerful opposition but by its very existence, forced the AAA to open its doors to 'every grade of man'.