Brundage soon found a worthy adversary: former New York judge Jeremiah Mahoney, the president of the Amateur Athletic Union, which organized and ran the U.S. Olympic trials. The AAU, which was founded in 1888, managed so many sports for much of the 20th century that it was effectively the controlling arm of the American Olympic Committee, now known as the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, said Olympic historian Bill Mallon. (The AAU’s influence on the Olympic movement “almost totally evaporated” when Congress passed the Amateur Sports Act of 1978, Mallon noted, but that was decades after the Berlin Games.)
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