 With the rise of numerous regional championships , as well as the growth in Olympic @-@ style multi @-@ sport events ( such as the Commonwealth Games and the Pan @-@ American Games ) , competitions between international track and field athletes became widespread . From the 1960s onwards , the sport gained more exposure and commercial appeal through television coverage and the increasing wealth of nations . After over half a century of amateurism , the amateur status of the sport began to be displaced by growing professionalism in the late 1970s . As a result , the Amateur Athletic Union was dissolved in the United States and it was replaced with a non @-@ amateur body solely focused on the sport of athletics : The Athletics Congress ( later USA Track and Field ) . The IAAF soon followed suit in 1982 , abandoning amateurism , and later removing all references to it from its name by <unk> itself as the International Association of Athletics Federations . The following year saw the establishment of the IAAF World Championships in Athletics — the first ever global competition just for athletics — which , with the Olympics , became one of track and field 's most prestigious competitions . 
