The endgame of the Olympics: What if the Olympic Games never come back?

Do you have some citation for this account of "the working class demanded entry? It sounds very much like a "just so" story. It seems much more likely that people like Horatio Alger stories and talent scouts go looking for people who can sell that story.

It's the consensus among sports historians that the professionalization of sports was driven by the working class, and that the amateur ideal was in large part a reaction by the middle and upper classes to this infringement upon their cultural arena by the lower classes. Of course this is a very complex topic and I won't write an essay here. Here is one source, Whose Hegemony? The Origins of the Amateur Ethos in Nineteenth Century English Society:

Though often advanced as an objective set of values, the amateur ethos was,
of course, highly subjective and subjectivity rested heavily on social class,
gender, nationality and even regional identity. In each case tension was
present in the application of the amateur ethos to the administration of sport.
In its most rarified form amateurism was assumed by English Gentlemen to
be the particular preservc of English Gentlemen.8 In some instances, as in the
early rules of the Amateur Athletic Association and the Amateur Rowing
Association, exclusive class formulations were explicit.9 However, as one
continually confronts in the attempt to comprehend English society, the
obvious presence, and contemporaries’ awareness of, class does not necessarily
facilitate a precise analysis of that phenomenon. Ubiquitous but elusive, easily sensed but defiant of definition or firm categorization, the concept of class is a
tool essential to the comprehension of English society yet dificult to hone to
efkctive usage. Such a problematic has impacted the efforts of historians
seeking to relate the nineteenth-century rise of the code of amateurism to the
class relationships prevailing in English society at that time. Nevertheless, few
historians would now support the argument that amateurism was class
neutral. ‘For all the claims that it was a rejection of financial gains from sport,
it was much more than that, it was an assertion of the immutability of the class
systeni.’10 Similarly, at the local level, ‘The new world of amateur sport
became esclusive and emphasized the strength of class discrimination.’ (...)

Why did members of the professions seek to distance themselves from sporting
professionals and exclude such athletes from competition under the aegis of
the then recently established sporting authorities? Most simply, the gentlemen
of the professions did not wish to compete with professional athletes from the
lower cIasses, whether from fear of defeat or aversion to physical contact.
There was among the English middle class an ‘ever-present revulsion of direct
physical contact with the lower classes and this led them to, ‘keep as far away
from the working class as possible’.” Both Cunningham and Lowerson
recognize a direct connection between this physical aversion and amateur
exclusiveness.3

Encyclopedia Britannica on the professionalization of association football:

Leading clubs, notably those in Lancashire, started charging admission to spectators as early as the 1870s and so, despite the FA’s amateurism rule, were in a position to pay illicit wages to attract highly skilled working-class players, many of them hailing from Scotland. Working-class players and northern English clubs sought a professional system that would provide, in part, some financial reward to cover their “broken time” (time lost from their other work) and the risk of injury. The FA remained staunchly elitist in sustaining a policy of amateurism that protected upper and upper-middle class influence over the game.

The issue of professionalism reached a crisis in England in 1884, when the FA expelled two clubs for using professional players. However, the payment of players had become so commonplace by then that the FA had little option but to sanction the practice a year later, despite initial attempts to restrict professionalism to reimbursements for broken time. The consequence was that northern clubs, with their large supporter bases and capacity to attract better players, came to prominence. As the influence of working-class players rose in football, the upper classes took refuge in other sports, notably cricket and rugby union.

Many more papers and books on this exist.

I have yet to see any persuasive evidence for some objective caliber of performance being tied to overall audience enthusiasm. Performance relative to the competitive field matters for sure, but if the tide is lower in general I don't see why it would matter.

I don't think there is a correlation between objective performance and audience enthusiasm either, but I definitely think there is one between enthusiasm and relative performance. Unless you assume the complete extinction of professional sports, which is extremely unlikely to happen if for no other reason than there's too much money in it, then there will be a noticeable difference in performance between amateurs and professionals.

The reason they're runners and not any other part of the track-and-field world is because running can be trained with no equipment and no dedicated stadiums. You can do it barefoot if you have to. And even once sponsored, the most expensive thing is a pair of good shoes and plane tickets/accommodations to where you need to go. The Warsaw Pact countries poured tons of resources into their sports programs specifically to distract from their dismal economic metrics in the world's eye, so Romania and Bulgaria are poor examples. And Brazil isn't really a poor country so much as a very unequal one. It's strictly middle-income, and their football team is basically a national religion.

From this, I assume you could find fault with absolutely any example I give, for reasons that I think are reaching. You're moving the goalposts. We started with "small or poor countries are condemned to irrelevancy", now we're at "these countries may be successful and small and/or poor but they don't count because X, Y, Z". I don't think this is going to lead in any productive direction. I will point out that Brazil is relatively poor today (compared to other countries that are also good at football like England, Spain and Germany), but they were very poor 100 years ago, and that's how long they've been good.