USA's Bruce Jenner displays the gold medal he won in the Olympic decathlon at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, July 30, 1976.
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After U.S. athletes got creamed in the 1972 Munich Games, Ford made recruiting the best Olympians and bringing home more medals than the Communist bloc a national priority. In June 1975, he created the President’s Commission on Olympic Sports, which determined that infighting between the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), and the U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) had made it impossible to find the right talent. This conclusion catalyzed the Olympic and Amateur Sports Act of 1978, which gave the U.S. Olympic Committee all of the responsibility for putting together the U.S. team.