In November 2000, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the International Council of Sport Studies and Physical Education (ICSSPE) awarded author Allen Guttmann the first annual "IOC President's Sport Science Award".  The ICSSPE was founded in Paris in 1958 to reinforce links between the fields of sports, sport studies and physical education. 

Guttmann, a professor at Amherst College (MA) since 1959, has authored such works as:  From Ritual to Record: the Nature of Modern Sports (1978), The Games Must Go On: Avery Brundage and the Olympic Movement (1985), A Whole New Ball Game: And Interpretation of American Sports (1988), Women's Sports: A History (1991), The Olympics: A History of the Modern Games (1992); Games and Empires (1994), The Erotic in Sports (1996), a three-volume International Encyclopaedia of Women in Sports (2000), and Japanese Sports: A History (2001). 

In 2005, he published Sports: The First Five Millennia, a social history of the world's sports from pre-historic to contemporary times, for which he was presented the annual award of the North American Society for Sport History. The same year, he received an honorary doctorate from Belgium's Universiteit Leuven.