Competition sports are historically good for entertaining (actively and passively) billions of people. Do you have an alternative activity which is as engaging to as many people? Why not be entertained by watching fellow human beings push their bodies to the absolute microsecond limit? Why not reward those which are the most entertaining? Most of what we do in the end is completely pointless anyways if you get philosophical enough about it.

If we were all robots capable of performing brain intense activity all the time with no need for leisure activity, you may have a point about sports being pointless. However, we obviously are not. Sports are easy to relate to, easy to participate in, easy to admire and easy to watch. And since sports have remained popular for so long and now have such specialization, the differences amongst the most elite athletes are now only microseconds or centimeters. There is nothing wrong with measuring or finding entertainment from such small differences. I argue it makes it even more exciting.

Sure just because you're highly skilled in a narrow field doesn't mean you're a better human. It sucks that because of media we relate these skills with human worthiness, but you can't say that competition at a high level is worthless because of these drawbacks.

There are good reasons to have highly competitive sports. It lets people see what our bodies and minds are capable of, and it helps gives us an identity as individuals and as humans. Not to mention that entertainment is not pointless. Unless you're only going to look at it from a philosophical perspective, then yeah, pretty much everything we do is meaningless.

You relate these skills with human worthiness because of your own innately competitive impulses. It's because of your own rationality. It's because of your own drive to achieve. It's because of your own drive to impress your peers (especially women if you are a man). It's not the media's fault.

I downmodded this post because claiming that competition sports are "good for two things only" is absolutely ridiculous. Competitive sports are good for:

    Physical well-being
    Mental well-being
    Self-esteem, self-worth, self-satisfaction.
    Pure fun
    Personal motivation and accomplishment
    Social interaction
    Entertainment
    Proxy for real violence

... To list a few things off the top of my head.

Most athletes are not paid exorbitant salaries because most competition does not result in media spectacle. Yet sports remain an important part of life for people in nearly every culture on the planet, as they have for thousands of years.

Don't know who was downvoting you. I agree. Don't know if I'd have agreed three months ago, but I'm starting to grow increasingly weary of rankings and competition.

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of human potential. When I see people performing on levels I can't think of reaching, it gives me a fuzzy feeling. But we've gone past that in society, to the point of fetishizing achievement. I think it's awesome, for instance, that Michael Phelps broke the records he did. It's what he loves doing, apparently, and the technology behind his suit was pretty cool, and the spectacle was fun. But we aren't really given a choice about what to find fun, are we, when every media station heralds it for a week at a time. I'm sure other cool things were happening that didn't involve milliseconds in an expensive pool. Then the fame gets so ridiculous that his using marijuana became a scandal in and of itself, and he had to apologize not primarily for using but for letting kids down.

I'd like to see society move past these anal little obsessions. It's awesome that some people like some competitive sports, but I don't think it should be the center of our society. (I really don't think society should have any center whatsoever, but that's crazy talk.)

The media ruins everything through overexposure and pathetic coverage, from politics to celebrities to crime. I think it is a bit unfair to take it out on sports and competition. What people like Michael Phelps do is nothing short of amazing, and we shouldn't penalize his accomplishments, the entertainment he provides, or competition in general because the media is sick.

I'm not so sure it is 'amazing'. What I think is 'amazing' is to have a dream of putting men on the moon and realizing it, to come up with a way of connecting people all over the world and to allow people to travel around the globe in extremely short spans of time.

Athletes are - I'm sorry - overrated. Yes, it is great that they can do what they do, and I'm happy for them that they achieve their goals. But I'm just as happy for some local kid competing at ping-pong and winning, there is not much class difference there (in my opinion).

Sports are a means of finding your own limits, then exceeding those limits.

The media indeed messes it up, and for all those other categories you listed as well.

The amount of work, dedication, persistence, and pain Phelps has endured to achieve the results he has is no less than the work, dedication, persistence and pain an engineer on the first Apollo mission endured. Phelps and the engineer just happen to be good in different domains. They are both amazing people with amazing accomplishments. The world takes all kinds.

Work, dedication, persistence, and pain have no inherent value.

Don't look at the effort. Look at the final result. Lolita took all of four months to write, and it's terrific. That's less time than it took Ed Wood to make any of his movies, all of which bombed.

> Lolita took all of four months to write

Lolita took all of four months to type. It took years to create. (Phelps swims 100 yards so fast because he's trained for years.)

Are you sure Nabokov didn't think about the issues that led to writing Lolita in the years before he started putting words on paper? Maybe he really did put in more effort (e.g., in writing other novels) before Lolita was such a result in such a seemingly short time. Nabokov's autobiography suggests he worked hard for a long time developing his craft.

I think whether he spent 10 years on it or 15 minutes doesn't really matter, the work stands on its own, it is a creation. Sports as such - especially top sports where the 1/100th of a second counter makes the difference - does not create anything of inherent value.

The guinness book of records might make you believe otherwise, but it really does not matter who ran a little faster than his fellow humans.

Without Nabokov, Bach or van Gogh though, we'd all be a little poorer.

I don't think it's penalizing him not to place the spotlight on him. I do think it's penalizing a lot of other people to make the entire Olympic week about Michael Phelps.

You mean the NBC treatment of the Olympics. Whoever decided that slow-motion, voice-over, life-story, was the way to cover live sports events should be shot.

> Don't know who was downvoting you.

This started about a week ago, maybe a bit longer, no matter what I write, first it will go to -1 or -2, then slowly back up. Weird...

> really don't think society should have any center whatsoever, but that's crazy talk.

I don't think that's crazy at all. We value things like beauty, speed, strength and so on. But everybody has a story, and when you dig deep enough everybody has hidden strengths, all it takes is the right circumstances to bring them to the surface.

What we need to recognize is that 'spectator sports by the clock', beauty contests and so on have essentially become so meaningless that what you wear in a race (or in a beauty contest!) will make the difference between winning and losing.

I'd like to see a guy like Lance Armstrong compete on a 70's racing bike. Those bikes were plenty fast, but I highly doubt he'd make a chance.

All that drives it now is money and some weird nationalistic drive.

Let's refocus from sports to stuff that actually matters (and no in the /. sense), let's hold a competition who has done the most good for their neighbourhood. Let's have countries outcompete each other on slashing their defense budget, on minimizing their crime rates and political record.

All that energy going towards slicing .01 of some record or other it fails to excite me.

I was being a bit ironic when I said crazy talk. I think society ought to decentralize and focus on smaller communities, with more emphasis on the local than on the global, without many exceptions. It's crazy talk because it won't happen, though I think it would be better in the long run.

Let's have countries outcompete each other on slashing their defense budget, on minimizing their crime rates and political record.

I find it sad that Americans aren't competitive in things like that. We're, what, #37 for health care satisfaction? Push it up again! USA! USA!

This started about a week ago, maybe a bit longer, no matter what I write, first it will go to -1 or -2, then slowly back up. Weird...

That means you've made it on HN! Either there are bots, or your name is well-known enough to provoke random downvoting. When I tried using HN with a second account for several months, I was surprised that I wasn't bobbing under -1 every time I posted in a popular thread. Now it's back. Oh, well.

Perhaps you haven't really paid attention to how much endurance and power Lance Armstrong brings to the table, even late in a multi-stage race. In the history of biking there have been very few people with his abilities. Seems like a poor choice as an example for your point.