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.
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.
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.
