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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4993207" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, first, I think you vastly overestimate the public in that regard.  I think that for the most part atheletes are admired simply for their ability to perform heroicly.  Atheletes are generally excused for pretty much any other failing by an admiring public provided that they win, and if not fully excused then at least excused more than they would be otherwise.  Another bit of evidence in favor of the theory that for the most part we don't care how they win just so long as they win, is that most people don't spend a whole lot of time watching someone practice and generally don't interest themselves that much in what people do to get to the point that they are winners.  The curiousity you predict just doesn't seem to be much in evidence.  Finally, we don't generally give out medals for 'tried the hardest' or 'trained the hardest'.  It happens, but not that much.  I think the most you can say is some of the reason that some people admire some atheletes is the displine that is required to attain such a high degree of skill.This seems like a good time to address some ideas that are floating around.Alot of people see an injustice in the 'super' competing against the 'normals' and are calling it 'cheating'.  Some of you even picked up on the idea that when someone blows away the competition to a great extent and in a trivial manner that people percieve it as 'cheating' when what they mean is, "We ought to change the rules to make that illegal."  The problem raised by 'supers' in atheletic competition is that such competitions become uninteresting and pointless.  If Dash participates in the race, the race becomes meaningless because the outcome is basically obvious and we cannot be surprised by it.  Watching a race with Dash running in it is even less interesting than watching an atheletic competition in rerun - all the thrill is gone. - My suspicion is that if we had 'supers' and if we could not screen the supers so that we could say, "Ahhh.. you carry the mutant X gene, therefore you as a mutant can't compete in the 'baseline human games'", then atheletic competition as we know it would be both destroyed an revolutionized.  But even if we could exclude the supers, I think for the most part people would just stop caring that much about who was the fastest normal human.  Dash destroys the race whether he competes in it our not, because even if we exclude him from participating we still know that its just a race for second place anyway.  Athletes might still compete, because already 95% of those that compete know that they'll never win and 99% of them know they'll never even compete at a high level, but normal sports would hold little interest to the spectator.  What people would care about and pay to see would be competition between supers.  People watch athletic competition to see 'the best', 'the elite', to witness the highest level of performance.  Most of the sports in the Olympics we don't care the slightest about except during the Olympics when the worlds best are gathered together.  Athletic competition would adjust to compensate.  People would watch the Olympics to see something amazing - which is the reason we watch the Olympics now - and they really wouldn't care who was 'super' and who was 'normal' because from the perspective of a normal person every Olympic champion is already a 'super' capable of doing extraordinary things.</blockquote>

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