CaptainGyro: Nope, didn't say that at all.
That's fine but being intentionally obtuse doesn't help your case.
The fact is that it's not hard to see how the media, more-so than the people in general, deify our athletes. Look at Michael Phelps: he was the guy who showed China what for but then *gasp* they discover that he smokes weed every now and again. All of a sudden our hero is human, all of a sudden he's not some avatar of our national superiority now he's just a guy who enjoys the same thing millions of other people do and can also swim really fast.
That's not the kind of reaction you get from people who understand that he was just as human as the rest of us, that's the kind of reaction you get from people who have elevated this man far above the station of us mere mortals and were slapped in the face by reality.
Someone mentioned Tebow here, I live in Colorado, and if you did too you'd know that people do indeed see him as Jesus in a football jersey. Even the story of his birth is told in a religiously reverent way. For those who don't know his mother was told by her doctors that due to complications she would have to abort her baby. But she prayed and prayed and showed those evil doctors by giving birth to that boy and that baby was Tim Tebow. This is a story I first heard in a church for Pete's sake.
I'm 100% in agreement that not all athletes are d-bags, Tim Tebow seems like a genuinely nice guy if not a genuinely good quarter-back (although Manning has earned the ire of many a Bronco fan because of that playoff game) but to say we don't elevate people who can move their bodies better than others, or as you kind of suggested, people who are better looking or more talented is just silly.
The question the OP is asking is easy to answer, yes, we elevate these people because physical performance was an easy way for us to determine one's genetic superiority and those people were the ones who were able to feed the village. Today it's the smart guy not the strong guy who brings home the bacon but that doesn't mean our instinct to value the guy who runs fast magically goes away. But that's not the question he's really asking, is it? He's really asking "
should we be deifying these people?" To which the answer is no, but again, you can't just tell your baser instincts to disappear completely.
In the end elevating our more talented humans above the status of "mere mortal" is good, it gives us something to strive for, another incentive to succeed, it's just that athletes really should be much lower on that totem pole if at all.
The question is necessary to help make people aware of that fact so we might change; to answer the question and simply leave it at that is missing the point.
