Welcome to humanity.
We agree a Olympic gold is prestigious even though it’s just a sport. We agree Lawrence Olivier was great even though he was just acting. We praise Alan Turing even though he was just a mathematician.
We agree a Olympic gold is prestigious even though it’s just a sport. We agree Lawrence Olivier was great even though he was just acting. We praise Alan Turing even though he was just a mathematician.
And as you know, Alan Turing pioneered computer science and helped saved millions of lives, so he deserves our respect :-) Perhaps prestige is like natural snowball kind of effect, like how the rich will naturally get richer. A prestigious event becomes somewhat prestigious, so people want to win it. Then more people want to win it. Then it becomes more prestigious, etc.
That has nothing to do with number of viewers though. It is just a dirty trick from FIFA to eliminate competition: national teams in Olympics are junior (U-23) teams because FIFA does not allow senior teams to participate.
In a hundred years, the olympics and the nobel prize could be seen as quaint reminders of an earlier time — entirely without prestige, leaving the observer wondering why we cared so much in the first place.
It's irrelevant to the point, things are prestigious because enough people decide they are. The longest breath holder gets an entry in the Guinness Book and a cocktail icebreaker, a Synchronized Swimming Gold Medalist is always a gold medalist.
Just because something involves a measurement doesn't mean it's completely objective. All the medal tells you objectively is who ran fastest in that particular race, on that particular day, out of the people participating.
There are many subjective factors contributing to that result, and any "excellence" we infer from it is still highly subjective. Indeed, the very notion that running the fastest is something worthy of prestige is a subjective one.
We don't give a gold medal for the fastest people to write from memory an algo for reversing a binary tree, or for the person capable of feeding the most children in a day.
It's completely arbitrary.
Both sports trade on the sexualization of young girls. Why do we even have a sport where the main criteria are older men passing judgment on young girls? The scoring system is vague/complex enough that the “victory” game in both sports is highly rigged anyway, so it’s more about politics than skill when deciding between the top few spots.
Obviously that's not the case.
Athletes may value Olympic Gold more so than gold at a smaller, regional competitions, even when posting better results at the smaller venues ...
Society at large has been "tuned" to regard Olympic Gold as the "gold standard" regardless of whether the athlete performed better at other competitions.
A mathematician that changed the world to a huge degree. No actor or athlete performance drives the greatest innovations of today or wins wars. They are merely entertainers. Useful, but that's it.