I have to disagree with you there. Maybe its just me but I never understood the point of cheering on and calling pro athletes heroes. So they can run faster than me, they can swim faster than me, they can drive faster than me in the format of left turns for 3 hours. I don’t think that is something to spend more than three minutes acknowledging and I certainly don’t think it’s worth giving them more money than one can spend in a lifetime.
Sure, it’s a form of social inspiration, its a form of friendly competition between cities, states, countries. Sporting events would have to be one of the few times separate nations can participate in an activity that most likely wont result in some form of a war, but I don’t think that means give them more money and fame when they break a new world record for speed on a race track.
I have more of an interest in where technology is going. Maybe I'm weird but I like hearing about what the newest invention and socially accepted piece of technology is. Sure most of them aren’t innovative or even useful, but to the ones that are, they deserve their kudos, even if it was developed by a multimillion dollar corporate conglomerate. A lot of people in this world hate Microsoft. I'm neither for nor against, but if everyone hates Microsoft, why still use their software? If everyone hated Microsoft enough, they would just stop using their software and switch to Mac, Linux, or invent their own OS. Developers would use these new fangled OS' instead because of the hatred for Microsoft. This doesn’t happen, because Microsoft writes good software that has a use. If it wasn’t good for something, developers would focus resources on developing on Mac machines or Linux.
May have gone a little off topic, but I would rather see kudos go to the technological innovations than the person/people who can run faster than me, bike faster than me, drive faster, etc.