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Riding a bicycle is not a great accomplishment. Most able bodied people exposed to bicycles in their youth can easily cycle. The same applies to hitting a small ball with a stick towards a hole in the ground, or using another type of stick to hit a puck across ice, or for that matter getting into a vehicle and driving around, on and on, in an endless cycle. Any able bodied person can do that.

However, there are two things that separate most people from those who get paid a lot to do that: (i) most people cannot do it at the same level of ability as those people can; and, (ii) the market is not willing to pay to watch most people do those activities. This means, to use ice hockey and basketball as an example, while most able bodied people, with some training, can learn to play ice hockey or dribble a basketball; they are highly unlikely to be able to play ice hockey like Wayne Gretzky could, or work a basketball in the way Michael Jordan did. That's the relative skill part. The second part is the market pricing part - most people are simply not willing to pay money to watch Joe Six-Pack attempt to dunk a basketball. Advertisers may be willing to pay a lot of money for Jeff Gordon's car to drive around in circles with their name on the hood, and people may be willing to pay a lot for season tickets to watch LeBron play with a ball ...and for that matter people are willing to put their Dollars into work to listen to Rush Limbaugh, but wouldn't pay to listen to a FReeper say the same exact things (and not only would they not pay, they wouldn't listen for free even).

Skill/ability plus market pricing. That's why most people are willing to pay some people to do something that most people can be able to do at a lesser level. Kind of similar to why doctors are paid more than janitors ...anyone can sweep trash, but not everyone can be a doctor, or is willing to put the sacrifice necessary to be one.

With that said, making athletes into heroes is absolute lunacy. They are just people who, either by hard work or genetic luck, are able to play a sport. Nothing more, nothing less. However that doesn't mean they do not deserve what they are paid, primarily for the simple reason that that's what the market has priced them at, and people are more than willing to pay them such amounts.