[FarMcKon]

The writers claim of `the extreme meritocracy of sports`is pretty amazing. Considering all the research into 'Everyone in Baseball is born in August' to the constant drum of doping scandal. Or people moving whole families, or rich buying second houses (near sky slopes) to pump their kids past the poorer competition, etc.

It's pretty crazy for anyone to imagine sports as 'meritocracy' when exact birth-day, parents wealth, school district/ college wealth, etc, clearly is a HUGE driver of sports outcome (1/4 ? 1/2 ? ). And that is not tying in genetics, or cheating, or more.

Scrape any 'meritocracy', and you'll find it a) by humans, b) in a culture, and underlying unfairness of the cultures still has a heavy impact.

[gramie]

I know someone who was able to send his children to medical school in a foreign country, when they weren't accepted into schools in our country. He was able to pay ~$500,000 in tuition, plus all the living expenses, etc.

Now they have graduated and are (by all accounts very fine, even superb) doctors. My kids will always earn a fraction of what they do. Hard to argue that wealth doesn't create opportunities.

Oh and by the way, my father is a doctor, so you could argue that his wealth enabled my brother to make it into medical school (7 years of undergrad, multiple years of applying before being successful) in the first place.

[mannerheim]

That's comparable to cheating in the same way a tutor is comparable to Googling on one's phone in the exam room.