Every culture has its sporting heroes, and the impulse to look up to them runs deep. It becomes a problem at a specific point, though, and it is worth locating that point precisely. Not when we admire what an athlete does, but when we elevate who we imagine they are: when a person who is extraordinary at one narrow, physical thing gets treated as extraordinary in general, a source of moral guidance and a template for how to live. That step is where putting someone on a pedestal starts to go wrong, and the psychology explains both why we do it and why it so often misfires. It also points, usefully, to a version of admiration that is entirely healthy.
The pedestal is usually a halo
Psychologists have a name for the tendency to let one impressive quality color our judgment of everything else about a person: the halo effect. First documented by Edward Thorndike in 1920 and studied ever since, it describes how a single striking positive trait, beauty, competence, fame, spills over into unrelated judgments, so that we assume the good-looking person is also kind and the successful person also wise, and it operates without our noticing, so we sincerely believe our high opinion rests on evidence rather than on one dazzling attribute.
Applied to athletes, the halo is enormous. Someone runs faster or shoots more accurately than almost anyone alive, and the glow of that excellence quietly spreads to areas it has nothing to do with: their character, their judgment, their fitness to be a moral example. But a sublime jump shot is evidence of a sublime jump shot. It tells us essentially nothing about whether the person is honest, generous, or wise, which is precisely why sporting heroes so regularly disappoint on those exact fronts. The pedestal was built on a category error.
Why the disappointment is structural
This is why the familiar cycle, hero worship followed by scandal and disillusionment, is not really bad luck but almost predictable. We project total virtue onto a person on the strength of a single skill, then feel betrayed when reality, an ordinary human being with ordinary flaws, fails to match the fantasy we assembled. The athlete rarely claimed to be a saint. We cast them as one.
There is a second unfairness built in, too: the role-model burden. We hand young people a stranger and say be like this person, and we ask that person to carry the weight of that expectation across their entire life, on and off the field, a job they never applied for and cannot really do. Some handle it with grace; many understandably do not. And the more intense the worship, the more it hardens into a one-sided, parasocial bond that is unhealthy for the fan and quietly dehumanizing for the one being idolized, who becomes a screen for other people’s needs rather than a person.
But admiration itself is not the problem
It would be easy here to slide into cynicism, and that would be a mistake, because there is a way of looking up to excellence that is genuinely good for us. The psychologists Sara Algoe and Jonathan Haidt studied what they call the other-praising emotions and drew a distinction that resolves the whole issue. They found that admiration, the feeling we get from witnessing non-moral excellence, someone doing a hard thing superbly, motivates us to improve ourselves in that domain, while elevation, a separate emotion, is what we feel on witnessing moral excellence, and it motivates us to become better people.
The two are different responses to different things, and that is exactly the line the pedestal blurs. It is entirely appropriate, and even beneficial, to feel admiration for an athlete’s skill, discipline and years of relentless work, and to let it spur your own effort. What is not appropriate is to convert admiration for a skill into elevation toward a character, letting awe at what someone can do slide into reverence for who they are. Admire the excellence, which is what admiration is for. Just do not mistake it for evidence of virtue.
The honest balance
A few fair points keep this from tipping over. None of it means athletes cannot be admirable people. Plenty are, and some genuinely model virtues, generosity, courage, grace under pressure, that are worth elevating. The argument is not that sporting heroes are frauds, but that their athletic greatness is not in itself proof of their goodness, and the two deserve to be judged separately.
Nor is this an argument against heroes for children. Role models can be valuable, and looking up to someone’s perseverance and mastery is healthy. The point is narrower and more useful than don’t have heroes. It is: admire specific, real things, an athlete’s work ethic, their craft, a particular decent act, rather than projecting a total, imaginary virtue onto a person you have never met. Calibration, not cynicism.
Where it leaves us
So the claim that putting sporting heroes on a pedestal is not always appropriate is, on the evidence, exactly right, and for a precise reason. It is appropriate to be inspired by excellence, which is what athletes genuinely offer. It is a mistake to treat excellence in sport as excellence in life, which is what the pedestal quietly does.
The healthiest stance turns out to be the most respectful one, both to the athlete and to yourself. Admire the remarkable thing they actually do, let it push you to work harder at your own hard things, and hold the person to the same ordinary standard you would hold anyone else, fully capable of being a genius on the field and an unremarkable, or even poor, human being off it. The skill is real and worth admiring. The pedestal is a trick of the mind.