A more principled reason for this indifference was an aversion to the belief, popular when I was growing up, that the ability to run faster or throw farther than other people is a contribution to the common good, and that we ought to honor the athlete in the same way that we honor the artist and the statesman. Games, in my house, were O.K., because games are fun. Sports are games taken much too seriously. Organized sports are an attempt, through regimentation (uniforms and trophies) and rhetoric (rah-rah boosterism and coach talk), to give an inherently pointless activity some kind of point, to inject a purpose into play.
The Olympics as Ritual : The New Yorker Loius Menand weaves some wonderfully expressed opinions and reminiscences about sport and games into a rewiew of books about the Olympics.