Sterling: Your assumption seems to be that sports are (is?) news. Which seems to beg the question. Another point: as with celebrity generally, with sports stars you have the problem as to whether these people are "special" or just "one of us" and "human interest" stories continue to confuse the issue: Bayoul is special not just because she is a good skater, but because she is an orphan--though there but for the grace of God go we--and is thus especially special because she has overcome the impediment of being an orphan by becoming a good skater--which is an example to us all--but this is the only way she could have overcome. Moreover, with sports stars we (?) demand that they retain more traces of their ordinariness than, I think, film or (other kinds of) TV stars. Hence the emphasis on amateurism etc.--and also the demand that they should be drug-free. After all, Ben Johnson (say) is a souped up human being through all the training he puts in; why has he crossed some new boundary by taking a drug which merely makes him a little more souped up--and which, in any case, doesn't directly affect performance, but enables him to train a little more and a little harder, and thus to soup himself up in the same way that he was doing in the first place. I know these things happen with other stars: who are both girl/boy next door and out of our leagues etc. My suggestion is, however, that the tensions/contradictions are perhaps particularly acute when it comes to sports. Perhaps, to return to my first point, because it is never clear whether sports are "real"--news, documentary, human achievement--or "fiction"--entertainment, spectacle, production etc. Jon