You said what I said, but better and funnier.

We've all been guilty of it a sometime...fact is, everyone at some time or another imagines themselves to be superior to others in some manner or another. What I love about this article is that the writer is acutely aware of her a**hole tendencies (which is more than I can say for most). HILARIOUS article.

Perhaps Ms. Sey is not a "horrible condescending jerk" as much as an experienced, highly skilled person who is fed up with the flat line of expectation that runs through American society. Our emphasis on the myth that everyone has an equal opportunity and equal skill has created a culture of non-judgment and judgment misapplied.

The huge self help industry is based on the notion that we are all artists, all talented, potentially great, maybe great enough to be rich and famous and able to do whatever we set our minds to. Baloney.

I watch my friends' children go to their athletic camps and see how every parent openly dreams of their child completing impossible feats. Your big, bow-legged kid who makes baskets by knocking other kids down is not "athletic;" he's mean and you're encouraging that trait, not not building a star guard. I sit in writing classes where inexperienced writers are less interested in writing than in how to sell the lame story they haven't written and cannot write for $1 million advance. In the same way people want to have written a book, not to write one, people want to have accomplished something without doing the work.

Talent combined with skill and drive makes difficult things look easy. Baryshnikov made leaping look like levitation. Coughlin makes swimming look like flying. Olympic female gymnasts are amazing not jut because they can do a series of somersaults on a 4" beam - what sort of hellish test is that?! - but because the goal of doing it is so near impossible as to be the goal of very, very few women in the world.

Questioning the emphasis on athletic accomplishments is one thing, questioning the ease of accomplishment is another. Those armchair critics who imagine that there but for my first marriage goes me are fooling themselves. They are also investing in the unhealthy delusion that social equality and innate human value are the same as inherent talents and individual focus.

With your central premise that when spectators watch the Olympics we have no idea how much training, sacrafice and effort goes into competing at that level.

We indeed do, that is why we watch, in awe and amazement at what the human body can do when pushed to its peak. We watch and are amazed at how they are in such excellent physical condition but still wracked with injuries and recovering from surgeries. We indeed feel for the person who makes it all the way to the event only to bust her ankle in warm ups. Or be there for one apparatus and fall off.

We the Olympic watcher usually do not have delusions that if we had just tried harder or had more time to dedicate to the sport that we would be on that beam or in that pool or on that track. Only scam artists try to convince the untalented that they can do it with more money and more time.

Are there some people that have these ideas, sure they are deluded and they are to be pitied, not scorned. It's like watching the American Idol or So You Think You Can Dance auditions and seeing those poor pathetic souls dance and sing horribly and awfully and you wonder what on this planet made them think they can do what the professionals do?

Being a spectator or a fan and being amazed at what others do does not make you deluded. Playing a sport as a hobby or way to stay in shape does not make you deluded.

Also, as a long time student of art and painting, anyone who draws or paints or sculpts is doing that to the best of their ability. I do not tell them they aren't artists or they don't know what they are doing simply because I have trained for over 20 years. How goddam arrogant, plus I realize I am also no Picasso. Just because someone can't do beam work like Johnson or Luskin does not mean they didn't do the skill, they just didn't do it well enough to spend all the money and time at the gym.

Please joggers don't run just because you can run a marathon in three hours, gee why should that person who does it in 8 even bother or even be proud of themselves, they should just slink off into a corner and never mention it because there are so many people better than them at running.

I've always distrusted people who like to say, you don't know what it's like till you've done it. Well writers don't know what it's like to be the opposite sex yet somehow they manage to write them well if they are a good writer.

Thank you for this article. I am getting sick and tired of the news reporting the "failure" of the womens gymnastics team (and others) because they "only" got a silver medal. These women are incredibly dedicated and do things that are unimaginable for the rest of us.

It's true that people who haven't done it can't really know how hard elite athleticism is, even if these same people have dabbled in an amateur way at the same activity. Indeed, that truth exists for most people who engage in a pursuit that requires a professional training and commitment yet is visible to the public in a familiar way. See, e.g., doctors and people who watch doctor shows, lawyers and anyone who thinks they're remotely intelligent and therefore "doesn't need a fancy degree" to understand the law, clergy and people who write off the clergy as being all pedophiles, etc.

My issue isn't with your haughtiness. My issue is with your thinking that your experience of condescension is exclusive to elite athletes. There is an absolute difference between one person who watches "Law & Order" and another who attends three years of law school and then works for 10 years in a public defender's office. The former might think he "knows about the law," and the latter would be utterly justified in thinking the former eyeroll-worthy.

By focusing this issue on you, and on gymnastics, is that it obscures a more important point. That point is that our culture, with its anti-elitism streak and its mythology of bootstrapping, encourages people to believe untruths about where they are relative to the rest of the world. This works in different directions and in different ways. People believe themselves worthy of fame without accomplishment. They believe themselves above average in all categories, despite such a belief being at odds with the notion of averages. In the same breath, they believe themselves underdogs, worthy of victory because of their long, put-upon struggles. They believe themselves normal and special at the same time.

These mythologically-driven beliefs, encouraged politically and culturally, delude people both about how hard it is to accomplish things at the very top of any field we well as how hard it is for people at the bottom (whether that bottom be in our lower classes or as compared with other parts of the world). As a result of these delusions, people miss how much perspective they continue to need, how much work they need to do to change their place in the world, how hard the lives of others might be, etc.

So, while you may grow frustrated with people who thought they "did gymnastics," there are billions of people who don't have, say, drinkable water, and therefore have a much bigger axe to grind with self-indulgent middle-class Americans who think they "know suffering." Perspective is something that all of us, even former elite athletes, can stand to increase.