I don't think it's looking down on athletics or sport specifically, but more the ridiculous edifices that have been built up around them. When you boil it down

I don't think it's looking down on athletics or sport specifically, but more the ridiculous edifices that have been built up around them. When you boil it down, sports are play, it's a "childish" activity. Which is fine for adults to engage in, but then you have all of these absurdities built up around play which can even go so far as to ruin the whole purpose of play (fun, camaraderie, personal excellence, teamwork, etc.) People get overly attached to their favorite teams, living or dying based on their success or failure on the field, and loving or hating those who like the same team or rival teams. There is so much money in the mix that players can not only make a living playing games but can become enormously wealthy in some cases, which distorts sport in odd ways sometimes. One of the worst examples being the ways that athletes injure themselves for their sports, such as those in boxing or football who endure brain trauma which shortens their lives and the quality of life, or those in many sports (baseball, football, running, bicycling) who take performance enhancing drugs in order to get ahead. Then you have cities that spend hard earned tax dollars to subsidize sports, with no good economic data to back such choices. Sports are definitely taken far too seriously today, often to the detriment of sport itself. And that creates numerous situations that are rife for parody and derision. Imagine an article detailing how some folks dedicate a huge portion of their life toward following, oh, let's say Magic the Gathering. How they spend every weekend dedicated to it. How they spend so much money on the hobby, and on various accouterments related to it. How they regularly get drunk while watching matches. How they will refuse to be friends with someone if they enjoy playing the wrong color deck. How they have gotten into several fights over the game. We would view someone like that as being outside the bounds of normal society, as being an unusual person, and as someone who engaged in pursuits that justified derision. But when people engage in precisely the same sorts of ludicrous behavior when it comes to sports, we see this sort of behavior as normal and even borderline acceptable. Merely because it's familiar and commonplace. But it is ridiculous, and it is worth pointing out how ridiculous it is.