Name the professional athletes you respect the most and why.
Ballet dancers. They give their lives over to their discipline and focus and, in many cases, their freedom as much, if not more than other athletes, and for very little money or fame. Even the prima ballerinas aren’t household names and aren’t known at all outside of their own countries or even outside of their own ballet companies. For ballet dancers, it really is about the love of the ballet. They don’t get endorsements or their faces on cereal boxes or multi-million dollar deals . Most of them are paid barely enough on which to live.
Think about it. Can you name me 2 ballet dancers, one female and one male who are currently performing? As a matter of fact, I doubt that you can name one. You might know the name of Melanie Hamrick, but not because she was a ballerina, but because she’s Mick Jagger’s current girlfriend.
What about the men? You’d have to go back to Baryshnikov, and he’s 76 years old and hasn’t performed in 2 decades or more. And the likely reason you could come up with his name is because he was in movies or that he was in season 6 of Sex and the City, playing Carrie’s Russian love interest.
Unless you are a fan of ballet and you follow it, you won’t know anyone who is currently performing. Yet I can name current baseball, football, and basketball players and even a couple of current soccer or European football players, and I don’t follow sports at all, with the exception of heavy weight boxing.
I’m going to include some videos of some current ballet dancers to prove the point that these people are athletes who can jump higher and longer than Olympians and balance better than gymnasts.
Men
Women
