Sure, college is about academics, but someone who spends a lot of time mastering a sport (and is gifted at it) isn’t that different from someone gifted at math and working at it.
I feel like HN may disagree, but not all athletes are 2.0 GPA students who relied purely on height to get in somewhere and have never worked hard.
But you actually posted the counterargument by yourself:
> Sure, college is about academics
Exactly: college is about academics and not sports, so athlets should only get a "VIP lane" for academic achievement/potential and not for athletic achievement/potential.
The CEOs are the future are more people skills related than anything else. If Harvard was all purely academically driven people, it would just create professors. Not exactly the college goal.
I am rather used to the German academic culture, but from this perspective I rather say: this is by the self-understanding of universities exactly the central purpose of colleges/universities (the rest is considered to be side gigs).
Except in the stuff that actually matters in the context of going to school -- your schoolwork.
> I feel like HN may disagree, but not all athletes are 2.0 GPA students
Yeah it's not all of them but you might want to take a gander at football/basketball players at the P5 level. There are a huge number of them that are, shall we say, not exactly college material. The schools shove them in basket weaving majors and assign an army of tutors to keep them academically eligible.