Kinetic Beauty

Leave it to David Foster Wallace to describe my fascination with athletes in a paragraph:

The human beauty we're talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings' reconciliation with the fact of having a body*.

Thank God it didn't take him 1,088 pages to do it. But, of course, what would Wallace be without a footnote?:

*There's a great deal that's bad about having a body. If this is not so obviously true that no one needs examples, we can just quickly mention pain, sores, odors, nausea, aging, gravity, sepsis, clumsiness, illness, limits -- every last schism between our physical wills and our actual capacities. Can anyone doubt that we need help being reconciled? Crave it? It's your body that dies, after all...great athletes seem to catalyze our awareness of how glorious it is to touch and perceive, move through space, interact with matter. Granted, what great athletes can do with their bodies are things that the rest of us can only dream of. But these dreams are important -- they make up for a lot.

(Source: Wallace, David Foster. "Federer as Religious Experience." The New York Times Sports Magazine. September 2006, 47-51.)