I think the answer is that scholarship is both overrated and hard to be definitive about in terms of winners and losers - a lot of it is politics, instrumental reason, self-promotion and class-based skills such as networking..Famous sportsmen have the medals to prove that what they did really was so much better than the rivals that came to claim their crown.

There's no relativism in an Olympic gold, a World Cup Winners medal or the cultural equivalent in American Sports.. The meaning of sports is universally consumed and understood.. The meaning of a piece of research rarely gains that level of public profile never mind appreciation or understanding.

When it does, you could argue that a figure like Aristotle, Newton, Darwin or Einstein can achieve the equivalent of sporting greatness - and more besides..And of course, sport is simply so much better at picking out the heroes from the pack and pinning medals to their chests.. Research is largely a group effort, built on the back of others' labour, where everyone wants their name on the paper.

Take sexy Quantum Mechanics for example? Who wears the crown here with all sorts of eminent contributions to the field? Rutherford, Bohr, Planck, Schroedinger, Pauli, Heisenberg, Dirac, Feynman, Gell-Mann, even Einstein would all have a fair shout.. And that's no use to a society where the rules of attraction are hard-wired in the school yard.

We   require of our heroes that they be both unequivocally extraordinary in stature and demonstrably extraordinary in deed (with, supporting stats and a replay and commentator analysis to prove it, as required).. The price of a state-sponsored ivory tower existence is financial security and relative autonomy without physical sacrifice.. The penalty is that few, outwith the walls of academe, ever know who you are and even less care.