Some people think that professional athletes make good role models for young people, while other believe they don't.
Discuss both these points of views and give your own opinion.
Nowadays, professional athletes are worldwide recognized and admired, setting some standards that can be recognized as good by children. In contrast, athletes can have some dangerous or bad habits. I strongly believe that famous sportsmen should be followed by their achievements, but not considered as role models out of their fields.
The path to become a top athlete is hard and demands a powerful will to overcome hard training schedules. This aspect of professional athlete’s life is an important source of inspiration for children and adults both. For example, in sports summer camps, many well known athletes visit child residences to encourage them to have active and faithful lifes. Because of that, I consider that athletes should be admired because of their professional careers.
On the other hand, despite the hard work that lies behind every successful athlete, many of them have a remarkable tendency to embrace the night life and to get on drugs. Such behaviours are exposed to the young citizenry as clearly as the sportive achievements of the athletes, distorting the public perception of what means being a great man or woman. This can lead children to behave incorrectly without being aware of what they are really doing. Therefore, I think that in the actual scenario, where private life of athletes is equally or more important than their sportive achievements, their presence as role models clearly harms the public perception of being successful in life.
To sum up, in my opinion top athletes do not make good role models because of their tendency to fall into drugs and scandals. However, this problem can be fixed by the media, limiting the public knowledge, if this were required, of the harmful behaviours of professional athletes.
