As a sports fan, this is a question I find myself asking a lot. Here in the UK, I believe the waters couldn't be any murkier as far as peoples attitudes towards decent sporting competition is concerned. Here's why:
Part of the Great British psyche is to reward the heroic losers, and woe betide any team or sportsman who actually achieves in his, her or their field, as they're all doomed. Take Lewis Hamilton, for example, on his way to being the first ever rookie to win the Formula One World Championship, crushed under the weight of national expectation, and he bottled it. Not to mention his team being punished for the Forumla 1 Spying Row with Ferrari. Take Tim Henman, always crushed under the weight of expectation when he played at Wimbledon, and therefore never won (famously losing to Goran Ivanisevic after a rain-delay, who went on to win the championship - you can't argue with destiny....). When England were in the World Cup in 2006, the weight of expectation was that we only should turn-up and the other 31 teams shouldn't bother. Cue England going out in a penalty shoot-out to Portugal after a string of sub-standard performances, mainly because, I feel, the national attitude spilling over onto the players.
Primarily, my sport is football (or soccer, if you're American), and with the English Premier League being stale and restricted to the same four teams battling out for the top four places, it's become a procession. Surely this is getting boring for Liverpool, Man Utd, Chelsea and Arsenal fans too? These are the four "best" teams in the UK, among the "best" in Europe, if not the world (and by "best" I mean "richest"). So my rhetoric is, if you're effectively buying the level of competativeness, then where's the sport in that? One of the reasons I like American Sport is that it's built towards parity, the worst teams get the first draft picks at the beginning of a new season, and therefore are given a fighting chance to put right their wrongs of the previous season (yes, i'm ware of the irony of drug cheats too). There are salary-caps in place (save for some "star" players), and this is something which football needs urgently. If only to temper the attitude of the players, who frankly are cacooned enough from reality as to have no clue how to function outside of the busom of their agents.
Almost every sport is rife with excessive gamesmanship and cheating, which is so far beyond the spirit of sporting competition as to defy comprehension. When Paula Radcliffe pulled out of the Athens Olympic marathon, she described it as "A bereavement", it's a foot-race Honey, not a death! Stop taking it too seriously.