Often, there is disagreement about who is the better athlete, or the better team. The
aim of this paper is to clarify a recent disagreement between the author (Mika
Hämäläinen) and Arvi Pakaslahti about different views of ‘betterness’ in sport competitions.
I introduced a ‘three criteria’ model of betterness, which suggested the
following three criteria: the official result, the ideally adjudicated result
and the display of athletic skills. Pakaslahti criticised my account and
introduced his own model, which has two built-in ideals of sport competitions:
the Athletic Superiority Ideal and the Just Results Ideal. I argue that when we
look behind the terminological differences, there is surprisingly little
genuine disagreement between my account and Pakaslahti’s.