The pleasure of sport, playing it or watching it, is a diversion in Pascal's sense: a noise that turns us away from ourselves.

Objects to

Pascal · Pensées · 1670

The path of pleasure holds enjoyment to be the good: the joy of running, the endorphins, the excitement of the match would be, on their own, enough to make a happy life.
But warns us: a human being cannot stay quietly in a room. They need noise, stir, a hare to chase, not for the catch, but so as not to see their condition. This is what he calls .
And sport is its finished form: the effort that empties the head, the stadium that makes crowds roar, the ranking one keeps refreshing. The fan's pleasure is even a pleasure by proxy, the emotion of a feat that is not their own.
This pleasure is therefore not an evil, but a flight: it fills time so that we do not feel it empty, and a whole life handed over to these emotions passes by what, within it, called to be faced.

Therefore So to set up this pleasure as the highest good is to take dizziness for happiness: diversion soothes our unease for a moment, it never resolves it.

Deepenings

Why we flee rest

shows it by a paradox: offer the hunter the hare without the hunt, and he refuses it. It is not the catch he wants, then, but the pursuit, all that keeps him from thinking.
Left with nothing to do, a person feels boredom rise, and behind it the dread of their finitude. Diversion is that veil thrown over rest, precisely because rest would return us to ourselves.

Possible resolutions of the objection

Your choice is recorded in your profile, like a questionnaire answer.