If Mike Tyson, a heavyweight, were to fight Floyd Mayweather, a featherweight, we might say it was an "unfair" fight, because Mike Tyson is so much bigger. And similarly, if we found someone who has the same weight as Mike Tyson, but who had no training in boxing, we might call that an "unfair" fight as well.

When it comes to professional sport, what we really mean by "fair" is that we've found a matchup for which we can't reliably predict the results in advance.

There is no universal gold standard of "fairness". When we say something is "fair", all we really mean (whether we realize it or not), is simply that we've isolated for all of the variables that we are interested in isolating for, within the given context.

When it comes down to it, literally *ALL* standards of "fairness" are essentially arbitrary. I think if people understood that, it would make this whole conversation a lot more fruitful.

I've explored this idea in more detail here:

https://medium.com/@nebulasaurus/there-are-no-fair-fights-c4ade3e4a4d8