Pressure in Athletics and Life

As we have seen in sports these last few weeks, in the Olympics and Open Championship (Golf), there have been a lot of athletes who failed to perform under the pressure of the big stage. In these situations, to me, there are two types of athletes. The first type is the young athletes competing in the sport more or less for love of the sport. Young athletes like the gymnast Jordyn Wieber or golfer Beau Hossler (US Open Championship) are still young and even though they spend hours and hours training at their respective sports, they are not professionals, the sport is not their job. As such we should view their short comings as, perhaps, moments of learning and growth. The second type of competing athletes are the professionals. Guys like Adam Scott at the Open Championship or Jim Furyk at the US Open are professionals, sport is their job, and as such I feel like we should view their failures as we would any other professional.
What do I mean when I say that? Well consider how you might feel if a surgeon, a professional in his field, were to fail as completely at the end of a major surgery as Scott did at the end of the Open Championship. Consider how you'd feel if an airline pilot failed on landing? No, we as a society tend to wear the white gloves when we talk about athletes and their failure in competition. Yet if a surgeon failed so completely at the end of a surgery and the patient died, a literal failure where he knew the proper way and simply did not do it, he would, at best, be liable for thousands, if not millions, of dollars in compensation to the family, and at worst sitting before a jury of his peers facing significant time in prison.
With athletes we always like to talk about how great a pressure they faced in a given situation. But is that pressure any greater than the pressure faced by the surgeon or the pilot? I think not. But as I said, we treat athletes with ease. Why not simply say it how it is and admit that these people have failed at their jobs? I took some serious heat two years ago when I was quick to say that Hunter Mahan choked and failed to do his job at the Ryder Cup. But is that not the case? His job is to play golf and hit solid shots. He flatly did not do that. Same with Adam Scott at the Open Championship. He failed to do his job. If I were to fail at my job as they did, I would, be standing tall before my commanding officer, wearing my dress uniform, and waiting for him to dispense punishment. But again, we simply brush it aside when athletes fail.
On top of this, we often berate fans who dare try to put the screws to the athlete who failed. We would have no such sympathy for the real world professional. It is a different world, to be sure, but the sympathy that people shot athletes while showing none to professionals in the real world should not be the case. Show your sympathy to the seventeen year old girls who gave their best effort and did not succeed. She deserves it. But the professional who fails to complete his job deserves none of our sympathy, unless, of course, you'd show sympathy to other professionals, real world professionals, when they fail.