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Building things, inventing things, writing things. Some athletes, I'm sure, but I doubt many were at the top of the pecking order at school.
Fair enough.
Sarcasm aside, you're correct. I view Fortune 500 CEOs as being glorified babysitters, often barely competent. They're not idiots, often they're quite bright, but they're golden retrievers: they get those kinds of positions by being the right kind of chap who everyone likes, and they try to stay on the horse and not to fuck it up too badly before they leave. Say what you like about Yudowsky - and I do - at least he has ideas. Lots of my most charismatic schoolfriends went into Goldman Sachs and consultancy and the like, it's such a waste.
Sorry, I'm up too late and a bit bleary, but this just doesn't match on to my experience of life at all. Being good at this stuff (except football) makes you a loser. There is nothing that schoolboys (and often pre-1980 or so the men that they grew up to become) like to sneer at more than some swot earnestly making an effort to be good at things. Good for you if your life experience was different, but read say CS Lewis about his time at school for a counterpoint.
EDIT: I'm probably being a little belligerent. It's not even that I disagree with you completely, it's just the stunning levels of naivete and smugness in that story from Herodotus (on which my own schooling was at least partially based) irritate me. Oh, you didn't kiss the boot when the big kid told you to, and then he had his mates beat you up? Clearly you aren't high-agency and are doomed to a life of sad mediocrity while we reorder our society into bronze age Persia. Let the kids treat each other however they like, all things are for the best in this the best of all possible worlds...
We despise the experiences our ancestors told us would build character in young people, then are shocked that we lack men of character.
Bohr was on the Danish National Football team at the Olympics. Hemingway boxed and played football. Every president between Eisenhower and HW Bush, except LBJ, was a varsity athlete. Robert Moses was a varsity swimmer.
And yet he still became CS Lewis.
Or look at Elon Musk who went through a heck of a character building school experience back in the bad old South Africa:
Which sure sounds like it would be bad for Elon Musk, awkward target of bullies, and not at all like character building. It probably isn't something I would choose to send my kid to as described. But then he turned into Elon Musk. So we shouldn't totally discount that being the victim of bullies is a canon event that builds the character of the outcast who becomes a genius.
What the original comment advocated for was not sports specifically, or for every kid to be forced to hang out with every other kid and play sports. It was for kids to be allowed to self organize to do what they want to do. That can be form a band, that can be D&D, can be a creative circle, can be a WoW raid.
I've all the sympathy in the world for the loser, the outcast, the dork, the nerd, the geek. But I don't think they are any better served, ultimately, by safetyism than is the jock.
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