Mike Celizic

For years, devotees of competitive dancing have been saying that what they do is a legitimate sport. After what we’ve seen on "Dancing with the Stars" the past two seasons, you have to admit they have a point.

Athletes, it turns out, are dancers. And if that’s true, then it must follow that dancers are athletes.

For the second straight year, a world-class athlete has two-stepped away with the top prize in ABC’s hit show. Last year, it was former Dallas Cowboy, Emmitt Smith. Tuesday night, Olympic champion short-track speed skater Apolo Anton Ohno beat out former N Sync singer Joey Fatone and boxing champion Laila Ali for the title.

It really shouldn’t be a surprise that great athletes can be great dancers, and that great dancers are great athletes. Great athletes are fit, graceful, coordinated. They are goal-oriented, accustomed to putting in long hours of practice, open to coaching, and hard to discourage. They’re also fiercely competitive.

When you tune into a show like Dancing with the Stars, you’re not expecting Baryshnikov. The competitors are regular people, and some are picked for the anomaly factor — seeing Jerry Springer in a contest of beauty, class and grace is like seeing a ham in a meat case of a kosher deli.

Some people probably thought when the show started that putting athletes on was just as silly. Athletes are big and sweaty. They’re jocks — big slabs of meat with no functioning brain cells and little grace. And that includes the girls.

Of course, anyone who’s watched a great shortstop, pass receiver, or ball handler knows that there’s more than a little grace in sports. The wonder isn’t that the producers of the show turned to athletes as contestants, but that they haven’t had more of them.

I’d love to see some tennis players on the show, and I can think of a number of hockey players who could cut a rug. How about Ozzie Smith? You don’t think he couldn’t dance a little? I’ll bet you could even find some good dancers on the PGA and LPGA tours.

(Although I wouldn’t put my money on Tiger or Phil; Annika and Sergio are more likely suspects. Greg Norman might be pretty good, too; he just has the look.)

Other athletes who have been on the show include Jerry Rice, Evander Holyfield and Clyde Drexler, whose glide has become more of a galumph.

Laila Ali had a great run this year. The daughter of Muhammad Ali, she’s made her living the same way here dad did — beating people about the head with her fists. But people who have seen her only in the ring were mightily surprised to see a woman who is not just big and strong, but graceful and sexy. As the saying goes, she cleans up good.

Ali finished third. Second was Fatone. But the clear winner was Ohno, a speed skater who finally got to feel what it’s like for his cousins, the figure skaters, who can’t compete unless they’re wearing a really swell costume.