What did you want to grow up to be when you were a child? An astronaut, perhaps, or maybe a singer, or a doctor? 

Or maybe you were inspired by watching your favorite sports stars strut their stuff on the world stage, getting paid handsomely to do the one thing they love more than anything else in the world. 

But sometimes the reality isn't as rosy as it may seem. CGTN takes a look at five athletes for whom their profession is less of a dream and more of a chore. 

The most recent addition to the list of reluctant athletes, Australian Tomic caused a stir recently when he claimed he had been bored during his first round defeat at Wimbledon. Pressed on the matter during a subsequent television interview, the controversial 24-year-old admitted that he had never loved tennis, saying that he regularly only puts in around 50% effort. Tomic has earned more than 7 million US dollars from the sport, and freely acknowledged that he had so much money he didn’t care if he won or lost, causing an avalanche of outrage from fans and ex-tennis pros.

French-born left-back Assou-Ekotto made over 150 appearances in the English Premier League for Tottenham Hotspur, and appeared at two FIFA World Cups with Cameroon. Yet the 33-year-old is perhaps better known for his frank social commentary. In an interview in 2010, Assou-Ekotto lamented the vanity and vacuousness of the Premier League, freely admitting that football was not his passion and that he was just playing for the money. He also publicly stated that a player could be expected to transfer to a new club if his parent club failed to match other teams' higher wage offers. 

A surprising selection, perhaps, given the Brazilian's determination and commitment to the cause in the early part of his career, which saw him regarded by many as the fastest driver in the world by the mid-1980s. Yet despite winning his third Formula 1 World Championship in 1987, a high-speed shunt early that year clearly affected him more than he let on at the time. Piquet admitted years later that the crash had affected his depth perception, forcing him into clandestine hospital visits every fortnight. Never one to mince his words, the Brazilian acknowledged that the aftermath of the accident had ruined his enjoyment of the sport, and said he subsequently drove solely for the not-inconsiderable sums of money a three-time champion could command, before his low-key retirement in 1991.

No compendium of disenchanted sports stars would be complete without Andre Agassi. One of the most successful and flamboyant players of his generation, the American won eight Grand Slam titles and an Olympic gold medal over the course of a 20-year playing career. Yet all was clearly not well behind the scenes. First coerced into picking up a racquet as a child by his domineering tennis coach father, Agassi wrote in his no-holds-barred 2009 autobiography that he had always "hated tennis with a dark and secret passion".

The colossal talent of "Joltin' Joe" DiMaggio saw him rise from sleeping on the floor of an overcrowded California apartment to being ranked a three-time MVP winner and an All-Star player in every one of his 13 MLB seasons with the New York Yankees. His record 56-game hitting streak set in 1941 still stands nearly 80 years later, and has been described as the most extraordinary thing to ever happen in American sports. And yet DiMaggio's biographer wrote recently that for all his natural talent and innate ability, baseball was merely a way of making money, adding that as a child, the San Franciscan had little inclination to play the sport that was to propel him to wealth and fame beyond his wildest dreams.