Such is the nature of shooting sports. A number of years back, Rob Galbraith's site did an article on Sports Illustrated Magazine's workflow when covering the SuperBowl game that year. Though somewhat dated now, it is still a good read.
Rob Galbraith DPI: Sports Illustrated's digital workflow
In summary the magazine had eleven of the world's top sports shooters on the ground, and in all there were over 16,000 exposures to generate the cover and the handful of pictures in the article. A sports shooter has zero control over the subjects. Any time it looks like a peak of action is about to occur, one must shoot. If you wait to see if it will make a good shot, it won't—because it is already history. Timing is everything—a moment early or late, and the picture is boring. Even when you absolutely nail the peak of action, the picture may still not tell much of a story, so gets culled. One can not afford to squander even a single opportunity, because it may be the only exciting picture of the lot.
Covering major league baseball in the US (baseball was only invented so that cricket would no longer be the world's least exciting sport) I was getting nothing. Zero close plays. Seven innings and not a usable shot. Then came the seventh inning stretch. I looked over my shoulder and the crowd was standing and stretching—with one exception. Well, he was stretched out over five seats, sleeping in the afternoon sun! That was the shot of the game. It not only made the cover of the sports section, Associated Press picked it up and it ran in papers around the world the next morning.
Shooting ISO6400 was not even on the radar back then. For night-games it was mostly Tri-X pushed to ISO800-1200. I have a print beside me shot a year or so back at ISO12,800 with far less noise than the grain of the Tri-X. With sports, content is everything. Hit the moment when the image is definitive of the game, and no one sees the noise. A bit of blur is seldom a problem and often tells the story. Covering auto-racing, a high shutter-speed shows cars parked on the track. Slow shutter-speed and panning blurs the background into streaks of light and dark, blurs the wheels and tells everyone that car was haulin'. However, when it crashes, you want the highest shutter-speed you can get.
Bokeh in sports is generally a necessary artifact of a lack of light, and often ruins the image. The story of most team sports is the interaction between the teams. If only the ball carrier is in focus, the story is almost always lost. It works in this case, because the person is running solo. Were it a race, you would lose the expressions of intensity and perhaps desperation of the other runners. It might make a great portrait of the winner, but would lose as a story-telling sports shot.
