Telephoto lens designed to compress the depth of field, not just sport, and I am not shooting sport but I use telephone lens to shoot landscape, and portrait sometimes.
There are masterpieces of sport image made prior the time of AF, so I guess a lens is at its best of capable of reaching critical focus, with or without the aid of automation, of course, AF is a convenient and becoming more and more of a dependent feature, all of them still allow manual focus tell that manual focus is important.
I use to think my Nikon was good mechanically until I started to use Leica M 20 years ago, I thought my Hasselblad was good until I get an Alpa. Yes, I have many long lenses from Canon or Nikon to 600mm, they feel what they are worth. Not the Carl Zeiss TPP, it is in a different leage from the beginning. The lens when it introduced can only be pre-order without specific delivery time because Zeiss would only wait until the lab found the right piece of glass that met the tight specification then they can manufacture into lenses they need for the lens. Planed to make 300 but in reality much less due to the high requirement of special glass that does not come everyday - even from its own works, mine is serial 78, not sure how many more after that. The tele-converter is optically paired, and individually calibrated.
I just got the Canon EF 300/2.8L IS II last night, yes, it is a good lens, but still a lot less when you put in on hand.
BR,
Pingang