What nouns work with やめる when you quit doing something

Question

８日、レスリングの吉田沙保里さんが選手をやめると発表しました。
On the 8th, Wrestling's Saori Yoshida announced that she will quit the sport.

I'm not sure if my problem is with the use of やめる or with 選手 here.

I understand 選手 to mean a person who does a sport (let's use the word 'player'). But you can't quit player, you can only quit being a player, or maybe quit as a player.

If I was going to quit being company president would 社長をやめる be correct? This one sounds weird to me.

What about eating apples? Would both りんごを食べるのをやめる and ちんごを食べる both be okay? Both of these sound fine to me.

Basically, I think I'm trying to understand what kind of nouns I can use with やめる, but I'm not even sure I can explain how it works in English. If 選手をやめる is correct though, then it doesn't work the same in Japanese.

Please also see my comment below, which may or may not be related to the problem I seem to be having.

Answer 1

You can use it with pretty much anything. You could even say something like:

日本人をやめる。 : I quit being Japanese. (I stop Japanese)

As you said, in proper English it would be like "Quit being...".

りんごを食べるのをやめる and りんごを食べる

Both sentences are fine.

選手をやめる

This is fine too.

Also, I think you're right about the other verbs in your comment. Unfortunately, I think it's something that you have to get used to, when you think about it with the "Japanese logic" though, it makes quite a lot of sense. One that you might encounter more often is 話す as in:

何を話せばいいかな。 = What should I talk about...