You Call That a Sport?
Forget the campaign trail. Forget the reddit forums. The ideal venue for a heated debate remains the pub.
In the outside world we are professionals, parents, pedestrians. Inside the local bar, we are philosophers, political pundits, and athletic experts. As the pints flow freely, opinions transform to facts and the trivial become matters of utmost significance. Superlatives are fired like automatic weapons. Which was the best? What is the biggest? Who is the prettiest? When intellect can’t determine a winner, fisticuffs prevail (or nowadays the iPhone).
I recently had a healthy discussion with a friend over drinks about the unoriginal topic of sports. Which activities can be considered sports, and which are relegated to things-you-do-on-a-rainy-day? Baseball, basketball, soccer, hockey, football – all sports. Bowling, darts, and billiards – out. Golf? Probably not. My friend’s criteria for inclusion centered around effort exerted. Golfer’s don’t break much of a sweat unless their minicarts stall in the overbearing sun. Swimmers, runners, and skiers are all athletes because they work hard. I struggled to think of a valid counter argument – something that was sweat inducing, yet didn’t seem competitive in sportlike manner. Maybe weight lifting or rock climbing?
This argument isn’t a new one. I’ve even had it before myself. In college my hallmate was a cheerleader who made the case that cheerleading was a sport. Like many people, I considered cheerleading a form of entertainment, and a very enjoyable one at that. My opinion, as is it typically is, was founded on ignorance and television. But over freshman year I learned a lot about the competitive nature of cheerleading. The debate was officially settled recently when the American Medical Association deemed cheerleading to, in fact, be a sport.
People have devised well-formed systems of definition. This one, from CBS Sports, requires an element of defense that eliminates such pastimes as track, swimming, and chess. A fan poll had interesting results, with auto racing hovering around the 50% line. At its heart, this is an argument of semantics. So to spice it up, I modified the question. “What should be included as Olympic sports?”
The new question has additional layers of consideration. For logistics, timing, and financial reasons, there can only be so many events hosted by an Olympics. Therefore the answer cannot be open ended. In fact, the International Olympic Committee has recently capped the number of sports in the Summer Olympics at 28. In the IOC parlance, a sport (e.g. skiing) may have multiple subdisciplines (e.g. alpine skiing, cross country skiing) and a discipline may have several events (e.g. alpine skiing includes super-G and slalom). But the limit makes the debate more interesting, because in addition to a yes/no component to the sports definition, there is a hierarchy involved. Some sports are Olympic sports and others are just inferior.
My friend’s immediate response to the question was “The most entertaining sports should be Olympic sports.” This made sense, but the commercial argument seems cold and shallow. The Olympics stand for international competition and cooperation. It is a global event spanning millenia. And yes, in modern times it has become a sponsor fueled spectacle of ratings grabs, advertising, and taxpayer contributions, but I still want a warmer, fuzzier answer.
There is, of course, a list of official criteria to be considered by the IOC. Before being included in the official Olympic program, a sport is evaluated in areas such as History & Tradition (e.g. when was the first world competition), Universality (e.g. how many countries have competed and qualified for championships), Popularity (what is the spectator attendance at world championships), Image (do governing bodies have both men and women representatives), Health (e.g. how many recent doping violations), and Costs (e.g. how much money required for equipment and training facilities). Some sports are turned away based on a major gap in compliance, as sumo was in the nineties for being a single sex sport. Even after a sport is included in the Olympics, it can be discontinued, as softball was after 2008 due to lack of competition with the US team dominated year after year.
But some existing Olympic events just seem unnecessary. I mean racewalking LOOKS awkward. I can’t imagine that it gets good ratings. And other exciting sports like tug-of-war and korfball are relegated to second tier “recognized but not included” status. If they included tug of war right before the 100m dash, I would tune in to see the brute force expression of competitive spirit. In terms of cost you just need a rope. That’s all. Some mud and a rope.The system is broken. IOC, please fix it.
