Let's Get Philosophical

Dark days are upon us, my friends. The football season is over, the baseball season has yet to begin, and basketball is stuck in the doldrums of the All-Star break. With no sports to watch, it provides us at Poop on Boozer with an opportunity to take a step back and reflect on deeper, more profound sports-related questions. Today's edition: what is a sport?

It's not a coincidence that I find myself asking this question as the Olympics begin. Sure, there are Olympic sports we can pretty much all agree actually are sports (hockey, etc.), but is bobsled a sport? Is ski jumping? In examining these questions, I've come up with two essential rules that distinguish true sports from events, exhibitions, spectacles, etc.

Just one thing to note before we begin: classifying a competition as "not a sport" is not necessarily intended to diminish it. Sure, it might be. After all, one of my unofficial litmus tests for whether or not something is a sport is if someone told me, "I'm a professional athlete, I play ____," whether or not I'd have to laugh in their face. If a croquet player told me this, they would not pass that test, so yes, croquet is less tough, less intense, less worthy of athletic respect than, say, basketball. But many activities that will not pass my rules (e.g. logging) are immensely tough--they just aren't sports.

If it's understood that I don't necessarily mean to insult anyone (although don't rule it out), on to the rules:

Rule 1: To be a sport, an activity requires a certain minimum level of exercise and exertion beyond what is normally experienced in day-to-day life. This is what I'm really getting at with my "I'm a professional athlete, I play ____" example from before. The best example here is NASCAR, which passes my second rule (keep reading) for sporthood, and would be a sport if it required any exercise at all, but it does not. Note that an activity can require a great deal of skill (as NASCAR does), but that doesn't make it a sport. International diplomacy requires a great deal of skill. So does knitting. Neither are sports.

Other activities excluded from sport-hood by this rule: golf, luge, bobsled, skeleton, archery, etc.

Rule 2: To be a sport, the activity must force its participants to interact directly with their opponent or opponents. The main intent of this rule is to get rid of "performance-style" sports such as figure skating, gymnastics, ice dancing, ballroom dancing, etc. These activities do pass Rule 1 and are perfectly athletic and tough, but they're performances--more akin to theater or ballet than to football.

I added this rule because, to me, sports isn't just about exercising, it's about strategizing in order to best somebody else. Gymnasts, by and large, do not strategize against their opponents, they strategize against the rings, or the parallel bars, or the pommel horse. Any activity where you are trying to go out and do exactly what you did in practice, and beat a course as best you can, does not fit my definition of a sport. In gymnastics, nobody tries to stop you, and having someone try to stop you is absolutely essential for sporthood.

Another effect of this rule is that some racing-type sports make the cut, but others don't. Swimming and track and field don't--in those sports, you stay in your lane and try to move as fast as possible regardless of what the people in the other lanes do. In cycling, however, you can jockey for position, cut off your opponents, etc., so it earns its right to be called a sport.

As one final note, "direct interaction" doesn't mean physical contact, necessarily. Tennis is a good example--you and your opponent aren't allowed near each other, but you each try to stop the other from doing what they're trying to do, and you have to adapt to what your opponent is doing if you want to beat them. Thus, sport.

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There may be more rules out there, but I've tried to come up with a system that can define sports in as few rules as possible. I'd be curious to know if my colleagues disagree, and if so, how they'd create their system.