I have been debating this with my family a lot since the Olympics started. I think events like synchronized swimming are performance art, not sports. Same with figure skating. They are closer to a poetry slam then to a track meet.
Also, who is to say that the judges aren’t biased in some way? Most olympic events are judged by a clock or tape, which can’t be persuaded or bribed.
They still require athletic ability and fitness.
So does ballet, jazzersize, aerobics.
Ballet is very much judged by those who attend the performance.
The Association of National Aerobic Championships
You’ve convinced me. Boxing is not a sport.
You could say the same for any sport that has referees/umpires/etc.
Especially baseball as calling balls and strikes affect so much of the game.
Why does this question come up every four years, I wonder?
Yes, ithey are sport. For one thing, they are athletic competitions. More important, they have always been considered sports. They are always included in sports programs at schools, you can get athletic scholarships for gymnastics, etc.
I tend to agree with the OP. I view them more as athletic performances rather than sports.
After seeing some of the so called “judges” decisions at the Olympic boxing I would have to agree. Boxing is clearly a game, with pay-to-win.
I do view them as sports, yes.
But I don’t hold them in as high esteem as ones that aren’t. I’ve always felt there is too high a potential for bias to ignore.
Is there any sport that isn’t a judged event, other than Calvinball?
As always, this falls into the old “what is the definition of a sport?” argument, and nobody on Earth agrees with anybody else about the distinctions among “sport,” “game,” “athletic performance,” and so on.
This is exacerbated by the fact that “sport” has become something of a value judgement for a lot of people. If I say that I don’t think, say, NASCAR is a sport, then I must obviously be declaring that I have a low opinion of both NASCAR and its fans.
Not really, no. There are different levels of judging, though.
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Mechanical judging of an objective measurement. Track and field is mostly this. Machines, with virtually no realistic chance of error, decide who was first to the finish line, or jumped the furthest, or threw the javelin the furthest, or whatever. In most cases there is very little else to be judged and it’s usually verified by a machine.
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Sports that involve judged application of rules. This would include, for instance, soccer or baseball or volleyball. In such cases the objectives are very clear and measurable, but elements of action are judged by a person - whether a runner is safe or out, whether the ball landed in or out, whether the player was offside or not. Often machines are being incorporated into these judgments (e.g. instant replay, of tennis’s electric eyes to spot serves that go a little long) but humans are still involved.
This level of judging can be easily verified in some cases and not so much in others. For instance, a baseball umpire calling a ball fair or foul is either right or wrong, and an instant replay will correct a bad call almost all the time. Conversely, a soccer referee calling a hand ball can be a tricky thing now, because the referee must make a judgment of intent; the “ball to hand” guideline, if you will. American football is hideously complex and difficult to officiate because of the complexity of the rules, and hockey is famously hard to officiate because so many elements of the rulebook rely on judgment of intent. In theory the rules are totally objective; in practice they can be hard to apply.
3. Sports ion which judges ascertain the athletes’ technical proficiency. This is true of, obviously, gymnastics or diving. There is no true “Artistic” element to most such sports, contrary to popular belief; there’s no Artistic Expression score when a guy is doing the vault. However, the excellence of the athlete must be judged by a person; there is no way it can be done automatically.
- Sports in which subjective measures are openly judged. Figure skating is the #1 example, obviously. Synchronized swimming is another.
In some cases a sport might have elements of more than one type of judging. Ski jumping, to my admitted bewilderment, has both a purely Type 1 measure (the length of the jump) but adds a Type 3 (a judgment of the quality of the landing.)
I agree. Gymnastics, Figure Skating and similar events are artist performances. Not sports.
The judging is subjective and often biased.
Figure Skating is really bad. Does the muscular girl who lands the triple axel outscore the dainty girl that does beautiful and graceful moves? Both give flawless routines. One athletic and the other artistic. Who wins?
Every Olympics we hear complaints of biased judging in these artistic “sports”. It’s unavoidable because the judging comes down to personal taste and its completely subjective.
phungi’s rule: “Any event that cannot be objectively measured (i.e., time, distance, number) has no place in international competition.”
It’s a tough call. Boxing and other martial arts are sports generally speaking. When you reduce such contests to a time limited event you’ll either get a lot of draws or the competition has to be judged. The alternative is fighting to a finish which is dangerous for the competitors. Boxing tried to eliminate the problem with touch scoring but it was worse than the traditional judging. Some gymnastics and figure skating events could be limited to points based scoring, but it would take something away from the sport if ungainly success at difficult moves was worth just as much as finesse. The problem with the Olympics is finding reasonably objective judges. We all know only our own country’s judges can be trusted, and the other countries complain when our judges fairly and objectively judge our own athletes better than the other’s even though they obviously are. And thus it becomes an unsolvable problem. At a minimum the events should be reduced to as much of a points based system as possible with as little subjective interpretation as possible, but the problems will remain with certain events.
I myself also usually prefer sports with objective elements, not subjective. But I recognize that different people like different things, and no one is forcing me to watch the stuff I don’t like.
But it’s not always the case! Let me offer a board gaming example: I like playing Dixit and Cards Against Humanity as much I as I enjoy Splendor and Agricola, and the former 2 are as purely subjective as the latter are objective. So there’s room in the world for both kinds of activity.
I think you can also get a scholarship for cheerleading. Is that a sport? An Olympic-level sport? Not to take anything away from cheerleaders, or gymnasts, or synchronized swimmers, who are athletic, and have skills, and train hard, but where do you draw the line between art and sport. Does sport need to have a winner identified by objective scoring only?
Boxing is kinda-sorta a sport - the objective part is if one of the pugilists gets knocked-out. If they both on on their feet at the end of the round, then it becomes subjective.
OTOH, you have baseball, or golf, which seem more like hobbies, or games, than sports.
How are baseball and golf not sports? They are rather clearly not artistic in nature, and are contests of physical skill.
Cheerleading was in the PE department when I was in high school. If done competitively, that’s enough for me to consider it a sport.