Competitive “Cheerleading” has little cheerleading; it’s basically a variant of rhythmic gymnastics, just with a big team. It’s as much of a sport as rhythmic gymnastics, by any rational examination.
IMO, the more important distinction is between 1 & 2 on the one hand and 3 & 4 on the other. Specifically, do judges declare the winner?
This is where people have a lot of problems. Every sport has refs and disputable calls. The real issue is where at the end of the game one guy is declared the winner by a few people, when a lot of other people who have seen the same game - and many of whom have just as valid judgment as the official judges - believe the other guy “won”.
To me, there seems to be a big divide between categories 2 and 3; in the first two, the winner of the competition is pretty clearly decided by the actual outcome of the competition. One team scores more goals, one person outpaces another, someone throws something farther, etc… There may be an interpretive component to how and why the rules apply, and to what extent, but in a broad sense, that isn’t intended to directly determine the outcome of the event, although it often has a large effect.
In the second two, the outcome of the event is directly dependent on non-participating judges, and while watching or participating, there’s no inherent way to tell who won.
That’s where people draw the sport/not-a-sport line a lot of the time, with events in categories 1 and 2 being labeled sports, and events in categories 3 and 4 being labeled as something different.
Personally, I’m kind of torn; there IS a large and valid difference between the two sorts of competitions, but ultimately it all comes down to how words are defined, and I tend to think “sport” applies to all of them, as the only difference comes down to how the winners and losers are determined, not to the athleticism or ability of the participants.
There’s also another divide between category 3 and 4 that’s pretty serious. Things in category 3 are ideally supposed to be more objective than subjective, but it’s still a matter of human eyes viewing it and someone’s opinion of how well they did. Category 4 is basically how pretty they looked while doing their exhibition.
To use an extreme thought experiment, if judging and refereeing were to be done by super-accurate AI systems, it seems to me that categories 1, 2 and 3 would be essentially the same- there would be self-evident winners and losers based on the criteria that determine success. Category 4 would still be different in that it is still fundamentally aesthetic opinion based.
Yeah, I’m with you guys. The distinction between 1 and 2 is largely one of what is technically possible. It is easy, using machines, to be absolutely certain who ran the fastest. The measurement is straightforward and simple. Conversely, while, say, soccer is objectively measurable - you score more than the opponent to win - many decisions are difficult to make by machine, such as whether a hand ball was intentional. The intent is for complete objectivity, but it’s hard to get there. Major sports are generally trying to get there but there’s limitations to how far and fast you can go. You can’t turn a soccer game into a 4-hour affair to go over every call at nine camera angles.
The difficulty of this sort of thing is very obvious if you consider that by my definitions, Olympic boxing is a Type 2 sport. What is being judged should be totally objective; you either landed a hit or you did not. The sport is, however, preposterously corrupt and the decisions are often insane. Conversely, many gymnastics disciplines are awfully close to Category 2. They may not have the super-AI machines bump points out would turn all Type 3 sports into Type 1 sports, but you don’t hear a lot of arguing over who did the rings the best; there is generally wide agreement over what constitutes a proper score.
That said, I am not arguing anything on my list is or is not a sport, just trying to define the parameters of what we mean by “judging.” Something is always judged to some extent.