problem is that the type of sports you’re looking for have teams actively interacting with one another. However, unless that interaction is shoving or punching or touching (team tag, where more than one person is “it”, certainly seems to fit the bill of what you’re looking for. tag wrestling, illegal boxing, and gladiatoral matches may qualify too), you need an object that everyone tries to interact with. Moreover, when that object is fixed it is usually called a boardgame, while whenever it isn’t it can usually be counted as a projectile. Without such an object you’ve got people in different corners doing whatever and it stops really resembling a traditional sport. Autoracing, for example, is a competition that requires teamwork. But whether it’s what we usually understand as a sport… Can card games be called sports?
The only other possibility is of weird contraptions whereby people can interact with them (and by extension each other) while the contraption doesn’t have to move, or doesn’t have to move so much so that you’d have to start calling it a projectile on a tether. But if you start going down that path, why exactly should we exclude gamepads, tvs, and especially crazy team Dance-Dance-Revolution matches? (Is extensive physical activity a requirement?)
But i guess this question was meant to be a challenge, and my analysis of why such sports are unlikely should only fuel the search. We have team tag, which surely qualifies on all counts (unless you mean adults must play it too). Is there anything else we can come up with and agree on? Team rhoshambo?
Not in Britain – here you actually do race the other boat to be first past the finish line. The fastest time is not involved. There’s a version of rowing known as the ‘Bumps’, which Cambridge (and I think Oxford) use, where the sport is as follows:
All the teams are ranked according to how they performed last year, and you start rowing at staggered time intervals. The aim is then to overtake the boat (bump) ahead of you. There are more intricacies involved, but it does boil down to n teams competing against each other.
Not in the context of competitive orienteering. I know what you are talking about from learning bush navigation techniques, but in competitive orienteering, those sorts of techniques are waaay too slow to be used.
Similarly in the Oxford vs Cambridge annual event (possibly in others, I don’t know enough about rowing), the boats are not constrained to fixed lanes; they are assigned a single side of the river at the start and may not crowd the other boat out, but if either gains a big enough lead over the other, either boat may take the other’s station, and thus get the inside line on all bends and so on. (Yes, the following boat may tuck in behind the leader. I have never seen this used as a winning tactic, though.) So there is a boat-versus-boat element that does not mirror a simple time-trial.
My only experience with orienteering competitions was in Boy Scouts, which was rather amateur in some ways, but I can tell you that sometimes back-readings are necessary, and that any faster method will land you in the wrong spot. I take it the competitions you’re referring to didn’t have any large iron obstacles on the course to throw off compasses at particular points?
Of course, the first time this happened on a campout orienteering competition, the scouts (myself included) very quickly realized that their compass readings were unreliable next to the big flagpole, and immediately sent spotters out to back-sight, but the adult leaders who set up the course hadn’t realized that the pole was magnetic, so we still ended up far from where we were “supposed” to be. After that, though, we started including iron in the courses deliberately.
No, they really aren’t. The fastest time wins. Since the clock starts when the axe hits the wood or when the starter says “Go” whichever is first, the team that finishes first doesn’t always even win. You can jump the gun and not be penalized.
While the audience is watching the teams, the judges just watch the clock. And they are often done in heats, so the top two finishers may never have competed against each other.
But most importantly, there’s no interaction between the teams so it doesn’t meet the criteria for this thread. Unless you are talking about events I’m not familiar with. Mostly they are bow and X-C cut, log roll, pulp toss, and some canoing events. Are there others?
“Oh Mummy, oh Daddy, let’s all play kabaddi!” - Tim Bisley (Simon Pegg), Spaced.
Kabaddi on Channel 4 was awesome. When we were about 9 or 10 me and my brother used to watch it religously, always trying to figure out the rules and when we didn’t understand a decision we’d make up our own justification. They really should bring it back, or make it an Olympic sport.
Competitive orienteering uses compasses very little: they are what you use when you have no option. They are slow and inaccurate compared to reading terrain.
So, basically, the compass (and its attendant techniques) is what’s used by very basic beginner Orienteerers (such as Boy Scouts when they first start) but terrain reading is what’s used by advanced Orienteerers?
I would have to add another vote to sail racing. Although it is a “race” it is exceedingly tactical and involves significant interaction with the other boats, particularly at the start and around turning marks.
In contrast to, say, track, where the ideal is to have identical conditions for each race, in sailing is to use the ever-varying conditions of wind and water to get around the course the fastest, without illegally interfering with other boats or having other rules infractions. In sailing you need tactics and teamwork to beat the conditions and your competitors.
This is particularly true of match racing, in which the main strategy is for the boat in the lead to “match” what their competitor is doing so that the trailing boat cannot gain any advantage to retake the lead.
I also agree that sailing and ballroom require significant interaction with the other competitors. Billdo made a good case for sailing, and floorcraft (not running into other competitors) is an important part of ballroom dance. While you could remove the interaction from both, it would seriously lessen the challenge.
Rather than derail this thread any further I’ll make one last comment on orienteering that is actually on topic before starting another thread to answer your question.
Chriscya correctly reminds me that teams do sometimes compete in orienteering. However, at least in my experience, that is basically something done by people being sociable, newbies or boyscouts, where for one reason or another they don’t want to go out alone (or their scoutleader doesn’t want them to). Team orienteering is to orienteering what, say, tandem cycling is to cycling: sure, people do it but it’s not really where the focus of the sport is at, usually.
Meanwhile, Monty, I’ll answer your question over here…