That excluded middle is so wide you could run a marathon across it.
Yeah, I was really annoyed when they disqualified that karate Olympian in the gold medal final for an illegal kick and they just gave 23 athletes the gold medal instead.
If your sport is such that the only way to judge the winner is by endangering the participants, your sport sucks and should be banned.
FWIW I love those kinds of games. I have a few of them myself (Pandemic, Flash Point, Betrayal at House on the Hill, The Fury of Dracula to name a few). (there is still some competition in a few of those)
That said, aren’t all games a competition? Even if cooperative you are still competing to “win” the game. Like Pandemic, 100% cooperative but you are still competing to beat the game.
Yes, it’s a competition, but not an interpersonal competition.
Most games are the Man vs. Man plot line - Player 1 wants to beat Player 2. Only one can win, so zero-sum. Cooperative games are the Man vs. Nature plot line - a group of people fighting against an unsympathetic universe. The personification of opposition isn’t the person right across from you - it’s generated by a universe of die rolls, card draws, and pawns advancing along tracks towards doom.
So yeah, you’re right that there’s competition - but it’s not a person standing in your way from your goal. You’re fighting against some rules that are known and can be made sense of, even if you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen next. I’d be tempted to analogize the difference between systemic racism and blatant, KKK or stereotypical southern rural sheriff racism, but this post is getting a little long as it is.
I wonder if some (not all) of this is based on the somewhat intangible nature of what happened to Biles. You can’t “see” the twisties and it’s difficult to understand how significant they are and how dangerous it is to compete with them.
I remember when Chicago quarterback Jay Cutler left the NFC championship game against Green Bay (Chicago’s biggest rival) with what turned out to be a significant knee injury that would’ve prevented any quarterback from performing. He could still walk fine and spent the rest of the game on the sideline. A lot of fans and even fellow NFLers castigated him for leaving the game.
I think that’s why she sent out video of herself landing on her back while trying a dismount. Some people are just going to handwave it, but others might get the danger from seeing it play out.