What makes an activity a sport?

The Game Room
1

This thread was inspired by the topic about what woman has come closest to competing against men in a sport. Some of the sports mentioned include race car driving and bowling. What criteria would you use to define a sport? I think that some of the criteria should include these.

  1. It should involve an element of competition. This would exclude things like WWE style wrestling.
  2. Their should be a physically active element. This would exclude things like chess.
  3. Their should be some generally agreed upon rules. This would exclude things like “roughhousing” or people just tossing a ball around, or an actual fight as opposed to boxing or MMA.

Do you all think these criteria are too restrictive or not restrictive enough? What kind of activities would these criteria exclude that can be considered a sport, and what kind of things could these criteria include that would not be sports? In particular, I am interested in the case of race car driving. I personally do not consider race car driving to be a sport, as it seems not to meet my 2nd criteria. Does that mean my 2nd rule is too restrictive, or am I imcorrect in my assumption that their is not a physical element to race car driving? I don’t want to restrict the question to just race car driving, so feel free to discuss other activities as well.

2

What about darts? Or fishing? Honestly, I don’t know how to answer your question but I do know that auto racing requires more physical exertion than either of those. Driving a car that fast for that long is mentally and physically exhausting.

3

Personally, I would replace your second rule with one a bit looser: If someone telling you what to do results in you doing as well as that someone, then it’s not a sport. This would still exclude chess: If I make every move that Kasparov tells me to make, then I’ll play as well as Kasparov. It would, however, include most video games: A Starcraft pro telling me to make more SCVs or to queue up siege tanks or to attack the enemy’s south expansion might help my game, but I’m still not going to be able to do those things as effectively as the pro will.

4

An ESPN contract.

5

This scholarly analysis should answer all your questions.

6

  1. Many sports have no element of competition, although some people may chose to make a competition based on the sport. For example, skiing, canoeing and kayaking, cycling and walking are not inherently competitive, although there are major competitions based on these sports. Hell, some folks will compete over just about anything, regardless of whether it is a sport or not. Let’s not confuse sport with competition, for although sports can have competitions, many sports can be fully enjoyed without competition.

  2. Chess and bridge have been recognized as sports by the International Olympic Committee, so while I appreciate your point about physical activity, the consensus of the IOC is that physical activity is not required.

  3. Agreed upon rules apply to competitions and to many sports, but do not necessarily apply to sports, e.g. skiing, canoeing and kayaking, cycling and walking, so agreed upon rules are not necessary to the nature of sports.

7

Consider the following:

Physical sports
Mind sports
Competitive sports
Recreational sports
Team sports
Individual sports
What is common to all of them? Identify that, and you will be in a better position to define what a sport is.

8

One interesting definition that was proposed in a previous thread is that a sport is a physical activity in which defense is a component of the strategy (this definition does exclude any kind of racing).

9

This makes no sense. Pretty much any sport can be done non-competitively. If you eliminate walking and cycling because they were originally modes of transportation, then you’d have to eliminate all motor sports, speed skating, swimming, most track events. equestrian, and sailing.

10

This is my definition of sport: physical competition powered by humans involving defense.

Some forms of racing get included here - bike racing involves drafting and blocking, foot races where lanes don’t matter, etc.

11

Let me put it another way: competitive alpine skiing is a subset of the sport of alpine skiing, and competitive white water kayaking is a subset of the sport of white water kayaking. Competition does not define what is or is not a sport.

12

ESPN2 has carried Magic: the Gathering tournaments, so I think that you’d need additional qualifiers beyond that one. :slight_smile:

13

If I like it, it’s a sport.

If I think it’s dumb, it’s a dumb game only dumb people play because they are dumb.

14

Recreational skiing is not a sport. There are a number of sports which are based on skiing, but when I go to the slopes just to have fun, I am not engaging in any sport. Nor am I engaging in sport when I ride my bike, either to take in the scenery or to commute to work, nor when I am taking a dip in the pool to cool down on a hot summer day.

15

Somebody lost an eye?

16

Well, to you recreational skiing is not a sport, but to millions of others, it is.

17

It’s OK, they’re allowed to be wrong.

18

No… that and the game falsely called poker are exactly what I meant…

19

So golf is not a sport. Or bowling.

20

Darth Sensitive’s produced this definition before and I find it truly mystifying.

A sport, to my mind is a contest of physical skill that identifies a winner and which is engaged in for its own intrinsic purposes.

Warfare, for instance, is not a sport, though it is a contest of physical skill of sorts, because it is not contested for the purpose of sport.

Chess is not a sport because it is not truly a contest of physical skill. It was certainly be tiring, but the game is effectively unchanged if it is contested by email. A quadriplegic could be a grandmaster by simply asking someone else to move his pieces. I’d say the same of poker.

Obviously, racing is a sport, and a definition that excludes the 100-metre dash is one that can’t really be taken seriously. We can argue over, say, sports that are not very physically demanding (billiards) or sports that are judged (figure skating) but if you’re defining out things that are very obviously sports, that’s just silly.

Chronos makes an interesting point about, say, skiing for fun versus people skiing for a gold medal. I would identify that as being a different definition of the word “sport.” Regrettably, English lacks words to divide A sport from just sport - say, the 100m dash, which is clearly a sport, versus me just running for exercise and fun, which is sport, but not A sport. English really has only a few words to describe such things; sport and game, which sometimes mean different things and sometimes can mean the same thing (baseball is both a sport and a game) and “exercise,” which is often used interchangeably with “sport.”

“Sport” is a word with quite a lot of definitions as a noun and as a verb, and in the gerund case an adjective (“a sporting chance”) but I interpreted the OP to be asking the same question we’ve debated a hundred times before.