I was waiting for dancing to be brought up. I would label it an art form rather than a sport. It is a very physical art form, and like almost anything it can be done competitively if you slap some judges down in front of the competitors. But it just doesn’t resonate in my head with the word “sport” (which is the only authority for their definitions anyone really has here). I was going to be flippant and say that any activity where the difference between winning and losing is whether your mascara runs isn’t really a sport.
In other words, I would echo those who say that an objective criteria for winning is necessary. While many sports involve officials making judgement calls, the basis of those calls is clearly defined in such a way that the official is, in theory, fulfilling a mechanical function. The strike zone, for example, is not in principle open to the umpire’s subjective interpretation. It is between the catcher’s knees, the batter’s shoulders, and over the plate. Umpires and referees can make bad calls, but there is a definite physical REASON the call was bad. Either the guy really was offsides or he wasn’t, for example. The tag was in time or it wasn’t in the real world. And so on.
This is completely different from the case in, say, gymnastics. If two competitors hit every technical point the same, a judge still ranks them differently because one of them just looked better, to that particular judge, doing it. Any argument with his call boils down to just another person’s opinion, unlike the case with umpires and referees. And I would add that there is sometimes expressed a general feeling, which I agree with, that the more you can automate the functions performed by umps and refs the more “pure” (in the sporting sense) the game becomes.
A sport can involve competing with another person, or one can be competing with the clock, the yardstick, etc. So I disagree with those who rule out things like running and swimming as too individualistic.
I also disagree with those who rule out sports based primarily on eye-hand coordination (billiards, bowling, golf, etc.). I personally find such sports fun to do yet boring to watch; maybe that’s just me. However, ruling them out because the “muscular effort” is the effort of fine control rather than the effort of strength or stamina seems to me to be, if you’ll excuse the expression, splitting the hair too fine. It’s like saying that a baseball batter is engaging in a sport (strength required) but a pitcher isn’t (mainly eye-hand coordination).
I’ve never hunted, but I consider it a sport. Of course the deer knows it is being hunted. It’s a prey animal! That’s its place in the food chain! A deer, and every one of its ancestors have known they’re in this competition every minute of their lives for millions of years. The animal doesn’t have a human appreciation of its position, but it has a deer’s understanding of it, to be sure. Just as I allowed competition against the clock and the yardstick, I must allow competition against the more complex natural environment a hunter experiences. And of course there is a clear and objective winner.
Nor am I under the mistaken impression that the hunter always wins. However, I would NOT consider shooting a deer in a pen to be a sport, and I am under the impression that a lot of hunters have become so fixated on getting a deer that they have called upon technology to a degree that takes the sport out of it and makes the activity not far off from shooting deer in a pen. With elaborate camo ninja outfits, scents, blinds, modern rifles, scopes, bait, (and for ducks, decoys and calls), etc. etc. etc., well for Pete’s sake, your facing a creature with a brain the size of squash ball after all! The more “primitive” the hunting, the more sportsman-like I consider it. Bows moreso than guns, for instance.
One way to assess man-animal competitions as sports, like hunting and bullfighting, is to look at the rate at which the humans fail. If the matador wins 99% of the time, I’m not sure it qualifies as a sport. The same sort of considerations might apply to the methods chosen by the “sport hunters”. If you can’t lose, or at least have barely any chance of doing so, I wouldn’t call it much of a sport.
My final criteria for sporthood:
- Physical prowess is somehow being measured or assessed.
- The assessment is objective (at least in principle).
- The objectives are sufficiently clearly defined that success (a win) and failure (a loss) are both possible, and reasonably likely.
IN:
-running (and the rest of track and field)
-golf
-sprinting
-swimming
-shooting (guns or archery)
-hunting
OUT:
-figure skating
-gymnastics
-synchronized swimming
-dancing (ballroom or otherwise)
If it makes people feel better I would be amenable to putting these latter activities, which are fun to watch and deserving of respect even if they are not sports, into a category that we could call “sport arts”.
