What is a 'sport'?

With the Winter Olympics upon us once again, I just listened to Dick Button, the former figure skating star and 40+year commentator get all enraged about people not considering figure skating a sport. In a laughable self-contradiction, he cited the athleticism of the skaters and the need to successfully complete the difficult jumps as his reasoning, then seconds later, in a response to Bob Costas’ query about whether the new scoring had made the judging “all about the jumps,” Button replied that ‘artistry’ was the defining difference between top skaters. Doh. ‘Artistry’? Did New Orleans beat Indy in the Super Bowl because Drew Brees’ artistry at QB was superior to that of Payton Manning?

Let’s cut to the chase. If I Were King, a sport would be defined as “any athletic competition involving an individual or group as the primary agent, in which the outcome is determined by 1) an objective measure of supremacy, either head-to-head or against some metric, e.g. time, height or distance; 2) competition on a field of play with a set of rules, the application of which is minimally subjective.

There are two keys to this: the words ‘primary agent’ and ‘minimally subjective.’

But let’s start with easy stuff: for the first part of the definition, there shouldn’t be a lot of argument. High-jump is a sport; measured by height. 100-meter dash – ditto; measure by the clock (or head-to-head). Shot put – of course; measured by distance. Swimming, running, jumping, throwing stuff, skiing or skating a course or track – anything measured objectively, no problemo.

Sports have rules though and not all those rules can be objectively applied. On the one hand, missing a gate in skiing is pretty objective. Judges can see and make a call. However, some calls are more subjective – interference between short-track speed skaters for instance, but the competition is still overwhelmingly about beating the other person to a clearly-defined finish line, not about the judge making the interference call. Baseball has an umpire calling balls and strikes as well as other calls, but the game is ultimately about scoring the most runs – an objective measure of supremacy. These are all sports.

But when a judge makes the primary or entire determination of a winner, then this is not a sport. It is a competition, but not a sport. So figure skating: not a sport. Anything with judges – diving, snowboard halfpipe, ALL gymnastics – not sports. Then there are the fringe cases, like freestyle moguls in the Winter Olympics. Sorry Johnny Mosley, love to watch the competition, but it’s not a sport – 75% of the scoring is judges' opinions of how well you skied the bumps and how well you did the two tricks. Only 25% is the speed at which you completed the course. Not enough. Why? Because I am King and I so decree it.

An then finally, in a decision to surely piss off all those Nascar fans, motor racing of any kind: not a sport. Why? Because the driver is not the primary agent of the competition, the car is. It is the car moving around the track, the driver may be guiding it, but the car is the conveyance. One may argue that most sports have tools or agents, like cars, but the key is in the word 'primary.' And as King, I get to decide which sports fall on which side of the line.

Here’s a few more:

• Golf: sport
• Sailing: not a sport (agent issue)
• Bowling: sport
• Boxing: not a sport (would be if always determined by one person being KO’d or quitting)
• Archery: sport
• “Pro” Wrestling: come on, do you even have to ask? Not a sport. Not even a competition. Just a show.
• Wrestling: OK, this one’s tough. All scoring in wrestling is done by a referee who subjectively decides if there is a take down, a reversal, an escape, etc. Because in many cases, the action that ‘scores’ in wrestling is quite clear, similar to the action of a baseball player catching a fly ball (where it’s not an ‘out’ until the umpire calls it one), the cases where the wrestling judge may be making a more subjective call are far less than 50%. So: sport.