I tend to hold a personal belief that if it can’t be determined objectively who wins, it isn’t a fair contest and therefore isn’t a sport. It isn’t measurable in a fair way, no matter the number of judges, as the judges themselves become an external factor unrelated to the skill and performance of the person doing the work.
There’s lots of impressive styles of dancing, in water, on skates, on strange arbitrary gym equipment, on horses, and they can be entertaining and require high degrees of skill, effort and training, but they aren’t “sports” as much as they are “performing arts”.
I await the pitchforks as this post becomes more of a sport readily measured than any of that dancing.
Fouls in basketball are subjective, does that make it not a sport? There are many subjective elements to sport officiating that undermine such a black-and-white classification.
I tend to hold a personal belief that if it can’t be determined objectively who wins, it isn’t a fair contest and therefore isn’t a sport. It isn’t measurable in a fair way, no matter the number of judges, as the judges themselves become an external factor unrelated to the skill and performance of the person doing the work.
There’s lots of impressive styles of dancing, in water, on skates, on strange arbitrary gym equipment, on horses, and they can be entertaining and require high degrees of skill, effort and training, but they aren’t “sports” as much as they are “performing arts”.
I await the pitchforks as this post becomes more of a sport readily measured than any of that dancing.
Fouls in basketball are subjective, does that make it not a sport? There are many subjective elements to sport officiating that undermine such a black-and-white classification.