Continuation of Categorizations of Sport/Non-Sports.

Disclaimer: Whenever I'm talking about these varying categories of what makes something a sport or not, mainly in my last post, I'm not saying that it's fact or even that I believe it, just different approaches to the topic. Because after all it means absolutely zero.

In my last blog post (hope you read it) I discussed different categorizations of sports and what could potentially make something a sport. Maybe you may have noticed  I left out competitions with elements of subjectivity in them or at least high amounts of subjectivity involved. This is a big part in newly categorizing competition. The Olympic games just happened and you may notice that a interestingly high amount of the games are scored by judges, which makes it subjective based. These sports are Gymnastics, Diving, Synchronized Swimming, Trampoline, and many more. These are easy to say that they are subjective because there's no clear objective way to score points or rules. You can't mathematically judge or officiate the game, it must be a human with human behaviors. It's important because in all these events different people could think different things and that leads to disputes over who won, which team is better, and who is the best. Really illegitimatizes lots of statistics involved in my opinion.

Subjectivity is not a clear line at all though, even if it may appear to be. It's a spectrum. You have sports such as synchronized swimming that are all based on judges, and then darts where there's no way anyone could argue over opinion because it's all very clear. There's in between though, a big example being officials/refs/umpires in sports such as football, basketball, soccer, baseball, and more, almost every sport to varying degrees. So while there's a clear way to score without much dispute in basketball, there's still disputes over which events are fouls or not. And even further on the spectrum are fighting sports such as boxing, wrestling and UFC. They are mixes of both aspects because there are technical ways to win such as knocking out an opponent, but if that doesn't happen its up to judges to decide, and as I'm sure many of you are aware, that can end poorly often.

When I was young and we'd create backyard games with the extended family and due to hypercompetitivity any small crack in the rules would be exploited and result in endless arguing. If any rule was subjective neither team would admit they were in the wrong so we had no choice but to make all rules objective and clearly defined. As a result of this, I believe all competition should strive to have as little subjectivity as possible and the less it has the more of a "sport" it becomes. I'm very into ranking teams and players and comparing statistics and as I mentioned earlier, it's hard to compare that when its all a result of some dudes' opinions.

The question we (me) are all wanting to know the answer to is whether the level of subjectivity effects the sporty-ness of it or not. Not just me but I think many people believe it does, many people when asked if cheer leading or dancing, even in their competitive atmospheres are sports, they'll respond no, I think it's a valid opinion but many probably think otherwise. I just think such a beautiful part of competitive is the ways you can mathematically approach it and its much harder hwne subjectivity is involved.

Really lame post this week but next time I'm talking about solved forms of competition and how luck plays a role, will be very exciting. Thanks

What is a Sport?

Near everyone at one point in time has played a sport or talked about sports and everyone for sure has participated in competition as it's very inherent to us. While everyone talks about sports not many people try to find out exactly what a "sport" is. Probably because it means zero, but regardless.The main discussions I hear of defining sports is between athletes themselves whether it be soccer players, cross country runners, tennis players, or chess players. These discussions often go hand in hand with the inherent value of the sport though but I will discuss that later. The point is over the years I've heard and read just about every definition possible, maybe some better than others.

If you google "define sport" you will get "an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment." which is a good place to start. Most people define a sport with “physicality” or “athleticism” which is respectable. This clearly cancels out many candidates such as chess, poker, and all other less common board and card games. But it doesn’t clearly draw a line as physicality of a sport is a spectrum. Is golf athletic? Shuffleboarding? Darts? Video Games? The biggest issue of defining it with just words and not examples is it just isn’t clear enough. Skill is also mentioned and skill can be applied to almost all forms of competition but even that faces a large spectrum of examples.

I’ve heard someone define a sport as a “physical game” and a game is defined as “interactive competition between two (or more?) parties”. So football and basketball fit the bill while less interactive forms of competition such as track and field and golf don’t count as games. I like this definition because I think a huge aspect of competition is interaction with the opponents. If the Cleveland Cavaliers play Uni High Basketball their outcome would be much different than playing against the GS Warriors. On the other hand if Usain Bolt runs against me rather than Justin Gatlin, the outcome for him will be just about the same aside from minor psychological factors. So forms of competition with no interaction are in their own vacuum and very much different. The whole element of preparing for a certain opponent and various matchups is gone with them.

Going off of those two aspects, to better define "sport" I split up all forms of competition by two factors. Whether it is a game or not (which is clearly defined and I loove that) and the degree of physicality but because that isn't well defined I tried to scrape up three categories: Athletic, Physical by Nature, and Mathematical (very easy to define). So if you can imagine a table with 6 boxes that should encompass all competition for now. I will give examples for each, the order being how strong it fits in the category.
Athletic Game: American Football, Basketball, Soccer, Hockey, Tennis, Fencing?
Physical by Nature Game: Shuffleboarding/Curling, Billiards, Darts, Video Games?
Mathematical: Chess, Bridge, Checkers, Connect 4, Poker?
Athletic Non-Game: Sprinting, Golf, Shotput, Long Jump
Physical by Nature Game: Piano, Sowing Competition, Cow Milking Competition (Don't knowidk
Mathematical: Solitaire,

I purposefully left out all forms of competition based around subjectivity and judges so that will be where I pick up on this juicy topic next post. Thanks for reading.