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.