Read this arti­cle recently about the old­est “bar­gu­ment” (a fun, pas­sion­ate debate over utterly triv­ial ques­tion that is entirely a mat­ter of opin­ion), what makes a sport a sport.

(Is Calvin Ball a sport?)

He claims that the three fun­da­men­tal char­ac­ter­is­tics of sports are:

1. Peo­ple com­pete at it,
2. Com­put­ers can’t do it, and
3. Aes­thet­ics don’t count.

This is the rea­son­ing he uses to claim that cheer­lead­ing is not a sport while cro­quet is.

Per­son­ally, I think defin­ing sport is like defin­ing art. Peo­ple are both quite set in their ways and usu­ally unable to fully artic­u­late them, so no one is ever moved away from their gut feel­ing about whether some­thing is, in fact, sport and/​or art. That said, although I’m more inclined than not to agree with this author, I imme­di­ately tried to think of sports that break one or more of those con­di­tions. I still haven’t thought of a good one yet.

If you read the com­ments on the orig­i­nal arti­cle, some of the more inter­est­ing things that are thrown in for con­sid­er­a­tion are golf (seems to fit the require­ments but many peo­ple say it isn’t), debate (com­menter claims that it fits the require­ments, but I feel that rhetoric is quite sub­jec­tive, so it fails check #3), and robots (whether they count as “com­put­ers,” and if they would inval­i­date exist­ing sports as robot­ics got more advanced).

I guess sim­i­lar to the robots ques­tion is that of video games. Tech­ni­cally, #2 applies, since peo­ple can play against AIs, but you could make the argu­ment that AIs are poor sub­sti­tutes for a human oppo­nent and are only for train­ing pur­poses, sim­i­lar to a ten­nis player hit­ting a wall or a base­ball player in the bat­ting cages.

Per­haps we can add a fourth check, or mod­ify the sec­ond one to say that the endeavor must be human-​powered? Then the computer/​robotics aspect is severely lim­ited, if not com­pletely moot. Also, it would elim­i­nate car rac­ing, which I don’t think of as a sport. (Unless it was Flint­stones car rac­ing, which would be awesome!)

Also, the ques­tion of aes­thet­ics is hazy, as demon­strated by the ques­tion of debate above. If you think about it, there is a cer­tain amount of aes­thet­ics in all sports with human ref­er­ees or judges. Look at all the ques­tion­able calls dur­ing the World Cup, or those NBA play­ers who have a rep­u­ta­tion of flop­ping. Think about box­ing or MMA matches that go to judges’ deci­sion. All of these are sub­jec­tive and can be gamed.

Any­way, can you think of any excep­tions to the orig­i­nal three checks? And what do you think of my sug­gested change?

(Is bad­minton a sport?)