Sport - A Matter of Interpretation?

I suppose that any endeavor can be sport if you want it to be. Road building can be a sport if you organize it as a competitive event, with the winner being the first crew to get their road paved. You can have an excavation portion of the event, followed by the road grading stage, and finally, for the few teams qualifying for the final round, the laying of the asphalt finale. The winning medal can be a tar ball.

But do we want figure skating to be a sport? Can you effectively distill the total effort and achievement of a figure skating demonstraton into the concept of won or lost? If you can, then maybe figure skating is a sport. But is that all figure skating means to you, winners and losers? When you turn an activity into a sport, you have to devise methods to attribute 'points' to aspects of the performance, such that you become more focused on the number of activities (tricks?) the performer successfully negotiates rather than the reward and pleasure of simply watching the performance. When you apply formula to figure skating, the viewer, the skater, and the art all lose.

Track is a sport. So is shot-put. The outcomes are measurable in just one way. If you make it to the finish line first, as measured by a clock, or you throw the shot farther than anyone else, as measured by a yardstick, and you follow the rules (no detectable drugs in your system), then you are declared the winner! There may indeed be much to admire in your running style or shot-put technique that will help you to succeed, and also feed the need that high-priced sponsors and networks have for something to talk about, but the measure of your success will not be a table full of judges concerned about returning to their home countries after deciding, as objectively and patriotically as they can, how graceful was your stride or how roundly you spun before releasing the shot. Technique matters in terms of whether or not you are successful, but it makes no difference at all in the ultimate measurement of your success. It simply doesn't matter how you looked. As long as your shoes had no springs in them and you got to the finish line first or threw the shot farthest, you win. No one wins a track meet because the total of the style points they earned plus the points they got for finishing second earned them a better score than the poor slob who crossed the finish line first but looked like an Edsel or a Yugo in getting there.

Hockey is also a sport, though sometimes I think the concept of 'sport' and 'team' is an oxymoron. Still, hockey is about numbers. The winner is the team that finishes the game with the most goals. I don't need a judge to tell me what a goal is. When the puck slides into the net, it's a goal! It doesn't much matter how it gets there, whether by virtue of the team enforcer clubbing and boarding the opposing players to death (NHL style) or because the team just happens to be good at skating and passing. Whatever the means, whether felonious or athletic, your team wins if it finishes with the most goals. Again, all you need is one judge, called a computer, to figure it out.

Weightlifting is certainly a sport. You had better have good technique or your back will be mighty sore, but technique is not nearly as important as getting the bar where it belongs. There is little room for dispute among opposing judges as to whether or not you got the bar got up to where it should be and it was kept stable for the requisite about of time. It either got there or it didn't.

As for auto racing or anything else that needs a motor, no, that's not a sport. You can be the most talented driver in the world with the best crew, but when too much technology comes between your foot and the earth, somehow, I don't think the judges of ancient Greece or their discerning ancestors would call it sport. I don't see where driving a car makes you an athlete. I didn't say that driving a race car was easy or that I stood a chance of doing it well, but a driver is not engaged in anything remotely called sport anymore than is an astronaut on the road into orbit. They may be in great shape and very impressive at what they do, but they are not engaged in sport. If they are, I would like to talk more about the sport of asphalt laying.

Are the pole-vault, the luge and cycling sports? No, no and no. At least not until everyone is using the same pole, the same sled and the same bicycle. I want to see and admire the best athletes, not the ones who came from the best financed teams. If performance enhancing drugs are forbidden, then why not performance enhancing machines?

But back to figure skating, because this is a sore subject for me. Somehow the word 'sport' and 'figure skating' sounds obscene to me. Turning figure skating into a competive sport turns it into an athletic event with so many required components that you may as well just sit back and count the number of loops and clean landings, add it all up and declare the winner. When you turn it into a sport, you have decided that you would rather count it than appreciate it for the art that it is. Once you decide that you need to award a Gold Silver or Bronze, then you have taken something beautiful from the world and turned it into a mechanistic formula where finishing with the most 'points' is more important than your art.

If I miss a track event, through the services of a talented writer I can read about it the next day and be able to understand and appreciate what happened. But can any story effectively convey the substance of a figure skating performance? Does a medal convey the achievement?

But no figure skating at the Winter Olympics? Not at all. I would miss it terribly. It should be part of the Winter Games, as a demonstration of the amazing achievement of its artists, represented by the skaters the figure skating world chooses to represent itself with, perhaps by sending very young and promising skaters whose careers are yet to be established, and more senior and experienced skaters who have contributed so much of their lives to skating. What a positive Olympic spirit this would convey, the presentation of an art whose value is not merely a function of its contribution to a national medal count. It would be meaningful. It would be beautiful. It would be a relief - from the baser of the motives we share, the one that moves us to root for one person at the expense of another.