While covering the news last night on FNC's Red Eye (you are DVRing it nightly, are you not?) Fox Business Network reporter Tracy Byrnes defended cheerleading as a "sport."
Utter nonsense.
Cheerleading, Ice Dancing, and Synchronized Swimming may all be competitive endeavours requiring athletic ability, but they aren't sports.
Here are two simple rules of thumb by which you can tell if the activity in which you are engaged is a sport, when victory is determined by your score:
- If a score is awarded based on judges' arbitrary opinion of the quality of your performance, it's not a sport.
- If the score is determined solely by the completion of a specific task, it is a sport.
Discuss.
Imperial Department of Hegemony By Force
So is NASCAR a sport or not? And if a sport requires some type of judge to determine if a play is "legal" or not, is it still a sport?
Golf is a sport, according to your definition.
I'm undecided about calling NASCAR a sport, per se, though a race has the redeeming feature of having a clear winner.
Referees and judges who oversee the rules are within my definition of sport. Those who determine the score are not.
Yes. It requires athletic ability, and the score is determined solely by the golfer's performance, not by a judge.
I don't think NASCAR is a sport. It's certainly a competition, but since the cars are mechanical, it's certainly not "athletic." I would even include horseracing as a sport.
Golf certainly is a sport, but I have heard some disdain it, so I was wondering about your take on it.
Your logic re: NASCAR doesn't track. Sure, the quality of individual cars affects the outcome.
But so does the quality of individual golf clubs, baseball bats, and hockey sticks.
The chief determining factor in NASCAR is still the skill of the driver. Or: You could take the first-place and last-place finishers of any race, make them swap cars, and the original winner would still beat the other guy's pants off, even if his driving a crappier car kept him from equalling his original time.
We used to record Red Eye, but they stacked up faster than we could watch them.