I am a Footbag player (aka Hacky Sack which is a trademark), we play over a 5 foot net on a badminton court. When I have interviews with various journalists one question often comes back: Is this really a sport. Well if you have to run to retrieve a Footbag, then pass it and spike over the net I guess it is.
For me it is obvious. What is not so obvious is why people call things like poker, automobile racing, curling and golf, why do they label those things sports? For me sports has something to do with a lot of movement generated by the person, sweating, burning a lot of calories and normally it's a race, on foot, on a bike, a scoring game like soccer and hockey, volleyball, basketball where people move for real.
Poker is a game where people sit down and throw a card from time to time but I find it in the sports section of my newspaper, which enrages me.
Auto racing, the engine does all the work, the driver doesn't even move one inch by himself. Some reply that you have to be really fit to be a race car driver. I had a job once where I had to bend metal corners with a sledgehammer for 12 hours a day. I made me really fit but was I doing sport? Auto racing is not a sport, it's a stupid activity in which grown ups burn fuel for nothing, plus it's so boooring.
I was really laughing when my girlfriend told me that she was traumatized when she was a kid by watching TV and seing some curling. What was the trauma about, she just couldn't understand why these old people brooming the ice were in a sports broadcast. I'm just like her.
Golf now, a dandy game made for rich people to show off their social status. So much fertilizer is spent on the greens alone that it could feed the entire world. Fat people hitting one stroke and then driving a motorized cart to the next hole is that your definition of a sport? Yes Tiger Woods is fit but why doesn't he prove that he can perform something great in a real sport? Why don't they have to run as fast as possible to the next hole? After all it's the only reason why Biathlon is a sport. They have to ski and ski fast to the next shoot.
Well this is a non exhautive list of what I consider not to be sports but (foolish) games.
Yevez talks about Footbag, Peteca and sometimes other alternative sports, which means they're not in the mainstream. Yves Archambault's nickname, Yevez, is pushing people to move, whatever their age is.
1 comment:
Well i seen one of my uncle and aunt at a family reunion lately. They are 76-78 years old. My uncle has been playing golf 6 days a week, my aunt 3 times/week for probably 30 years or more. During winter they do country skiing.
I did find them in a great shape for their age. So at least if golf is not a sport, it's at least an excellent workout for the ones who don't use cart.
Also there's a lot of what i would call precision sports/games that doens't involve cardio like the ones you mentionned, golf, car racing and curling. And we could add archery, gun shooting, pool/snooker, dart, baseball ....
These all rely on the precision of a very specific movement/motion. In a way it's quite similar to the 100 meter sprint. All the focus is on one or very few particular movements that need to be mastered except you sweat a lot more training for sprint than for dart :-)
Post a Comment