[Cause]

The first definition I got from google was: an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment.

Okay so this is just a fun little conversation I am interested in having. Honestly I started questioning it this week for a couple reasons; 1) the Olympics continues to test out or showcase new sports such as breakdancing, surfing and Skate dancing 2) chess popularity seems to be taking off recently thanks to the Queens Gambit TV show and growing youtube presence of chess grandmasters 3) e-sports is growing in popularity and has massive cash prizes but to many still strikes as absurd.

Now in particular I have seen the controversy around Australia's female Breakdancers performance, I don't know the sport well at all but her performance did seem to be shall we say lacking but she wont her spot so her performance couldnt have been completely unexpected. Was Australia just not ready to find and support an official breakdance team? Is the definition of the sport too loose, or currently to amatuerish? I also for reasons I cant quite explain feel like breakdancing is not a sport but cant really articulate why. Its a competition, dancing is physical and rhythmic gymnastics/synchronized swimming have been at the Olympics for decades (seem to be fundamentally similiar). Or more specifically its not that I don't think its a sport I'm just not sure its an 'Olympic' sport. I feel the same about skating.

I have watched some x-games footage over the years; skating, BMX, stunt jumping etc all of these things look awesome, are entertaining, require skill, physicality and are competitions but again I dont feel they are olympic. Same for E-sports. An adult who is the best in the world at the child game of starcraft isn't different from the the adult who is the best in the world at the child's game of basketball. Basketball is physical whereas starcraft units behave as they behave by hardcoding and the game gets constant balancing patches to try make it even but clearly their can be unfair advantages or the game wouldn't keep changing. Still its a mental competition same as chess and arguably its a physical skill to make 300 moves a minutes (I cant do this). Also imbalance is inherent to sport or else 7 feet tall giants wouldn't dominate basketball and we wouldn't have weight classes or gender divided sports. We control it as best we can but luck is a factor in sport. I dont look down at e-sports I just dont think it belongs in the olympics and I would call them athletes I would call them elite gamers. The best players at chess aren't athletes they are grandmasters.

I also don't seem to believe soccer, basketball are Olympic sports either (though they have a long history). I think part of it is that I feel they are not Olympic because they have other much larger and more serious competitions; Premier league, NBA etc. I also think the team nature of these sports seems to be part of the reason I feel they don't belong but what about synchronized swimming, rowing then which have been olympic sports for a long time. Seemingly again, with no inner consistency I believe chess could be an Olympic sport but then why not have Go too.

I seem to have a gut feeling about what sports do and do not belong but cant really justify why. I also wont be surprised if my gut feelings dont match everyone else in the worlds feelings either


Edit- can a mod god move this to discussion.

This post has been edited by Cause: 12 August 2024 - 07:10 PM

[worry]

It's an interesting question. I learned from a podcast recently that Arts were part of the Olympics from 1912 to 1948, in the categories: architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture. They weren't dropped for not being sports, either, but because the competitors were considered professionals and (at least at the time) the Olympics was supposed to be an all-amateur competition. That has obviously since changed, yet they still haven't brought back the architects!

[polishgenius]

I think there are like four separate questions going on with Olympic breakdancing and Raygun in particular:

1) Is breakdancing, athletically and physically, within the paremeters of a sport? Sure, why not. Gymnastics has the same theme of subjective scoring rather than objective goals, and there are way less physical sports.

2) Is it a problem that someone who is shit at breakdancing turned out at the Olympics? Not inherently, no. There's always people who qualified from countries who never do that sport and Olympics history would be poorer without them. Eric the Eel is an icon.

3) Should breakdancing be an Olympic sport? I actually don't see any problem with it from the 'olympic' side of things- lesser known sports getting a showcase is part of the charm of the games (I'm also all for BMX, and I'd like to see things like roller skating introduced). There might, however, be a problem from the 'breakdancing' side- that is, there's a cultural background and context to breakdancing that doesn't seem suited to sportification, and making it an olympic discipline removes it from that. I have no insight into breakdancing at all myself so I can't judge that at all, but I've seen that put forward.

That actually feeds into the fourth question:

4) Should Raygun have been at the Olympics? Was she really the best breakdancer Australia could find? I fucking doubt it. And the fact that she's a professor of cultural studies who once wrote, for example, an article where she's essentially whining that it's unfair that the cultural cachet of 'authenticity' bars her from real credibility... it leaves a bad taste. It feels like she must know she's not the best but took advantage of being relatively wealthy and having prominence or contacts to get herself the spot. Or at least, she didn't correct the organisers when whatever tryouts they had didn't find anyone better. It's possible that's unfair, but someone fucked up for her to be there, surely.

[worry]

Your #3 and #4 are interesting because -- at least from what I've read -- Raygun qualified for the Olympics legitimately. She won or placed in multiple tournaments, most importantly winning an Oceania qualifier in Sydney last year. This doesn't necessarily mean she's the best, but if your intuition in #3 is right, it could also mean the folks who are the best aren't interested in competing -- at least in the tournaments under the sanctioning body that would lead one to the Olympics.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

polishgenius, on 12 August 2024 - 08:45 PM, said:

4) Should Raygun have been at the Olympics? Was she really the best breakdancer Australia could find? I fucking doubt it. And the fact that she's a professor of cultural studies who once wrote, for example, an article where she's essentially whining that it's unfair that the cultural cachet of 'authenticity' bars her from real credibility... it leaves a bad taste. It feels like she must know she's not the best but took advantage of being relatively wealthy and having prominence or contacts to get herself the spot. Or at least, she didn't correct the organisers when whatever tryouts they had didn't find anyone better. It's possible that's unfair, but someone fucked up for her to be there, surely.

You seem to be forgetting that many people around the world think her dorky anti-breakdance breakdance is hilarious. Especially that amazingly unimpressive little kangaroo hop. (It's almost certainly the least athletic dance routine in Olympic history...)

OTOH when she says she's interested in the "politics" of breaking as a privileged(-seeming?) white Australian taking up a spot on the Olympic breaking team and making a mockery of it---that seems incredibly cringe and questionable. Though perhaps she's mocking the idea of it as a sport?... Or mocking privileged white Australians who misappropriate hip-hop culture?...

Quote

The internet can't get enough of Australian dancer "Raygun", whose breakdancing performance at 2024 Paris Olympics [...] won the attention of social media users worldwide.

[...] her unique moves have the internet in a chokehold, with her meme-worthy "kangaroo hop" becoming a particularly hot topic.

[...] said they are "obsessed with Raygun because I identify with the level of dorkiness she projects."

[...] "I could live all my life and never come up with anything as funny as Raygun

Viral Olympic Breakdancing Star Rachael Gunn aka 'Raygun' Dubbed 'Aussie Legend'
 (thedailybeast.com)

Quote

Fellow Olympians cheer breaker Rachael Gunn as she joyfully re-enacts some of her viral moves on the streets of Paris

[...] The prime minister [of Australia] said the Olympics was all about participation and congratulated Raygun for representing the country.

"Raygun had a crack, good on her, and a big shout-out to her[...] That is in the Australian tradition of people having a go."

Labor's environment minister[... said] that "haters are going to hate", and that if she could, she would buy a Raygun T-shirt.

"The rest of those people are sitting on their couch mucking around on social media. She's actually represented our country at the Paris Olympics. She's an Olympian,"

Raygun breaks out kangaroo hop as Olympics end while athletes and politicians hit back at 'haters' | Paris Olympic Games 2024 | The Guardian

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 13 August 2024 - 01:22 AM

[Tsundoku]

As far as I am - obliquely - aware, the IOC went to some dancing federation to get the breakdancing qualifiers etc going and be the representative for the Olympic breakdancing here.
But apparently breakdancers are by and large in another organisation, which didn't get the call-up.
So this twit of an academic with a completely useless degree gets the nod because the real breakdancers here (?) never got the opportunity, or didn't want to be part of the wrong dance federation, or something like that.

Either way, most responses I've seen here seem to range from the barely tolerant "Ok, she was utter shit but she had a go", to outright cringe and revulsion. Most people seem united in agreeing this shite shouldn't be part of the Olympics. Even the largely positive responses seem to base it more in the comedy value rather than taking it seriously as an Olympic sport.

Me? I'd like to either outright get rid of anything judged and go back to "Higher, faster, stronger", or at best relegate judged sports to be second-tier value. Ie, one athletics gold = 5 judged golds, or something similar. Judged sports are a festering sore on the arse of the Olympics with the ridiculous levels of corruption that are excessive even for the insanely corrupt IOC, which is itself right up there with FIFA for sheer blatant dodginess. And with judged sports, they keep on letting more and more utter shit in.

Also, I'm a big fan of cricket, but I don't think it's an Olympic sport. Even the short T20 format is a 3 hour game and doesn't lend itself to Olympic scheduling. Yes it was in the 1900 Olympics, but whatever.
It seems it's going to be at LA 2028, and the other sports will be baseball/softball, flag football (which seems to be touch football?), lacrosse sixes and squash (making a return).

https://olympics.com...-new-sport-la28

EDIT: this article looks like it was either written by someone who got their cricket education from Wikipedia, or used AI and didn't fact check, as there are a couple of glaring errors (to my eye). However, it serves as an acceptable short summary for the uninitiated.

EDIT2: this thread could just as easily be moved to the Sport forum as Discussions, IMHO.

This post has been edited by Tsundoku: 13 August 2024 - 08:53 AM

[Tiste Simeon]

I read somewhere but I can't find where, possibly a Reddit thread (so entirely possible that it's completely unfounded), that the tryouts only had about 20 or so people turn up and she'd been pressing for things to move quicker or something so she essentially manufactured herself getting chosen and got a free trip to Paris out of it, claiming her expertise as why she should be the best choice for it. It's all a bit weird.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Azath Vitr (D, on 13 August 2024 - 01:21 AM, said:

Though perhaps she's mocking the idea of it as a sport?... Or mocking privileged white Australians who misappropriate hip-hop culture?...

No wait I know... she was mocking the Last Supper! It's interpretive breakdance. She's just like Jesus, sacrificing herself to save humanity... from sports! (Or more seriously: taking sports too seriously. And more tragically: mistaking high-level physically strenuous sports, or simply watching sports and never getting physically active, for good exercises for personal health, when they're more likely to injure you and cause serious medical issues and substantially decrease your life expectancy if you're competing at a high level. And even if you're doing them within the "healthy exercise" threshold, there are more efficient ways to get the same level of health benefit. Additional benefit (beyond what you might get from simply exercising efficiently) comes down to culture and social interaction.)

Tsundoku, on 13 August 2024 - 08:44 AM, said:

So this twit of an academic with a completely useless degree

Her degrees got her a job as a professor so they certainly haven't been useless... for her. Now you might say that as a professor of "useless" subjects like culture she's worse than useless, but people might say the same of most lawyers, administrators, and politicians. (Not to mention much of the rest of the economy, which tends to be either wasteful or actively harmful.) And if culture is a useless subject... why are we wasting time here discussing it? Do you really think there's no value to scholarly research on cultural matters? Or to developing greater cultural understanding (whether for the old-fashioned purpose of righteously motivating the populace to support whatever those in power want it to support, or the new-fashioned purposes of first eliminating cultural barriers to efficient employment of traditionally marginalized groups and then a little later on giving people something to keep them out of trouble once automation starts doing all the "useful" work)?

If the goal of the administrators who chose her was to maximize the glory of Australia---as measured, of course, in terms of fame and attentional capture metrics---then since she's clearly become the most famous breakdancer in the world, and generated ample publicity for Australia with her "iconic" and oh-so-original "kangaroo hop" (what creative genius! and such uniqueness! such an uplifting little hop! perhaps next she'll start cranking out Tiktok dance challenge trends---because that's what youth culture mostly seems to be now... ::old man does angry dance at cloud :: ), her selection has been a tremendous success.

Now, is she a twit? Very likely a bit worse than that. But she seems to have been a very useful twit.

Tsundoku, on 13 August 2024 - 08:44 AM, said:

Me? I'd like to either outright get rid of anything judged and go back to "Higher, faster, stronger", or at best relegate judged sports to be second-tier value.
https://olympics.com...-new-sport-la28

All fights should be to the finish---preferably knockout or submission. Actually... why not all sports too?

In all seriousness though it's utterly ridiculous that Pankration (MMA) has not been brought back to the Olympics. It was a major part of the ancient Olympics, and it seems to have become one of the world's most popular sports. Do they think too many countries just can't find decent fighters? Kickboxing was added as an Olympic sport in 2021, and any country that has wrestling, boxing, judo, and kickboxing is already much of the way towards having a decent MMA team. And fighting is one "sport" all peoples are familiar with... it is the primal sport. The only one that really makes much sense.

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 13 August 2024 - 03:13 PM

[D'rek]

Specifically on the Australian breakdancer stuff

I don't know anything about the "meta" side of it like what she has said or any of that, but purely in the context of "this athlete at the olympics wasn't very good let's laugh at them" I think it is all a bit sad. The Olympics is trying to stay modern(ish) by introducing new events that aren't the same old 20 largest sporting traditions in the world for the last 50 years, and as a consequence of that some of these sports are going to be ones where a handful of countries are way ahead of any other countries. But because it's the Olympics every country is allowed to participate. If Jamaica wants to send a bobsled team by god they should be allowed to do so.

I'd never particularly expect Australia of all places to be a powerhouse in breakdancing in the first place... so is this not somewhat like laughing at the Angola badminton team for not being on the same level of competition as China and Korea? (Except that it's seen as "ok" to do so here because Australia is a "western" English-speaking developed nation or whatever.)

Maybe the argument people would make then is that if Australia doesn't have a breakdancing scene "on par" with the most competitive countries they shouldn't have sent someone at all, but I'd disagree with that, too. I am a big fan of every country sending at least 1 rep to as many events as they can, even if they don't expect to place particularly high, it can still be part of growing the sport in that country, and the small community around that sport in that country can still feel the achievement of getting 80th place one year, then 70th place the next Olympics, then 58th the next Olympics, and so on, until eventually decades later it becomes the story of how after decades of growth they finally won the first gold medal for that country in that event.


Now, if it turns out that Australia *does* have an incredible breakdancing scene and the Australian version of Morning of Owl got snubbed in the selection process in favour of sending this woman... well then yeah, Australia (and/or the IOC, however it works) needs to take a hard look at how they're running their qualifications selection and improve THAT.



On "what is a sport"

I don't think you'll ever find a good straightforward definition for the word at this point. It is already such a commonly used umbrella term for all sorts of diverse stuff and you can't unclog it from that usage. In a perfect world you'd see more of those, er, disciplines(?) making a compound word out of it like motorsports, but that just hasn't happened.

I think you *could* try to break down all the things that are commonly called "sports" into a series of categories and try to give *those* things simple definitions. Something like:


Traditional sports - competitive athletic endeavours where humans perform difficult physical feats, with intangible victory criteria - Pole vaulting, football, weight lifting, javelin throwing, swimming, running, tennis, basketball, hockey, etc
Reflexive sports - competitive endeavours where humans perform a physical task with precision - Gun shooting, archery, darts, bowling, golf(?), etc
Mind sports - competitive endeavours where humans perform difficult mental challenges without any significant physical challenge - Chess, scrabble, puzzle competitions, Microsoft Excel championships, Geoguessr competitions, etc
Artistic sports - competitive endeavours where humans perform physically challenging tasks in a artistically pleasing way that is scored by judges more on its artistic expression than on being the most difficult physical feat - synchronized swimming, diving, figure skating, breakdancing, most gymnastics, etc
Cavalry sports - competitive endeavours where humans ride biological animals that perform athletic feats - Horse racing, horse jumping, elephant polo, etc
Motorsports - competitive endeavours where humans operate mechanical machines - car racing, motorcycle jumping, sailboat racing, etc


Of course many sports would be hybrids of these categories - Equestrian dancing is a Artistic-X-Cavalry sport, Starcraft fans who insist that fast reflexes and how many clicks you can make per minute are just as important as your strategies would say it is a Mind-X-Reflexive sport, and so on. And that's fine.

I think a categorization of "sub-sports" which together all encompass the overall concept of "sports" is about as close as you can reasonably get to defining sports without dismissing one or more of the ways that the word "sport" is already commonly used today.

Cause, on 12 August 2024 - 05:38 PM, said:

Edit- can a mod god move this to discussion.

done

[Cause]

D, on 13 August 2024 - 06:42 PM, said:

Cause, on 12 August 2024 - 05:38 PM, said:

Edit- can a mod god move this to discussion.

done

Praise Be!

_________________________________________________

Rayguns performance is somewhat distracting from the point I really wanted to make, should breakdancing be considered a sport and then more particularly an Olympic sport.

That said in any sport for someone to win someone must lost. That's obvious. However Raygun isnt being made fun of for being the worst breakdancer or performing under par. She was clearly our of her league, underperformed and didnt get to attend the olympics for free. I am not an expert in Breakdancing but her routine looks as if she is mocking the olympics. Did she rehearse, was her routine planned, did anyone see it beforehand and actually If she took the spot of someone more deserving than shame of her. Even if she didnt though Australia wasn't under an obligation to send an athlete to perform in every event. If you cant compete above a minimum level of competency you dont belong in the competition.

[D'rek]

Cause, on 13 August 2024 - 09:25 PM, said:

Rayguns performance is somewhat distracting from the point I really wanted to make, should breakdancing be considered a sport and then more particularly an Olympic sport.

Personally, I see no reason why not when the Olympics has plenty of other sports that require judging and/or officials carefully orchestrating it like synchronized swimming, figure skating, judo, equestrian dancing, gymnastics, fencing, etc, that have been part of the Olympics for a loooooong time. I can definitely understand the idea of wanting to have a sports competition that consists entirely of only purely athletic events that are won by racing, intangible scoring, or knocking another person unconscious first, but the Olympics simply isn't trying to be that and hasn't for, uh, centuries I guess?

I could totally get behind reorganizing the Olympics into a yearly event that cycles through the types of sports, so like one year it is all the races, track-and-field events, and swimming. But then the next year it is all the artistic judging events like diving, gymnastics, and breakdancing. Then the next year is all the big team sports like soccer, volleyball, etc. Maybe even have a chess and e-sports year, why not. Then after 5 years it loops back to the races and track again, and so on.

[Maark Abbott]

A miserable little pile of secrets.

[Macros]

On the other hand

Who cares who can run a little bit faster than someone else?

Let's make the Olympics for people who do the most good, or innovate, or anything useful


My lawn

Get off it

[Tsundoku]

Macros, on 14 August 2024 - 09:15 AM, said:

On the other hand

Who cares who can run a little bit faster than someone else?

Let's make the Olympics for people who do the most good, or innovate, or anything useful


My lawn

Get off it

No, people who do the most good, or innovate, or anything useful should get by far the best remuneration. Shouldn't even be close.
People like athletes and entertainers, who contribute nothing of value except some occasional warm 'n' fuzzies should not make astronomical sums of money.
Doubly so for bankers, lawyers and so on. But unfortunately the system is the way it is because those at the top rig the game to get themselves rewarded best.

That quote falsely attributed to Samuel L Jackson is still a damn good idea:
"Maybe if we underpaid these modern mumble rappers and overpaid teachers there would be smarter people in the future and less s----- music."

[Macros]

like this

[worry]

Athletes, and mumble rappers, and teachers, and (some) lawyers are all labor and should be united in their efforts for fair and just compensation against the owner/executive class in their respective professions. While we're daydreaming, they should all be subject to a robust progressive income tax system, with very high (one might even say corrective) rates at the top margins, and with tax revenues being broadly used to foster the collective good.

[amphibian]

I've long held (probably close to 20 years now) that my preferred definition of sport is one that does not primarily rely on the decision of judges to decide the outcome.

This means that although they are incredibly challenging activities to do, gymnastics/figure skating/dance/diving etc are not sports. They all rely on judge scores to decide who wins and that's not really head to head competition - which is the crux of my sport definition.

Judo/boxing etc have primary scoring and game mechanics that do not involve judges (shido/falls, knocking people down or out).

This gets a bit hairy with some of the fencing where instead of using the touch pads, the judges determine who scores. I don't like that and would prefer the touch gear to be used in all forms of fencing instead of judges.

A game of checkers becomes a sport in this definition and I'm ok with that. We don't have to pay attention to or elevate all sports to prominence or the Olympics.

This post has been edited by amphibian: 14 August 2024 - 07:19 PM