Malazan Empire: Cause - Viewing Profile - Malazan Empire

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.