Sport

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Sport is worth up to 620 billion dollars globally, according to the consultancy A.T. Kearney, as of 2013. That figure covers everything from a single runner on an empty road to crowds packed into a stadium. The world's most accessible and practised sport is running. Yet the most popular spectator sport is association football, a game watched by people who never kick a ball themselves. How did physical play grow into one of the largest industries on earth? Why do chess and bridge sometimes count as sport while a video game tournament often does not? And how did an activity built around fair competition become a tool for dictators, a flashpoint for war, and a target for religious condemnation? The word itself offers a clue. It comes from the Old French desport, meaning leisure. Around the year 1300, its oldest English definition was simply anything humans find amusing or entertaining.

• 2. Drawing The Boundary

  ›

  The Council of Europe refuses to call any activity a sport if it has no physical element at all. That rules out games of pure thought. Yet the International Olympic Committee, which oversees the Olympic Games, recognises both chess and bridge as sports. SportAccord, the international sports federation association, goes further and recognises five non-physical sports: chess, bridge, draughts, Go and xiangqi. These bodies also cap how many such mind games they will admit, holding the door only partly open. The Global Association of International Sports Federations, known as GAISF, offers the closest thing to an agreed definition. As the association for the largest international federations, covering association football, athletics, cycling, tennis and equestrian sports, it acts as the de facto voice of world sport. GAISF asks that a sport have an element of competition, harm no living creature, avoid relying on equipment from a single supplier, and contain no luck deliberately built into it. It sorts sport into categories: primarily physical like rugby, primarily mind like Go, predominantly motorised like Formula 1, primarily coordination like snooker, and primarily animal-supported like equestrian events. Disputes over where the line falls have reached the courts, as governing bodies of excluded mind sports fight to access funding reserved for recognised sports. Newer claimants press at the edge too. Video games, also called esports from electronic sports, draw vast participation and organised competition, yet mainstream sports organisations still mostly decline to recognise them.

• 3. How Winning Is Decided

  ›

  In a race, the clock settles everything. The time to complete the course is an objective measurement, leaving no room for opinion. Gymnastics and diving work the opposite way. There, judges decide the result, making it subjective and dependent on human assessment of each performance. Some sports live between those poles. In boxing and mixed martial arts, if neither competitor secures victory before the time limit, the outcome falls to judges' scorecards. In boxing, three judges independently score each round, weighing clean punching, effective aggression, ring generalship and defence. Competitive events also sort their entrants to keep contests fair. Participants are graded by result and often divided into groups of comparable performance, by gender, weight or age, with handicaps or penalties applied to even the field. Formats vary widely too. A competition may be open to a broad range of participants or closed to invited groups only. Some allow a tie or draw with no single winner, while others build in tie-breaking methods to guarantee one. Many leagues stage a regular sports season, then crown an annual champion through playoffs.

• 4. Ancient Roots

  ›

  Artifacts and structures suggest sport existed in China as early as 2000 BC, with gymnastics popular in its ancient past. Monuments to the Pharaohs show that swimming and fishing were well-developed and regulated in ancient Egypt thousands of years ago, alongside javelin throwing, high jump and wrestling. In ancient Persia, the traditional Iranian martial art of Zoorkhaneh kept a close connection to warfare skills, while polo and jousting also took shape there. India's traditional games carry comparable age. Kho kho and Kabaddi have been played for thousands of years, and kabaddi may have served as preparation for hunting. By the time of Ancient Greece a wide range of sports was already established, and military culture and the growth of sport shaped one another. Sport grew so central to Greek life that the Greeks created the Olympic Games. In ancient times these were held every four years in a small village in the Peloponnesus called Olympia. From those ancient Olympics onward, sport grew steadily more organised and regulated. Later, industrialisation brought motorised transport and more leisure time, allowing people to attend spectator sports and join athletic activities, with mass media and professional athletes carrying the trend further still.

• 5. The Spirit Of Fair Play

  ›

  Sportsmanship strives for fair play, courtesy toward teammates and opponents, ethical behaviour, integrity, and grace in victory or defeat. The sports journalist Grantland Rice captured its spirit, writing that it is not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game. The founder of the modern Olympics, Pierre de Coubertin, echoed the idea in his creed: the most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part. Cheating cuts against that ethos. A core principle holds that results should not be predetermined and that every participant deserves an equal chance to win. Gambling on outcomes creates incentives for match fixing, where participants collude to fix results rather than compete honestly. Doping presents another temptation, as some athletes try to enhance performance through medicines or by artificially increasing the volume of blood in their bodies. Every sport recognised by the IOC or SportAccord must run a testing programme against a list of banned drugs, suspending or banning those who test positive. Violence forms a third breach. Athletes, coaches, fans and parents sometimes turn aggressive, with rioting and hooliganism by fans a particular problem at some national and international contests.

• 6. Who Gets To Play

  ›

  Women reached full 50 percent parity at the Paris 2024 Olympics, after accounting for 49 percent at Tokyo 2020. The picture beyond elite competition is less even. Global surveys report that only 20 percent of women take part in sporting activity monthly, against 31 percent of men, and the World Health Organization notes women are 5 percentage points less likely than men to meet recommended activity guidelines. Some events erase the divide entirely. Baseball5 is the first mixed-gender sport admitted to the Olympics, requiring men and women on the same team. Children face their own balance of reward and risk. Youth sport offers fun, socialisation, peer relationships, physical fitness and athletic scholarships, and activists tie it to education and the fight against the illegal drug trade. The Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children's Hospital names death or serious injury, including concussion, as the biggest risk, arising from running, basketball, association football, volleyball, gridiron, gymnastics and ice hockey. In the US, youth sport is a 15 billion dollar industry spanning equipment to private coaching. Disabled or adaptive sports serve people with physical and intellectual disabilities. Many adapt existing sports, but some were built from scratch with no able-bodied equivalent, such as goalball and boccia. Age opens another category. Masters sport usually covers those 35 and older, served by competitions like the World Masters Games, organised every four years since 1985.

• 7. The Politics Of Play

  ›

  Benito Mussolini used the 1934 FIFA World Cup, held in Italy, to showcase Fascist Italy. Two years later Adolf Hitler turned the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin and the Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen into a stage for Nazi ideology of Aryan superiority, projecting a peaceful image while Germany secretly prepared for war. Sport could also resist power. When apartheid was official policy in South Africa, many sports people, especially in rugby union, refused to compete there as a matter of conscience. In Ireland, Gaelic sports tied themselves to cultural nationalism. The Gaelic Athletic Association once banned players who took part in games seen as British in origin, and its Rule 42 barred football and rugby union from Gaelic venues. That rule was eased to let those games into Croke Park while Lansdowne Road became the Aviva Stadium. Nationalism runs through sport's reporting, and tensions sometimes turn deadly. The 1969 Football War between El Salvador and Honduras was sparked by rioting at World Cup qualifiers. At the 1972 Munich Olympics, Palestinian militants entered the Olympic Village, took Israeli team members hostage, and killed 11 athletes in the Munich massacre. Sport can even sway ballots. A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that when the home team wins before an election, incumbents can gain 1.5 percent of the vote, an effect known through the Washington Commanders as the Redskins Rule.

• 8. Bread And Circuses

  ›

  Étienne de La Boétie, in his essay Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, called athletic spectacles a trap. He wrote that no bird is more easily caught by decoy than people lured into servitude, that plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators and strange beasts were opiates by which ancient dictators lulled their subjects under the yoke. The charge that sport distracts and controls has echoed across history. During British rule of Bengal, British and European sports began to supplant traditional Bengali sports, eroding native culture. In communist East Germany, from the 1970s to 1990, an estimated 3,000 unofficial collaborators were used each year in top-level sport, including football players, fans and referees. The Stasi built this network partly to stop athletes escaping to the West, relying on surveillance and repression. Religious thinkers have leveled their own charge of idolatry. Sport was once an important form of worship in Ancient Greek religion, with the ancient Olympic Games held in honour of Zeus and uniting pilgrims as one people. Yet some Christian thinkers attack athletic competition as human beings adoring and sacrificing to themselves. Tertullian condemned the shows of his day, insisting the entire apparatus of the shows is based upon idolatry, and warning that the show always leads to spiritual agitation. Clerics in the Wesleyan-Holiness movement still oppose professional sports today, arguing the leagues profane the Sabbath and compete with a Christian's primary commitment to God.