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Defining Sport

By Rick Karcher, Michael McCann, Geoffrey Rapp, Greg Skidmore, and Howard Wasserman

I jokingly have been interested in trying to define "sport." I have toyed with a definition that requires objectivity in scoring and determining winners. Thus, if it is about objective questions such as who runs faster or who scores more points, it is a sport; if it is about getting a 5.6 from the East German judge, it is not a sport.

But John L. Jackson, an anthropologist at Penn's Annenberg School identifies three necessary conditions:

1) There must be a ball or ball-like object that organizes everyone's attention.
2) There must be a sense of physical urgency when the ball is in play.
3) The opponent must be able to take steps to thwart your efforts with respect to the ball.

Everything that does not possess all three elements is not a sport. it is a contest, a game of skill, an athletic competition, but it is not a sport,

Jackson put this out there to suggest that much of what we focus in during the Olympics is not, in fact, sport, including the privileged Olympic events such as track and field and swimming. His broader point is that the Olympics really is not about sport; it is about non-sport athletic competition--not the same thing.

Full post as published by Sports Law Blog on May 06, 2008 (boomark / email).