What Is Sport
What Is Sport
Why were sports created?
Why were specific sports created? This is an important question that will help us better understand the usefulness and popularity of some specific sports that exist today.
First, let us examine a typical definition of sport:
A sport is an organized, competitive, entertaining, and skillful activity requiring commitment, strategy, and fair play, in which a winner can be defined by objective means. Generally speaking, a sport is a game based in physical athleticism. Activities such as board games and card games are sometimes classified as "mind sports," but strictly speaking "sport" by itself refers to some physical activity. Non-competitive activities may also qualify, for example though jogging or playing catch are usually classified as forms of recreation, they may also be informally called "sports" due to their similarity to competitive games.
What we can glean from this definition is that sports is a rule-bound, structured and meaningful activity. A game is not a chaotic explosion of action; it is understandable, readable. Games not only happen before our eyes; they tell us a story.
In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Commander Sisko, the intrepid Starfleet officer and baseball fan, explains the enjoyments of a baseball game to an uncomprehending alien. Notice how the unfolding of the game is a meaningful and significant event:
SISKO: In the end, it comes down to throwing one pitch after another, and seeing what happens. With each new consequence, the game begins to take shape.
ALIEN BATTER: And you have no idea what that shape is until it is completed?
SISKO: That's right. In fact, the game wouldn't be worth playing if we knew what was going to happen.
JAKE PROPHET: You value your ignorance of what is to come?
SISKO: That may be the most important thing to understand about humans. It is the unknown that defines our existence.
A game, like a story, unfolds before us, and we follow it with intense interest. We know, at some non-rational level, that what is being revealed to us in a game is important. It
Some sports popularized in the Greek and Roman eras such as running, discus, javelin, wrestling, long jump and others are still popular worldwide. Sports have evolved throughout thousands of years but sports created in the last two hundred years are particularly successful. Why have some of these relatively new sports become so widely popular? What is their appeal?
It is certainly true that, in the last decades, media coverage and huge corporate and marketing engines that promote and sell these sports have contributed to their explosive growth. Other reasons that contribute to the popularity of sports are the outstanding athletic performance and impressive abilities that modern athletes demonstrate, skills that create a strong fan following whose admiration borders on hero-worship. In addition, the creation of sport programs and leagues everywhere has dramatically increased accessibility to organized sports for children and adults alike and explains the rising popularity of many sports. But there are also other psychological and sociological answers to these questions.
Evolution, environment, economic situation, necessity and even wars have surely impacted the creation and popularization of many sports. Certainly, biathlon cross-country skiing, for example, was invented from the necessity to travel faster in snowy conditions and also to be an agile hunter. The first marathon was inspired by the runner Pheidippides, who ran 25 miles from Marathon to Athens to announce the Greek victory and then died of exhaustion.
Sports originated from basic necessities of survival. By reproducing actions of hunting and fighting, humans practiced the activities that would help them survive and reproduce. For example, the practice of arch