Life, Writing, Weirdness

Lance, you are not a woman. What are you possibly thinking writing a blog post about International Women’s Day on International Women’s Day?

Bear with me for a moment. A few paragraphs, really. Three or four hundred words, tops. Okay, it’s not really a post about International Women’s Day, but there is a tie-in. Well, it kind of is but not until the end and I won’t be offended if you skip to the last paragraph.

I am not a sports guy. In the past, I have occasionally joked that my wife is grateful for that since she doesn’t lose me for multiple hours a week to whatever sport is currently in season. Instead, she loses me to other forms of entertainment or hobbies but is able to share at least some of those with me, and it can work the other way around, too.

But a side effect of not being a sports guy is that I don’t particularly care about the Olympics. Setting aside the desperate need our culture has to turn absolutely everything into a competitive activity, I’m of the general opinion that a substantial number of the events performed at the Olympics are athletic competitions rather than sports.

Someone out there is already flexing their hands in hopes of being able to throttle me someday just for having written that last sentence. They probably don’t even know why they have the impulse yet.

But let me explain. The difference between a sport and an athletic competition is whether or not a judge or panel of judges is required to determine the winner. Note that a judge and a referee are not the same thing.

A referee (and often more than one, especially at professional levels) is present to determine if a rule was broken, how badly, and what the penalty for the infraction should be (someone was offside in soccer, for example), or to judge the timing of something to determine which aspect of a rule applies (whether or not a player is safe or out when sliding into a base).

A judge is present to provide a rating for a performance. Possibly combined in some fashion with the ratings of other judges, who are all supposed to be impartial, that rating, singular or combined, determines the winner. It’s not an application of agreed upon rules, it’s an application of a small consensus opinion.

Sports have referees. Competitions have judges.

Sports have a clear winner after each match/game/whatever. Usually, there’s a score according to the rules (and yes, some sports allow or encourage ties). It may take a high-speed camera for a photo finish if we’re talking about a race, but even if there’s a small fraction of a difference, there’s still a clear winner.

For Competitions, on the other hand, there’s an individual or collective decision made about who performs the best for that event on that day with that field of competition.

This is not the same.

My oldest daughter, in the room for a discussion on this between my wife and I (because it’s Olympics season and we haven’t had this disagreement for a few years), observed out loud, “So most female-dominated sports aren’t actually sports, then.”

The comment brought me up short, as it was meant to, and she used the pause for a quick list of those sports that came down to figure skating and gymnastics.

I am still learning to think about things and hope that will always be the case, and I thought about this. Both of these general areas have events for both men and women, though not the same collection of events in the case of gymnastics and I do have to admit that both generally have a substantially more female focus as far as the media covering them is concerned.

So I did think about it, in the context of understanding there are always new things to consider on almost any topic, but I didn’t change my mind. I still ran up against the idea that it takes a panel of judges to say who was best in a given batch of competitors, and while it’s my preference of definition that’s getting in the way, that doesn’t mean it makes any less sense. The audience may have a favourite. Individual people in the audience may have favourites. The competitors themselves may all give the performance of their lives. None of that matters. If the primary point of things is style, it’s a competition and the outcome is determined based on a small collection of opinions on whose style is better.

The same goes for anything that’s judge-reliant. Figure skating, gymnastics, diving, any event with the word “freestyle” in the name, surfing, synchronized swimming, any combat sport that’s less than full contact according to its striking rules.

There needs to be a clear, objective winner.

From a certain high-level perspective, my entire life has been learning to broaden my own personal definition of what it means to be human and what it means to see other sapient beings. Did I like my daughter challenging the way I was thinking about sports? Absolutely. I think we need to be constantly testing our beliefs against reality, and reality isn’t always what we think it is.

And keep in mind where I started this post: I am not a sports guy. I’m not going to rush out and watch any sport that I think qualifies it as a sport and the genders of the participants aren’t relevant to that decision. I’m also not interested in watching competitions, athletic or otherwise. I remain unconvinced there’s any such thing as healthy competition when the person being competed against is someone other than the self. The only exceptions to this I’ve really made in the past few decades have been when one of my children was involved.

And this is not to dismiss or downgrade anyone who has worked their entire lives to become absolutely world class at something, recognized to the point where they get to represent their country at the biggest athletic competition in the world. If I somehow found myself as a spectator at some Olympic event, I would cheer myself raw for every person who stepped out into the arena/rink/stadium, and I would shed tears for every tiny misstep.

But if there were judges involved, I wouldn’t think of what I’m watching as a sport.

Remember the whole basis for this post is just my opinion, though. I happen to think it’s well-reasoned one, but I won’t be bothered if it gets challenged again. Maybe someone will come up with an argument that will change my mind. It hasn’t happened yet for this opinion, but it has for others and there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio.

The really important bit, though, and thanks for persevering to this point for the part of this post that actually means anything, is that today is a good reminder of a huge variety of other opinions that aren’t particularly well thought out. Regardless of the makeup of the teams in the Olympics or the Special Olympics, or any other sport or athletic competition, the idea that women are fully human hasn’t yet occurred to an obscenely large percentage of the men in my species, which is possibly the biggest ongoing tragedy of that species, spawning more suffering than most of us can possibly imagine.

Happy International Women’s Day, and be well, everyone.