This issue really evokes my emotions, because of how much I love sports. I think sports are a vitally important part of the human experience. I guess dance is, too, but we’re not talking about dance, in and of itself.
Dance isn’t a sport. Period. Ever. Nobody can change my mind about this. Dance is potentially expressive, beautiful, socially useful, entertaining, etc. But it IS NOT A FUCKING SPORT.
Only sports should be in the goddamned Olympics, and shoving non-sports into the mix is shameful and disgusting. It’s a wad of spit in the face of every great athlete who has ever taken the field. It’s a disgrace to the Ancient Greek tradition that the Olympics are attempting to continue.
I don’t give a fuck that there are already competitions for breakdancing. Or ballroom dancing. People can hold competitions for whatever they want. I actually think competitions shouldn’t be held for entirely subjective and artistic activities, but people can do whatever the fuck they want.
But not in the fucking Olympics. This shit makes me sick.
And before you start pointing out the other subjective, judged events that are already in the Olympics: THEY SHOULD ALL BE REMOVED, TOO. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM. NONE OF THEM BELONG.
No more gymnastics (rhythmic or otherwise). No more figure skating and ice dancing. No more skateboarding. No more surfing. No more synchronized swimming. No more freestyle skiing. No more diving. No more BMX. No more ANYTHING that requires judging.
You might browbeat me into admitting that some of those subjectively judged activities are sports, but you will never convince me that they belong in the Olympics.
Olympic sports should be restricted to those which are determined by means of a clock, a measuring tape, the accumulation of OBJECTIVELY scored points, or a physical beating.
Even some of those should be on the chopping block. Some of the points-scoring events are too subjective. If a sport relies too much on fallible human judging, it should be excluded.
The vast majority of the events should be arbitrated only by the cold, merciless, absolute judgment of the clock or the measuring tape. Therein lies the truest purity of sport.
Honestly, the best thing to do would be to reset everything to the REAL tradition of the Olympics. Almost nothing, other than running, jumping, and fighting. With an absolute minimum of rules to get in the way, and all the athletes competing in the nude. Just sandals on their feet. No space-age materials to help anyone. Nothing for anyone to hide. Just human muscle and determination, on display at the greatest possible level.
But it’s all a forlorn dream. Instead, we have to have our stomachs turned, as a bunch of revolting little shitheads wobble and headspin.
The ancient Olympians are going to be spinning in their fucking graves.
EDIT: YES, I AM AWARE THAT THE FIRST COUPLE MODERN OLYMPICS FEATURED NON-SPORT ACTIVITIES, LIKE SCULPTURE AND PAINTING. THAT DOESN’T CHANGE MY VIEW. INCLUDING ART IN THE MODERN OLYMPICS WAS A RIDICULOUS MISTAKE. JUST BECAUSE IT WAS DONE BEFORE DOESN’T MEAN IT SHOULD BE DONE NOW.
Username does NOT check out.
Honestly it never has, this dude has some of the worst takes and will never walk away from even a mild disagreement
Also, saying gymnastics don’t belong in the Olympics is not just an unpopular opinion, it’s crazy talk.
Like, in what world does one say that Simone Biles is not an Olympian.
Yeah, I’ve seen them around Lemmy a few times and they’re always freaking out about something they’re angrily wrong about 😄
ayy I saw you on HN the other day.
HN?
oh yes, what’s Lemmy ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
…this place? 🤷
Maybe imperative “chill, dude”
I love this thread. Chill Dude tell us more of your opinions we need content
I mean, that IS the purpose of the Unpopular Opinion community, right?
I’m not doing anything weird. I’m just doing it right.
You are definitely doing it right.
They’ve posted multiple essay length unpopular opinions here before.
I’m reading through them now its amazing. Nothing political so far, nothing bad, just very strong opinions on relatively innocuous things and he’s managing to make so many people angry… He’s like an artist
I kinda love how mad you are about this
Best unpopular opinion post I’ve seen so far.
I wonder if the upvote/downvote ratio is like that because people don’t think it’s unpopular or they’re tarded and vote because they dislike the opinion lol
I have always held that the up votes are for well written, thoughtful posts regardless of if I like the opinion. This is not really well written or thoughtful. It has a certain unhinged vibe to it.
I did up vote for the passion and because I sort of love a little chaos, but it was a tight choice.
But the options aren’t upvote or downvote, it’s upvote, downvote or no vote. I think unless I want to signal something specific, I just don’t vote.
It’s a disgrace to the Ancient Greek tradition that the Olympics are attempting to continue.
JUST BECAUSE IT WAS DONE BEFORE DOESN’T MEAN IT SHOULD BE DONE NOW.
That’s a contradiction. Also, the ancient greeks didn’t have the concept of sport were super into dancing - spartans especially - so this whole argument is void.
I’m sorry that something you say you enjoy (the olympics) makes you so angry.
Just wait till he finds out that the ancient Greeks didn’t have a winter Olympics
What if we measured who could breakdance the furthest.
Oh, shit. Now we’re talking. The 10,000 meter headspin would legitimately be the greatest distance race of all time. It would probably have a non-zero fatality rate, but that’s not my problem.
Pop-and-lock-a-thon anybody?
Poor Chang …
Whew, this left spittle on my screen from the sheer, unhinged rage of the typing :)
Legit though, solid unpopular opinion!
But dude, gymnastics is a core sport going back to the minoans. And there were trumpet competitions back in the older Olympiads. Trumpet champions existed, and were determined by judges.
Hate to break it to you, but as much as I also dislike subjective sports competition, the Olympians of old would not be spinning in their graved.
Now, I agree that there has to be some limit to what is and isn’t an actual Olympic event. And I’m not a big fan of judged events in general; they should be demonstrations, performances rather than competitions because they’d be better that way, you’d see cooler shit being done by peak human athletes.
But you might as well insist that only men compete if you’re going to try and use the pan Hellenic games as your standard.
My Olympic pet peeve is about how damn hard it is to find coverage of most individual sports. You might get lucky here and there seeing highlights of archery or biathlon, or stuff like judo. But they’ll show entire soccer matches without cutting away for anything but commercials. That’s infuriating to me. I’d rather watch hours of break dancing because it’s at least about the athleticism of the competitors rather than some team where even the best individuals get over shadowed.
I think all sports have more subjectivity than you are admitting. How often have you heard someone yell at an umpire or referee seen as unfair?
Obviously you’re never going to escape the subjectivity of events in which humans participate and the application of those rules, unless we want to just program machines to compete for us.
I think a better approach to what OP is saying is that there shouldn’t be a competition in the Olympics where the method of scoring itself requires subjective determination.
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Basketball: you throw the ball through the hoop, you get points.
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Football: you get the ball in this cage, you get a point
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Freedom Football: you get the ball over this line, you get points.
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Baseball: you circle the diamond, you get a point.
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Curling: your rock, uh… lands in a circle I guess? And that gives you a point, or points?
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Cricket: you… run between posts?
Etc.
Point is, while each of the above does require some amount of subjective judgement to determine if each team/competitor is following the rules, the winner of the game usually doesn’t depend on it.
Compare that to, say, figure skating or high diving or gymnastics, where the score depends completely on how well other people think a competitor did.
Gymnastics, high diving, etc. have a very strict scoring system as well. There’s a very objective way to score how things are done, it just looks subjective to people who weren’t involved in those sports.
Most sports look weird and subjective if you were unfamiliar with the rules, but after many decades, are extremely codified and much more objective than they appear.
Anyone that wants things to be simpler or more pure probably don’t understand the reasoning and history behind the rules.
That being said, like any rule set, a lot can be gained from starting from scratch. You just need to have a deep understanding of the way things are in the first place, otherwise you’d be making a lot of the same mistakes.
If figure skating was objective then the 2002 judging scandal couldn’t have happened.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Winter_Olympics_figure_skating_scandal
Strict, yes, but not objective.
No one is checking the height and diameter of the splash a high diver makes when she enters the water, or the exact angle a figure skater’s foot makes when he lands a triple lutz, or what the decibel level is for a cheerleading team. All of those are judged based on years of observation, but at the end of the day it’s still people’s opinions of the performance.
If you hit a hole-in-one on a par 4, everyone agrees your score is -4. If you do a floor mat routine, one judge might think it was absolutely perfect and give you a 10 and one judge might think it was sloppy and give you an 8. And you can’t argue one was right and the other wasn’t, because it still comes down to the opinion of the judges.
All of those require significant judgment. A dew examples:
Basketball: how many points is the shot worth/were they behind the 3 pt line? Was that a foul? Was it a flagrant violation that requires an ejection? The latter two apply to most in your list.
Baseball: more than others in your list, this requires subjective calls. Balls/strikes, safe/out, home run/off the wall, etc.
US Football: was that a first down/where should the ball be placed? Touchdowns in particular have specific rules about the ball crossing the plane that can take a long time and significant deliberation.
Edit: I’d also reject your claim that outcomes don’t depend on these calls. Many games come down to close calls.
I would like to make clear that what I am talking about is scoring points being objective, not all the minutiae of a competition. While there will always be a need for judging on a moment-by-moment basis (which, as I said, is because you can’t ever have a totally objective method of scoring games) all of those things have a clearly defined method of scoring that can be measured.
Basketball: how many points is the shot worth/were they behind the 3 pt line?
We can look and see where the shooter’s foot was when he shot. We can see if the ball left his hands before the shot clock ran out.
American Football: Touchdowns in particular have specific rules about the ball crossing the plane that can take a long time and significant deliberation.
Yes, that’s why replay cameras exist and why coaches can challenge referee calls. It’s not uncommon for the refs to think they see a play happen one way, but the camera shows it actually didn’t.
Specifically re: your comments on baseball, you’re right. But the method of obtaining points in baseball is objective: a runner has to leave third base and touch home while the ball is in play.
And even then, the humans making the robots are going to try to skirt the intent of the rules… Heck, even PvP computer games, which are probably as objective as you can get, need to be patched constantly to stop people using unintended quirks to their advantage.
Maybe there’s no such thing as an objective sport?
About the videogames: if you mean bugs, I don’t think anyone considers them fair game. They are mistakes from the organizers (developers) and should invalidate the results. It’s like if there was a 2 meter deep hole in the middle of a football field, the rules don’t consider that scenario but it’s obvious that that match shouldn’t be valid.
There are objective sports. Those that are not constrained by the physical world, like chess are 100% objective. Theoretically you don’t even need a board, each of the players could simulate it in their head and just communicate their moves.
Even if not 100%, I’d say some sports are close to that, in the case where the rules could be verified by a computer and 3D models that exactly represent all the elements of the game (to reasonable precision).
I don’t know of any 100% objective game that doesn’t rely on luck though (I’m sure some exist). Even in simple games like archery, golf or bowling, there are factors that the players cannot control or measure, like wind. They can measure wind in the place where they are, but they can only assume what the wind is in the path of whatever they are throwing. In chess, black and white players are not equal, and who is which color is random.
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I think there’s a difference between judging for the score and enforcing the rules as best you can.
As I said, most team sports do not fit my stringent definition, as well as most of the current versions of the formerly pure sports.
I believe we should strive for as few rules as possible, with as little subjective interpretation as possible. Like I keep saying, I think the ideal should be for the winner to always be determined by the clock, the measuring tape, or the last opponent left standing.
I truly believe subjective judgement degenerates the purity of athletic activity. The fact that subjective umpires bring so much disharmony and bile is evidence that I am on the right track. The more we can remove the referees from the proceedings, the better sports will be.
You should just make up a new word for what you’re calling ‘pure sports’. There’s no definition of ‘sports’ that even implies your concept of ‘purity’ is valid.
“Pure” isn’t even the right word. More like “unchill dude” sports, a category that only one person cares about, named appropriately.
Make that two people. I fully agree with OP, and I think my definition of sport would be nearly identical to theirs.
Middle aged libertarian bro watching activities.
First of all well done at posting an unpopular opinion. Are you aware how much you’ve contradicted yourself?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herald_and_Trumpet_contest
In the 96th Olympiad (396 BC), beside the athletic and artistic competitions, the Herald and Trumpet contest was added, which was already a formal element of the Olympic ritual performed by the kerykes (heralds) and salpinktai (trumpeters). Winners were chosen by the clarity of the enunciation and the audibility of their voice or horn blast.
Also breakdancing is awesome. Hope they add beatboxing soon.
Then I guess the whole thing was a forlorn dream, for a huge portion of its history.
There was always a mirage on the horizon, where we ALMOST had a true celebration of athletes. But it was always in the process of being diluted and degenerated by sick-minded morons.
Too bad there isn’t a melodrama event- you’d be a gold medal contender ;)
Well, fuck me then, I guess I should just go kill myself.
Sport is just dance for performers too lazy to train hard enough to make it in the Arts.
This is a very thorough and well thought out post.
I couldn’t disagree with it more regarding the modern olympics (I think there’s a lot of value in subjectivity judged sports as well as objectively judged), but I respect your reasoning, and would love to see a revival of the ancient olympics like you propose. So why not both? Keep the modern commercial games their own thing (because at this point there’s too much money in it for anyone to stop it) but bring back the traditional Greek games.
Completely separate thought: which category does boxing fall into? Matches are often won through points given by judges. Actually that’s the same with wrestling, a traditional olympic event.
OP repeatedly attacks boxing while praising pankration. The rationale? Pankration “doesn’t have scoring,” which is a patently false claim based on my 3 minutes of googling.
This is a very thorough and well thought out post.
It absolutely is not, it’s nonsensical rambling that had no need to be longer than a paragraph or two.
What he just wrote is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever read. At no point in his rambling, incoherent post was he even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in the fediverse is now dumber for having read to it. I award him no points, and may God have mercy on his soul.
Just so you know, I have reread my own dumb shit, and I realize it’s pretty dumb.
But, ya know, this is the “Unpopular Opinion” community. Not the “construct the most airtight and perfect argument that could ever be delivered before the Supreme Court” community. Take that into account, before you roast me to death, pal.
Oh, I was quoting Billy Madison for funsies, I didn’t want to roast you to death.
Oh, right. I actually think I might have gotten away with never seeing all of that movie. I think I saw it on TV with commercials one time, and fell asleep during it.
Not because it was boring. I was a young fella and I did that “I’m going to stay up for 43 hours and only crash when I have to” kinda thing.
No worries, Lemmybro.
Thanks. Please tell all this to the guy who keeps insisting that he has rhetorically owned me, because I’m not following the dictionary definition of “sports.” I’m defining my own terms, as to what a “pure sport” is. There is nothing wrong with that, from a linguistic or rhetorical basis. And yet, he thinks that he can just win the argument by saying “you’re not using the dictionary definition of sports, so you’re stupid lol.”
It’s pathetic.
As for boxing, it’s a whole awful thing. Emotionally, I want boxing to just go back to the way it was in the classical era. No points, just fighting until someone can’t fight anymore. But intellectually, I realize that concussions exist. On the other hand, that means the modern version, with the soft gloves and head protection is actually WORSE, because it trades a less bloody fight for a more dangerous and harmful one.
The folks who have reintroduced bare-knuckle boxing might have the best option going. It’s as potentially bloody as ever, but the fighters have to protect their hands, so they can’t break each other’s brains with full-power swings. It’s basically an endurance thing. Take any and all point-scoring out of that equation, and you’d have the version that I’d like to see in the Olympics.
Some people are so desperate for a gold medal they’d die in the ring before giving up. Need that time/round limit.
Some people are so desperate for a gold medal they’d die in the ring before giving up
That DID happen in the original Olympics, and the Greeks were cool with it. I mean, I’m not necessarily cool with it…but they really were.
Yeah not acceptable today.
Yep. People have degenerated to a disgusting state of weakness.
That’s not Olympics then, that’s a death match.
True enough. I don’t actually want that, at the end of the day.
Chill, dude
Personally I wouldn’t mind the Olympics going back to being an excuse to watch oiled up naked muscley guys do things like in ancient Greece. But I do think dance would go really well with that.
Anybody wants to do a naked, greased-up victory dance after they win the Pankration, that’s fine with me. But don’t judge the dance. Dance isn’t for competing.
Good unpopular opinion! I’m skeptical the modern games/organization would survive if you tossed the judged events out though. And a quick search shows there were a few subjective events in ancient games, too. Maybe there’s another organization with competitions that suit your interests better?
You do you, man, but I feel like getting this het up over a competition you’ll never be involved in, have any control over, or be forced to watch, is kind of a waste of lifespan. Are you happier for it? Healthier? Wealthier? Kinda seems like it’s just burning more than one second off your life per second for no benefit.
Also, tradition is just peer pressure from dead people, and they told me in school not to give in to peer pressure. We didn’t have breakdancing as an event, and now we do. The only constant is change.
