By KEN HERMAN
By KEN HERMAN
Cox Newspapers
We’re more than a week into the Olympics; so, it’s time to decide what’s a sport and what isn’t.
During the 2010 Winter Games, I ruled figure skating not a sport. In general, men agreed with me and women did not. Lots of stuff in life, including the Three Stooges, divide us largely along gender lines.
Here’s the rule: To be a sport, an athletic activity substantially has to be objectively timed, measured or scored. Yes, balls and strikes can be subjective in baseball, but the overall activity is objectively scored.
Activities do not qualify as sports if there is nothing other than subjective judging. And there is immediate disqualification for anything done to music or involving costumes, as opposed to uniforms. (See why figure skating isn’t a sport?)
These are not my rules. They are found in the sacred texts of all of the world’s great religions and some of its crummier ones.
Similar to figure skating, gymnastics is athletic and requires peak conditioning and hours of practice. So does ballet. Hence, gymnastics, like figure skating, is not a sport.
Gymnastics also falls short of sport because the women’s floor exercise (amazing tumbling runs connected by dancing and making faces) is done to music. Overall, gymnastics suffers from too much posing, too much packaging and, for the ladies, too much makeup. The only makeup OK in sports is the black stuff football players wear under their eyes to look cool.
My suspicions about gymnastics judging are reinforced every four years when we savor TV’s finest moment — Bela Karolyi’s my-heart-is-going-to-attack-me tirade against the judges.
NBC force feeds us gymnastics and figure skating because men will watch anything Olympics and many women who won’t watch any other event will watch gymnastics and figure skating.
Memo to gymnasts and their parents: I enjoy gymnastics and watched hours of it this week. It’s amazing. But I don’t need it to be an artificially competitive activity for me to enjoy it — again, like ballet, and though I’ve been banned from ballets because my snoring interrupts other guys’ naps, I understand gymnastics is a wonderful activity for young people and far more exercise than baseball (especially for those of us who remember many lonely hours standing idly in right field, thinking unhealthy thoughts).
And now, the rulings. The decision of the judge is final.
Track: First one to the tape wins. A sport.
Field: Furthest or highest wins. A sport.
Swimming: First one to the wall wins. A sport.
Diving: Subjectively judged (and weird in that smaller splashes are rewarded, contrary to what you strive for when you dive). Not a sport.
Synchronized diving: Subjectively judged and includes the word “synchronized,” an automatic disqualification. Not a sport.
Riflery, archery, fencing: Objectively scored and derived from warfare. Sports.
Opening ceremony: As much a sport as gymnastics and figure skating.
Badminton: A sport (but not the way you play it at picnics). And how cool is it that we had a badminton scandal? Look for an attempt to rehab the sport’s image by changing name to goodminton.
Team handball: A sport, though a foreign one. (Hey, am I the only one whose women’s handball brackets were screwed up when Croatia beat Angola?)
Boxing: Surprisingly, not a sport because of subjective, crooked judging. (It is a sport when somebody gets knocked out.)
Table tennis: A sport, but only when devoid of the words “ping” and “pong.”
Equestrian: Would be a sport (and only for the horse, not the rider) if they jettisoned dressage, which is French for “horse dancing.”
Trampoline: You’re kidding, right?
Rhythmic gymnastics: Automatic disqualification for many reasons, including music, makeup, posing, use of hula hoops and ribbons — and the words “rhythmic” and “gymnastics.”
Synchronized swimming: Have you been paying attention at all?