Tuesday, February 12, 2002

OLYMPICS: Here's Jim Caple on last night's figure skating flap. I was reading Oliver Willis on the Olympics and he, like a lot of us, feels that figure skating is not a sport. I have to disagree. Figure skating --on the vast continuum of sports, with, say, pro wrestling on one end (an entirely fictional, and hence entirely subjective sport) and, say, billiards or bowling on the other end (sports with minimal or no human judgement as to what constitutes victory, and hence entirely objective sports)-- lies on the subjective end, toward pro wrestling. The great American team sports would lie in the middle, with maybe the NFL right in the middle and the NBA and MLB heading towards subjectivity. Anyway, the subjectivity of figure skating is no reason to say it isn't a sport. It's just more subjective than most.

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