Two concepts of sporting excellence

ABSTRACT

This paper deals with the question of whether nature sports are to be counted among the (traditional) sports and Kevin Krein’s recent argument, based on sporting excellence, as to why they should. Krein argues that sports as such are ultimately about sporting excellence and because both so-called traditional sports and nature sports fulfil that criterion, nature sports belong in the sport domain. Here, I show that Krein’s argument rests on an equivocation between two concepts of sporting excellence. Sporting excellence in traditional sports is connected to sporting success. Here agon (contest or competition) dictates or frames areté (striving for excellence). This is not the case for sporting excellence in nature sports, as these are not competitions. We are dealing with two different concepts of sporting excellence and Krein’s argument, based on sporting excellence, must be rejected. It gives no basis for including nature sports in the sport domain.

KEYWORDS:

• Sport
• nature sport
• demarcation
• competition
• sporting excellence

Introduction

In the present paper, I will address a recent argument made by Kevin Krein concerning why so-called nature sports should be included in the sport domain. According to Krein, nature sports qualify as belonging to the sport domain together with other sports (which Krein calls traditional sports) because they are all about pursuing sporting excellence. Sports or traditional sports are essentially about pursuing sporting excellence and so are nature sports, thus nature sports are sports, i.e. part of the sport domain. In this view, being a contest or competition is not a defining feature of being a sport, but of being a so-called traditional sport. Nature sports are not contests or competitions, yet according to Krein they are sports. I agree with Krein that in traditional sports one finds sporting excellence and that the same is true of nature sports. However, sporting excellence in the so-called traditional sports and sporting excellence in the nature sports are different in kind. In traditional sports, what is excellent is in part defined by or understood in relation to or seen in light of how well one fares in contests or competitions. Agon (contest or competition) dictates or frames areté (striving for excellence). This is not the case for sporting excellence in nature sports, because these are not competitions. There are two concepts of sporting excellence at work here, and Krein’s argument in favour of the place of nature sports in the sport pantheon is only upheld by equivocating between the two. To reach this conclusion, we must first set the stage with some preliminary remarks on our topic, then discuss additional details regarding nature sports and surrounding phenomena, before finally addressing Krein’s argument, based on the notion of sporting excellence, in favour of nature sports counting as sports.

Preliminary remarks

When reading the literature on sport, one might come to think that this field of research is a blooming, buzzing confusion of authors who freely make claims about traditional sports (aka sports), e-sports, non-competitive sports, mind sports, nature sports, adventure sports, extreme sports, lifestyle sports, alternative sports, street sports, etc., without any clear sense of why all these types of activities or practices should be gathered under the same heading. This might leave a reader confused or despairing, but fortunately there is also common ground to be found. Even though most philosophical positions, no matter how crazy or outlandish, have been defended by some philosopher or another, no one has yet argued that there is no such thing as sport or that everything is sport. This gives us a consensus.

Consensus: Among scholars and others, there is an agreement that some things are sport, but not everything is sport, and that some things are not sport, but not everything is not sport.

Everyone agrees that some things are not sports, while also there are sports, and this means that even philosophers who state that there can be no definition of sport in fact somehow also think (perhaps without realizing it) that there is a demarcation between sport and non-sport. This is not to argue that if one wants to do research on sport, then one must at the same time provide a definition of sport or some demarcation criteria. You should, for example, be allowed to study the ethics of sport or aesthetics of sport without having to provide a definition of sport or demarcation criteria. This is a fairly straightforward Neurath’s boat observation.¹ You cannot do everything at the same time. Some things must be held or regarded as justified, understood, true, etc., while we investigate the topics we are interested in. However, the issue of demarcation tends to emerge, because when formulating or testing theories in ethics or aesthetics, for example, researchers must draw from what they regard as the sport domain and at this point one might run into controversial or contested borderline cases. The relevance of such cases regarding the question of whether they should count when formulating theories or testing theories against potential counterexamples depends on whether they are deemed to belong to the sport domain. So, researchers must, in such cases, either assume/presuppose/pretend/etc. that they know what is sport and what is not sport, or else provide a definition of sport (however rudimentary it may be).

I have argued that sport is ‘an extra-ordinary, unnecessary, rule-based, competitive, skilled-based physical activity’, where in the sport contest or competition sport practitioners ‘aim at fulfilling sport’s lusory goal of winning, minimally not losing, whichever sport competition they partake in’ (Borge 2021, 309; see also Borge 2019a, Chapter 3).² This means that games like chess, so-called nature sports like mountaineering, and urban for-sport activities like parkour fall outside the scope of sport, whereas computer games like Pac-Man (aka e-sports) fall within it. Regarding nature sports, in my view they fall short of being sports because they are not or do not constitute contests or competitions. In contrast, Krein believes nature sports belong to the sport domain (Krein 2014, 2015, 2019). One aspect of Krein’s concerns is to show that nature sports are not contests or competitions and how that fact accounts for the numerous differences that exist between traditional sports and nature sports. In my view, these arguments provide reasons for not including nature sports in the domain of sports. It is only when Krein adds that these activities or practices, which are not contests or competitions, should count as sports (part of the sport domain) that our views diverge. Here, I will not go into my reasons for excluding nature sports from the category of sport (Borge 2019a, 107–110, 170–178; 2021, 314–316). Our focus is on Krein’s recent argument, based on sporting excellence, concerning why nature sports belong to the sport domain. Before addressing Krein’s attempt to define sport or identify an essential feature of sport, which produces the result of nature sports being part of the sport domain (aka sports), we need to get some clarity on the very idea of nature sports and how to understand them in relation to similar activities or practices like parkour, the practitioners of which do not see themselves as doing sport.

The very idea of nature sport

Among the nature sports we find surfing, mountaineering, backcountry skiing, backcountry snowboarding, whitewater kayaking, kite boarding, sailing, and the like. Nature sports, as Leslie Howe puts it, are ‘those sports that have as a central or essential component some component of the natural environment’, where the natural environment is understood as natural components or features that ‘are largely outside the human influence and control’ (Howe 2012, 355; Krein 2019, 10). There are traditional sports where there certainly are components of the natural environment that seem central to the sport activities. Howe calls these ‘nature-instrumental sports’ (Howe 2012, 356–357). Nature-instrumental sports are nature-based activities or practices that use the natural environment to compete with other humans. The competition element distinguishes nature-instrumental sports from nature sports. What about Krein’s point concerning the natural features of nature sports being outside human influence and control? How does that relate to so-called nature-instrumental sports such as cross-country skiing and rowing? In the cross-country skiing case, the natural environment has been modified or shaped with the sport of skiing in mind, thus it has not been largely outside human influence and control. In the rowing case, the natural environment does not seem suited to nature sports, as its natural component or feature, the water, ‘is ideally devoid of any natural characteristic at all (i.e. dead calm)’ (Howe 2012, 357). Notwithstanding that dead calm water in a natural environment is just as natural as rough water, Howe’s point is in line with Krein’s thinking, when the latter argues that, in natural sports, the natural environment, i.e. the central or essential natural components or features, plays the primary role (Krein 2014, 194–195; 2019, 6–7). In so-called traditional sports, ‘the athletes (…) are primary to the sport (…) in nature sports, natural features play primary roles’, that is, in the former you test your skills against those of other participants in the sport event, but in a nature sport your skills are tested against the natural components or features you face when doing that activity (Krein 2019, 6). Presumably, dead calm water is not well suited to playing the primary role in a skill-based physical activity like rowing, which, of course, it does not need to do because rowing is a traditional sport in which the other rowers play that role. Krein furthermore emphasizes that ‘nature sports’ have ‘a certain type of intensity in the context of athletic movement and skill’ and relatedly, Howe points out that, of the various activities that take place in nature, she is interested in those ‘that demand some (often a high) degree of physical and technical skill’ (Howe 2012, 358; Krein 2015, 280–281).³ The degree of intensity needed for nature sports can be debated, but uncontroversially, nature sports are skilled-based activities or practices and being skill-based entails that they demand or require a certain minimum of effort.⁴ Applying your skills in traditional sports against other similar acting humans gives you contests, pitting your skills against the appropriate natural environment gives you tests.⁵ Contests like sport competitions produce winners and losers, while tests like nature sport events produce achievements and failures. Nature sports are not competitions.

According to Howe and Krein, nature sports are sports, even though these activities or practices do not constitute competitions and being a competition is for many (including this author) a crucial part of sport. Why should we bring nature sports into the sport fold, when they lack a feature many take to be at the very heart of the sport phenomenon? One answer is self-identification. If you self-identify as doing a sport, you are doing a sport. Krein at one point seems to be taking that line when he claims that ‘[i]n standard usage, the term “sport” is, and has been, commonly applied to nature sports’, and those who use language that way presumably do so because ‘[n]ature sports look and feel a lot like other activities that we consider to be sports’ (Krein 2023, 258; see also Krein 2019, 73). Krein goes on to remark that ‘[s]port is a cultural artifact (…) it is, for better or worse, what we humans decide it is’ (Krein 2023, 259). This seems to fit the view that sport is a social historical kind based on direct collective intentionality (Borge 2019a, 83–94; 2021, 309–312). Collective intentionality is to be understood as mutual awareness or recognition of the phenomenon in question being what it is and treating it as such. In short, when we do sport, we are aware of doing sport, and that mutual awareness or recognition is what makes it sport. Whereas natural kinds come readymade independent of human thought and action with the borders and divisions between the natural kinds drawn by nature such that they ‘mark true joints in nature’, social kinds are the result of human activities and interests (Armstrong 1997, 67). Social kinds are ‘things that exist only because we believe them to exist’ (Searle 1995, 1). If (traditional) sports exist because we believe them to exist, then why would we not also say the same about nature sports and let self-identification function as the final arbiter between sport and non-sport?

Sports qua the social kind of sport require collective intentionality in order to become competitions, in which by some conventionally agreed-upon way of ranking participants, they yield winners and losers. Nature sports are not like that. You can rock climb in solitude with no awareness or recognition from anyone else that you are doing just that and it is still rock climbing. In principle, that could be the case for all rock climbers and other mountaineers. Whatever mountaineering including rock climbing is, it does not need collective intentionality to be what it is, but traditional sports like the 100-metre dash or football (aka soccer) do. Climbing a mountain is just what it is, that is, climbing a mountain, but running a hundred metres is not automatically running a 100-metre dash competition and kicking a ball is not automatically a football match.⁶ More is needed. There must be agreed-upon conventions concerning what counts as what, like the starting line, the finishing line, method of ranking, the pitch, scoring a goal, rules, etc., that is, a mutual awareness or recognition that what we are doing now is a 100-metre dash competition or a football match.⁷ Take football. Getting a ball across a goal line, between the goal posts, underneath a cross bar is just that, getting a ball across a goal line, between the goal posts, underneath a cross bar. Scoring a goal in a football match, i.e. a sport event, takes more. It takes mutual awareness or recognition, i.e. collective intentionality, that getting a ball across a goal line, between the goal posts, underneath a cross bar now counts as scoring a goal in the football match we are playing. This observation per se does not reject the self-identification line, but it shows that the self-identification method in this area finds no support in the theory of sport as a social kind. If one sidesteps the (traditional) sports versus nature sports debate, and instead asks whether there are other activities or practices that are similar to nature sports in the relevant areas, but where the practitioners have different judgements about whether they are doing sport, like parkour, then the self-identification line looks even weaker.

Parkour is an athletic non-competition skill-based sport-like activity or practice. If one accepts the intensity criterion that Krein suggests on behalf of nature sports, then nature sports are also athletic non-competition skill-based sport-like activities or practices. Granted, nature sports take place in a natural environment, while parkour takes place in an urban environment. Still, it is safe to say that if nature sports are sports, then so is parkour, and vice versa. It cannot be the case that it is the nature in nature sports that makes them sports. After all, most so-called traditional sports take place in urban environments. If we look at Signe Højbjerre Larsen’s research, we find that parkour is a challenge to the self-identification line, because in parkour ‘[p]ractitioners (…) take exception from the categorization of parkour as an extreme sport’ (Larsen 2015, 8, my translation). Building on her experience, Larsen argues that ‘[p]arkour is not a sport, but closer to an art of movement’ and that it is ‘more playful than competitive and in this respect sport-like’ (Larsen 2015, 8, my translation; Larsen 2016, 298). On the one hand, nature sport performer and philosopher Krein self-identifies the athletic non-competition skill-based sport-like activity or practice of nature sport as sport, on the other hand, parkour performer and philosopher Larsen self-identifies the athletic non-competition skill-based sport-like activity or practice of parkour as not sport, but merely sport-like. Consistency in theorizing demands that, when we address the question of the scope of the sport domain, we treat nature sports and parkour the same way, and when we do so, it becomes clear that self-identification is not enough, because it pulls in different directions in these activities or practices. More is needed, and that is exactly what Krein tries to provide with his argument based on sporting excellence.

Two concepts of sporting excellence

Howe tells us that ‘[t]he pursuit of excellence is a constitutive aim of sport’, and according to Krein, ‘what sport is really about, or what is valuable about it, is (…) ultimately, that it provides frameworks for the pursuit of human excellence through skillful physical activity’ (Howe 2012, 354; Krein 2023, 259, my italics). One might think that sports are about competing and competitions, but for Krein that is a mistake because ‘sport really is about pursuing athletic excellence rather than beating everyone else’ (Krein 2023, 260, my italics).⁸ In order for this argument to make proper contact with the demarcation problem of sport, it must be slightly amended. Not all (traditional) sports are athletic. Archery and dressage (an equestrian sport) are two sports that hardly fit the bill of being athletic. Yet as longstanding Olympic sports (archery since 1900, then 1904, 1908, 1920 and continuously since 1972, and dressage since 1912), they are not contested borderline cases of (traditional) sport, unlike, for example, chess and e-sports (aka computer games). Certainly, both archery and dressage demand physical skills, but physical skills do not entail athleticism. We must talk of sporting excellence instead of only athletic excellence. With this amendment in place, we can formulate Krein’s argument, based on sporting excellence, for the inclusion of nature sports in the sport pantheon as follows:

P1: The core or essence of sport, which is what we value in sport, is (aiming at) achieving sporting excellence.

P2: If the core or essence of sport, which is what we value in sport, is (aiming at) achieving sporting excellence, then competing or competition is not the core or essence of sport.

C1 (from P1 and P2): Competing or competition is not the core or essence of sport.

And from this we go on to argue as follows:

P3 (from P1 and C1): The core or essence of sport, which is what we value in sport, is (aiming at) achieving sporting excellence and competing or competition is not the core or essence of sport.

P4: If the core or essence of sport, which is what we value in sport, is (aiming at) achieving sporting excellence and competing or competition is not the core or essence of sport, then nature sports are sport.

C2 (from P3 and P4): Nature sports are sports.

One perhaps surprising feature of this argument is that, not only do nature sports count as sport, but it seems that so-called traditional sports are, in a sense, lesser versions of the sport phenomenon compared to nature sports. Competition is not only neither necessary nor needed for something to be a sport, but in sports where this neither central nor essential competition component or feature is present, i.e. the so-called traditional sports, competition might indeed infringe on or hinder that which is the core or essence of sport. The drive for sportspeople in traditional sports to win the competition can cause them to forfeit the core or essence of sport. Krein tells us that ‘there are things that are more fundamental to sport than the competition’ and of these things the most important is seemingly sporting excellence, which is independent of competition (Krein 2023, 259). Given Krein’s view on the nature of sport (its core or essence), if, as is sometimes the case in traditional sports, winning competitions takes precedence over or trumps the kind of non-competition sporting excellence Krein identifies as fundamental to or ultimate in sports, then the conclusion that so-called traditional sports are lesser sports compared to nature sports would seem to follow. Now the debate is not whether nature sports are sports, but to what degree so-called traditional sports are sports. This might cause some readers to pause.⁹

The problem with Krein’s argument, based on sporting excellence, is that it builds on an equivocation. Premise 1 with regard to so-called traditional sports is acceptable, but only if one realizes that this notion of ‘excellence in sport’ is ‘a relative notion or term’ and that it is relative to how well one does in sport competitions (Borge 2019b, 439).

Areté or excellence in sport or a sport seems intrinsically linked to the ontology of sport, in general, and the mechanics of individual sports, in particular, i.e. being a competition with certain standards for quality performance, which enables a participant or practitioner to win or do well (Borge 2019a, 249).

Sportspersons in so-called traditional sports who never do well in sport competitions are not deemed or judged to be excellent or to be displaying, exhibiting or manifesting sporting excellence in their discipline.

We find that when we think about sporting excellence, agon (competition) frames areté (striving for excellence), so that the latter only emerges in the context of the former (Borge 2022, 382).

Philosophers of sport might be critical of this part of (traditional) sports – perhaps they find that deeming or judging as sporting excellence only that which is conducive to winning or doing well in sport competitions is not in the same way conducive to achieving other things we value, such as the good life, overall human flourishing, ethical conduct, or what have you – yet there is no denying that this is also the case. No matter what exactly you put into the notion of sporting excellence with regard to so-called traditional sports, a sportsperson who never does well or who never wins any sport competitions simply does not receive praise for displaying, exhibiting, or manifesting sporting excellence.¹⁰ This is a brute and brutal fact about (traditional) sports. There is no need to discuss any further details concerning how exactly to cash in what constitutes sporting excellence in (traditional) sports, as we know that the key element is a certain conduciveness to winning or doing well in sport competitions.

The (traditional) sport conception of sporting excellence builds on or entails doing well at competitions and that validates Premise 1 in the argument based on sporting excellence, but based on such a reading Premise 2 is false. However, if your conception of sporting excellence derives from the athletic non-competition skill-based sport-like activities or practices like nature sports, parkour and so on, then Premise 2 can be read as true. Premise 2 is true when we operate with the latter kind of sporting excellence and assume, or grant Krein, that it is also the core or essence of sport. However, based on such a reading, Premise 1 is false, because sporting excellence in so-called (traditional) sports is conditioned on some kind of sporting success in competitions. Krein’s line of argument is only upheld by alternating between two distinct conceptions of sporting excellence; one that adheres to so-called traditional sports and one that adheres to the type of activity or practice to which, for example, nature sports belong. When we give the same meaning to the notion of ‘sporting excellence’ throughout the first part of the argument based on sporting excellence, then C1 does not follow. Without C1, the second part of the argument does not get off the ground, and C2 remains stillborn. The net effect is that it does not follow from thinking about sporting excellence in (traditional) sports and nature sports, that we should place these two types of activities or practices into the same category. On the contrary, one could argue.

Having concluded that there is no denying that sporting excellence in (traditional) sports is intrinsically linked to winning or doing well in sport, John William Devine has recently gone against that view. If Devine is right, then Krein is not equivocating in his argument based on sporting excellence, and it may well be that nature sports deserve a place alongside (traditional) sports. Devine writes that sporting excellence is ‘constituted by physical, intellectual, and volitional capacities that are conducive to the achievement of winning (…) in a given sport’ (Devine 2022, 197).¹¹ This is in keeping with my line of argument and not in favour of Krein’s. Call this Devine Quote 1. However, Devine goes on to write that ‘“[e]xcellence” in this context is not comparative (i.e. not measured against the performance of others) (…) it is meant functionally as exemplary of admirable human capabilities that assist one in completing a particular task’ (Devine 2022, 197). Call this Devine Quote 2. We can understand the argument made by Devine as follows. The excellence part of sporting excellence does not stem from its conduciveness to winning or doing well in sport competitions. Instead, it stems from being exemplary of admirable human capabilities that assist one in completing a particular task and that are presumably, in turn, conducive to the achievement of winning. This understanding of sporting excellence in so-called traditional sports is compatible with Krein’s argument based on sporting excellence, thus it challenges or undermines my rejection of Krein’s argument.

This challenge can be met. Simply put, Devine seems to get the order of explanation wrong. It is as if you first have sporting excellence, which is then followed by conduciveness to winning. One can speculate that this has happened because his aim is to provide ‘a desideratum of any normative theory of sport’ (Devine 2022, 208). Perhaps Devine is more interested in how things ought to be, or should be, than in how they are. His endorsement of so-called broad internalism would seem to indicate this.¹² Be that as it may. Let us assume that Devine is trying to say something true about (traditional) sports. My reconstruction of Devine’s thinking shows us that this is not the way to think about sporting excellence in so-called traditional sports, because it entails that sporting excellence can somehow in some manner be detached from or stands alone from the competition element or feature of (traditional) sports, but that is wrong. Winning or doing well in competitions is constitutive of or intrinsic to sporting excellence in so-called traditional sports. This is how you read the phrase that agon (competition) frames areté (striving for excellence) in the quote above.

If we read Devine carefully, we find that he trades on a certain ambiguity similar to the equivocating we found in Krein’s argument based on sporting excellence. In Devine Quote 1, talk of sporting excellence being ‘conducive to the achievement of winning’ is straightforwardly in line with my reasoning about (traditional) sports, given that, here, winning refers to winning competitions in the various so-called traditional sports, which I think it is fair to say that it does. We saw in the previous section that the social kind of sports like the 100-metre dash, football, etc., demand or need, among other things, agreed-upon conventions concerning what counts as what, for example, methods of ranking, for them to be the social kinds they are. Method of ranking refers to a conventional procedure for deciding what counts as winning the sport competition, losing the sport competition, qualifying for the next round of the sport competition one is part of, and so on and so forth, for all the various types of traditional sports. Ranking in sport competitions entails comparing performances or performers in sport competitions with each other, i.e. ranking is comparative. How else would you know who won the sport competition or competitions in question? You would not! There is no winning without ranking, and thus no sporting excellence without ranking. Ranking is comparative, so sporting excellence is comparative, i.e. sporting success is relative to winning or doing well in sport competitions. However, if we assume our Devine Quote 1 understanding of sporting excellence and its conduciveness to winning, Devine Quote 2 is false. Devine Quote 2 tells us that sporting excellence is not comparative, but Devine Quote 1 implies that it is. Of course, one can read Devine Quote 2 as saying something about activities and practices like nature sports (although Devine is clearly writing about so-called traditional sports), and then Devine Quote 2 makes sense and can be true. We justify that reading by pointing to how Devine, in this quote, carefully steers his understanding of sporting excellence towards being functional in assisting in the completion of tasks. Tasks are like tests, not contests, and do not entail or need comparisons in order to be successful. However, based on such a reading, Devine Quote 1 is false, because the kind of sporting excellence we might talk about in regard to nature sports is not conducive to the achievement of winning, as there is no winning in those kinds of activities or practices. Furthermore, as already stated, so-called traditional sports are contests, not merely tasks or tests. Devine is making the same mistake as Krein.

There is more. Sporting excellence in (traditional) sports for us humans requires that our sport ‘competitions (…) yield enough losers’ (Borge 2019b, 440). In human sports, sporting excellence demands that not everyone be excellent at the sport in question for us to consider that anyone displays, exhibits, or manifests sporting excellence (Borge 2019b, 443–444). Not only is sporting excellence in (traditional) sports by its very nature comparative, but for humans, if we are to think in terms of sporting excellence for any performance or performer, that comparison must produce enough losers in the sport event. The latter point concerns our relationship to our so-called traditional sports and not these sports as such. For example, one could easily envisage an aesthetic sport, where the rules of the sport were such that, say at a certain skill level, many got perfect scores, which would yield many winners – all of them deemed or judged to be excellent or to display, exhibit, or manifest sporting excellence.¹³ Such a sport would see excellence in sport performance as an absolute. One perfect performance, which is excellent, is great, many performances that are equally perfect and thus equally excellent, are even better. We could have had such a sport or sports, but we do not. Take an example from a human aesthetic sport. The bar for receiving a perfect ten in gymnastics, which was first achieved by Nadia Comăneci in 1976, was certainly raised as more gymnasts received that score and would have received that score by the 1976 Comăneci standard. Finally, in 2006, the possibility of receiving a perfect ten was removed. In human sports, too many perfect performances are an unwanted result, because we do not see sporting excellence as an absolute.¹⁴ Excellence in our (traditional) sports is not only relative to competition, but also to being somewhat elusive, i.e. that our sports give us (enough) losers. That sporting excellence in our human (traditional) sports is relative to there being (enough) losers is, of course, not needed to establish that sporting excellence in these sports is relative to being conducive to winning or doing well in sport competitions, but it bolsters or shores up this fact.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Krein’s argument, based on the notion of sporting excellence, fails to establish that nature sports belong in the sport pantheon, because it relies on an equivocation between sporting excellence as conceived or understood in so-called traditional sports and the other kind of sporting excellence found in nature sports, which does not require the activities or practices to be competitions. The argument based on sporting excellence provides no basis for including nature sports in the sport domain.

Acknowledgments

I thank Leslie Howe, Kevin Krein, Signe Højbjerre Larsen, and Marzenna Jakubczak for comments and critique. The paper was presented at the International Association for the Philosophy of Sport 50^th Annual Conference, University of Split/University of Zagreb, Croatia, 2023. I am grateful to all the participants.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. ‘There is no tabula rasa. We are like sailors who have to rebuild their ship on the open sea, without ever being able to dismantle it in dry-dock and reconstruct it from its best components’ (Neurath 1932/1983), 92.

2. My definition of sport is somewhat more complex, but this formulation suffices in the present context.

3. See also (Krein 2019), 72–73.

4. According to Krein, nature sports need a high level of intensity in order for them to earn their credential as being sports, whereas Howe finds this requirement misguided (Howe 2019, 104; Krein 2015, 279–283). There is no need to enter any further into this debate here.

5. The distinction between tests and contests was first introduced in the literature by Scott Kretchmar (Kretchmar 1975/1988).

6. Adding Krein’s intensity of performance requirement makes no difference here.

7. See my Human Stampede and Shoreline Runners cases and why they are neither sports nor sport events (Borge 2019a, 76–78). The cases show how and why mutual recognition and a conventionally agreed-upon way of ranking participants are needed to turn an athletic sport-like activity or practice into a sport. This does not exclude that, with regard to sport-like activities or practices, there could be looser social conventions or demands with regard to what the community doing this activity or practice considers good/proper/real/etc. versions of it. In fact, there is every reason to believe that we would find those kinds of social conventions among for-sport practising communities like, for example, that of the sport climbers. Yet they are not constitutive of the activity in the way the rules of the 100-metre sprint are constitutive of it being the 100-metre sprint sport or sport event. The fact remains that a sport climber could totally disregard or be fully ignorant of whatever the sport climbing community thinks about sport climbing as such or even not be aware that such community exists, and still do sport climbing, while the equivalent is not possible with regard to the sport of 100-metre sprint. In this respect, such social conventions give us the sociology of climbing. The latter is important for understanding this area because ‘when something that is done for sport becomes loaded with highly skilled practitioners, who also start comparing themselves to each other along the parameters of best and better, then there is a basis for, perhaps even a pull towards, turning the practice into a sport, which provides a way of ranking the competitors’ (Borge 2019a, 109). My way of drawing the line between sport and non-sport makes room for and explains the sportification some nature sports undergo and how and why some of them transitioned into the sport domain.

8. Robert Simon’s normative view of sport ‘as a mutually acceptable quest for excellence through challenge’ is premised on how ‘sports should be regarded and engaged in’, i.e. ‘the ethical significance of competition conceived of as a mutual quest for excellence’, where ‘[c]ompetition as the mutual quest for excellence, it must be emphasized, is an ideal’, is not relevant here (Simon 2004, 27, 27, 32, 39, my italics). We are interested in how things are.

9. Krein does not draw this conclusion himself, but his commitment to competition not being a necessary part of sport and athletic excellence being what sport is really about justifies drawing this conclusion on his behalf. This conclusion also sits well with his line that nature sport with no competition ‘allows us to adopt other models of ideal human behavior’ (Krein 2023, 260).

10. The obvious counterexample of the presumably brilliant sportsperson who is always being hindered or pre-empted by forces beyond that person’s control or influence – so that he or she never does well or wins any sports competitions, yet is possibly excellent in his or her sport – is dealt with counterfactually. That sportsperson would have done well in or won sport competitions had such-and-such not happened at such-and-such times.

11. Devine gets it wrong when he explains that this is only excellent in a given sport if it is done ‘within the permitted means’ (Devine 2022, 197). This is an appeal to Bernard Suits’ incompatibility thesis, which has been thoroughly discredited (Suits 1967, 150; 1973, 55; 1978/2005, 40; see; Borge 2019a, 138–144, 165–170, 180–186; 2022, 363–365, 391–393 for my rejection of the incompatibility thesis and its defenders). Suffice it to say here, there has probably not been anyone who has ever won the FIFA World Cup without having broken the rules of football (with the possible exception of some goal keepers). According to Devine, the footballing world is in error or mistaken when they believe, for example, that Diego Maradona exhibited, displayed or manifested sporting excellence when he won the FIFA World Cup in 1986. This is a reductio ad absurdum of the position Devine here occupies. We, the footballing world, do not believe that Maradona that summer in Mexico 1986 exhibited, displayed or manifested sporting excellence, we know he did.

12. Robert Simon, who is a leading proponent of that theory, is very clear on constructing a normative theory. See footnote 8.

13. I envisaged one such possible sport and described it in some detail in (Borge 2019b), 443–444.

14. A critic might protest by arguing that there is no such thing as perfect in sport. There is always room for improvement. Comăneci, commenting on her own first perfect ten, wrote that ‘my routine was good enough. It wasn’t perfect, though’ (Comaneci 2011, 43). That is fine, but instead of invalidating my point, the critic in fact displays the sort of attitude we humans have towards sporting excellence as something that should be elusive, which is, at any point, at the boundaries of human achievement. Commenting on the perfect ten, Dvora Meyers tells us that ‘[i]f the 1988 Olympics were turned into a Nancy Drew mystery, it would be called The Case of Too Many 10s’ and that ‘[a]ll of those 10s could (…) be read as a sign that Comaneci and her gymnastics descendants had mastered and surpassed the rules’ (Meyers 2016, 55, 57). In keeping with my thesis, ‘so started the cycle of rule revisions. Every four years (…) the rules that govern gymnastics were modified to steer gymnasts away from the magical 10. Too many gymnasts scoring at or near perfection (…) [t]hese changes were gymnastics’ way of establishing a grading curve’ (Meyers 2016, 57–58, my italics).