How can we argue against your position if you don't say you're for or against Go being a physical sport?

A follow up question comes to mind: Is arguing on a discussion forum a physical sport?

_________________
be immersed

There is a lot of room for debate on the quality of contributions, but surely there's little room for debate that this is an important question for go players. Access to the Olympics at one extreme, or to funding from local councils or schools at another extreme, depends on the answer. If a killer answer could be found, that access could be gained and could transform the fortunes of the game.

It is certainly pointless trying to define a sport. People understand it by what they associate with it. It seems that in English, people nearly always associate it with physical activity, with competition (and so with rules, but not necessarily with an organising body), and with something normally or best done outdoors or in stadiums. Further, the physical activity is not enough per se: it usually has to be an activity where a physical skill decides the result.

But even within that widely shared (and quite small) nexus, there is huge room for disagreement. For example, many people think synchronised swimming is not a true sport: it an activity where rules have been artificially grafted on. But even people who frown on synch swimming will tend to accept ice dancing - perhaps because it is more overtly physical?. But the events on tv around the world that feature celebs and pros dancing against each other in competition apparently share all the common attributes of a sport but no-one thinks of it as sport. The entertainment factor presumably outweighs the sporting factor, and perhaps the factor that it is not open to anyone (and/or is a clearly artificial creation) counts against it.

Is playing football on the playground sport? Many people would regard that as either recreation or physical education. They may agree it is sport if pushed, but don't think of it as sport spontaneously or primarily. Similarly, Tiger Woods' form of golf may be sport, but two old retirees pottering round a golf course to see who buys the next round of drinks has vey different nuances.

Given that kind of inherent confusion, organisations such as the Nihon Ki-in or the China Weiqi Association have tried to exploit the ambiguities in the hope of labelling go as a sport. They have failed, but probably not because of semantics. The more likely reason is that the sports that already have access to the Olympics or funding are usually keen to make sure that no other horses come to drink at their trough. They have found it easy to use the semantics to beat off the incomers, but the real weapon in their armoury was implacable hostility.

So far, the chess and go worlds have licked their wounds and tried t organise a brand new show - mind sports. The fact that most other people easily accept the term shows that they recognise there is some element of sport in both games, so it may be worth someone trying still to come up with a killer argument for the Olympics, but to me it seems more likely that the rise and rise of computers in go will attenuate the already not-strong association of board games with sport in the minds of most outsiders.

What seems to follow from that strategically is that chess and go should pool their resources and build up the image of mind sports as something that can stand proudly beside (physical) sport.

However, while we already have sports jackets, I'm not sure that we'll ever have mind sports jackets (tweedy checks with elbow pads come close but no cigar).

For what it's worth, go is generally regarded as a "sport" in Korea.

Just take a look at this Naver news site:
http://sports.news.naver.com/general/news/index.nhn

Here's a screenshot from today:


A good handful of the top articles are related to go.

_________________
be immersed

"Is go a sport" relates to "should go be played at the olympics"
Like "is go a science" to "should go be taught at university"
And "is go an art" to "should go be subsidized by the state"

The classification as either could result in a stream of money and lead to more popularity.

To me Go is neither. It's too strictly bound by rules to make it an art, too void of Application to be a science, and too passive to be a sport.

It's the most fascinating game in the world though.

I think that you are mistaken about this. If there is a wish to support something, it will be pragmatically labelled as sport even if everyone agrees that it isn't. You don't need to convince people that it is a sport, you need to convince them that it is worthwhile to be funded.

We had a math olympiad training camp nearby that was classified as "sports camp" because "math camp" was regarded as a tutoring camp for failing students, so there was a ridiculous maximum cap on math hours per day for a math camp to protect the poor children from math. Because everyone agreed that it was a useless restriction on a math olympiad training camp it was accepted to be run as a sports camp (this did not involve funding but insurance for the participants so there were no liability issues for the coaches and organizers).

My advice is to get the children of rich people and politicans hooked on go, the rest will follow.

The strategic situation is not so different from real sports, by the way. In most smaller countries, there are a couple of sports that are really big with a lot of funding and everything else is do-it-yourself by would be olympic athletes. So, being labelled as a sport doesn't help baseball a lot in my country. We only know it because of peanuts cartoons and it seems to be mostly about losing.

Ok. I now officially declare you Norwegian.

If you noticed in the last link I provided, Chess is considered a sport by the Olympics, as well as by over 100 countries world wide ( all but 3 or 4 european countries), as well as international sports regulatory organizations.

Here is another link
http://www.chesssport.com/about/sport.html

>:-)

I'd like to think of it more as a debate than an argument, we are all friends here...