Seriously? That's a sport?

As you know, I am not a sports purist.  I am not a sports fan. I don't even watch figure skating and gymnastics or diving, pretending that it is the competition that I find interesting. For that matter, I don't watch them anyway. To me, these are essentially performances rather than sports, and adding the element of comparison actually ruins the beauty as far as I am concerned.

So I avoid the Olympics for the most part. Tom, however, watches bits and pieces and occasionally because he is amused, calls me to look at something. I won't go into what he finds entertaining because some of those things might be your very favorite events. Gazillions of people all over the planet sit mesmerized by what they see on their screens, and I am not one to claim that they are wrong to be so fascinated. It just isn't me.

One thing that does puzzle me about many of the bits and pieces I see when passing through the living room, though, is a question I think Sheldon Cooper might ponder. Are all of these really sports? I realize that the Olympic Committees of various sorts decide whether to admit or reject new events and that some things last an Olympiad or two and then quietly disappear, due to lack of commercial value I suspect more than because they are any less athletic than others that draw an audience and hence an advertising dollar.

I suppose it would seem less ambiguous if all events were such that the athlete won on objective grounds: he got to the finish line first, she threw her javelin furthest, the team made more goals. It is the areas where judges come into play that things seem to veer off into something else.Was that a 7.9 or an 8.0 performance? Is she a perfect 10 or only a 9.9? Sure he flew higher than anyone else, but was his ankle lined up with his cheekbone properly?

I looked it up -- being a librarian, after all -- and see that the things that puzzle me, and presumably Dr. Cooper, in the Olympics do fall under the definition. They require physical skill and prowess and are "of a competitive nature." I question on the deeper level, however, if everything that we turn into a competition is actually competitive in its very nature. The American pseudo-reality programs that make dancing and singing into a contest, for example. Are dancing and singing in their nature competitive? One can argue that there have been such competitions since ancient times, some even comparable to the Olympics. But here I show the dangers of being a librarian and looking up too much background.

Suffice it to say I think some things should just be fun -- fun to do, fun to watch, a source of delight for all, not a source of delight for a select few and a disappointment to the vast majority. I suppose that's unAmerican in some way, but it is the way I feel.