Towards a high definition of (Olympic) sport

Abstract

The paper entertains the idea of sport as a heterogenous concept and focuses not on the boundaries of its extension (a paramount consideration in case of the problem of definition understood in the traditional way), but rather of its internal structure. I start with Bernard Suits’ definition of sport (offered in his paper The Elements of Sport), which is a plausible attempt to construct a homogenous definition of sport. According to this definition sports create a subset of games. However, in his later paper The Tricky Triad, Suits himself criticized this definition by introducing a new category of judged sports that are not games, and a fortiori cannot meet his former definition. This distinction not only overthrows the original definition, but also reveals a hidden heterogeneity in the domain of sport. I would like to supplement Suits’ critique of his own definition by another objection, which draws the second dividing line in the domain of sport, namely the distinction between kinetic and non-kinetic, mainly performative activities. These two distinctions taken together allow me to construct a conceptual map of sport (and especially Olympic sport) that I call The Olympic Sport Image (OSI). It encompasses the following fields: athletic games, judged sports, mind sports and art sports. I would like to call the offered theory the “High Definition of Sport” (HDS), since it gives an insight into the structure of sport as a heterogenous domain. To prove the usefulness of this model I am showing its applicability into the history of the programme of the Olympic Games (OG) and I’m comparing it with Suits’ triadic model.