What is sport, and who decides what counts as a sport? High school coaches will tell you that sport is fun, as they nick the heels of weeping 13-year-olds with a well-oiled sjambok called Wagter.
For Australian ranchers there’s nothing better than downing a pint of antifreeze, then going after roos with a bow and fiery arrows. Chinese mystics get their sporting kicks on a Saturday afternoon by stopping their hearts and letting moss grow all over them. It all seems fairly relative.
Perhaps it is safe to suggest that to qualify as a sport, an activity must have some entertainment value. But that disqualifies anything involving the Cats and the Stormers. Chess is a case in point. Is it a sport or a psychosis? Certainly its greatest players behave like sportsmen, as any hotel maid who has ever had to clean up after Bobby Fischer knows. In fact it is likely that apart from harbouring paranoid fantasies about Commie Republicans in black helicopters, Bobby also used to bang his head against lockers to psych himself up before a crunch match.
It’s just hard to take something seriously as a sport when the highlights package shows seven hours of meditation, interspersed with the players taking turns to bang triumphantly on the snooze button of a little alarm clock next to the board. But perhaps we can’t judge an activity on its value as a spectacle.
For example, nobody watches foxhunting, yet its participants believe that it is a sport. This is because they forgot to ask the fox what he felt about the whole thing.
Of course Rupert and Arabella, astride Pongo and Theseus, insist that they are giving the beastie a sporting chance. You know, the way laser-guided cluster bombs give one a sporting chance.
But honestly, what kind of event is based on blood and pain, in which a large group of inbreeders massacre a tiny, helpless target? Apart from any match involving the Cats?
Why is a marathon considered a sport while hanging wet laundry on a rotating line is not? Both leave one emotionally and psychologically spent, muscles stretched beyond breaking point. Both celebrate humankind’s triumph over impossible odds. Both involve damp underwear.
And if curling continues to blight the winter Olympics one has to in all fairness allow casserole-dish-scrubbing, window-squeegeeing and cat-delousing to turn professional.
Cheerleading has become an officially recognised sport in the United States, which means that if you go to a pro basketball game over there you will at least be watching one real sport, at half-time.
Only a civilisation capable of producing Barbara Streisand and Survivor Thailand could have thought it would be a good idea to invent a sport in which freaks try to put a big ball through a hoop.
Who came up with basketball? Was he at the circus, watching Shaquille the Flaming Seal jump through a hoop with a second left on the clock?
One can understand the symbolic history of most other sports — one runs across a line to symbolise completion, one hits a ball with a modified plank because international law prevents one from hitting necks with a modified chainsaw — but what possible symbolism could there be in basketball? Posting letters? Collecting eggs?
The most enjoyable basketball games are those played by lab rats in small glass tanks, when each basket is rewarded with a crouton. Now that’s a sport.
Still, basketball looks like quantum physics next to synchronised swimming, a sport based on the belief that six legs, wobbling about in the air (and looking every inch like the morning after on the Titanic) will create the illusion of balletic grace and poise.
However, no one has reminded these soggy sugarplum fairies that water is transparent, and we can see their suffering little faces and thrashing little arms down there as they desperately fight off the encroaching Kreepy-Krauly.
There seems to be only one solution that will satisfy everyone: all human endeavour must be declared sport, and we can all take pride in being champions.
Next time you need to bath the dog, take a moment and gather yourself.
It’ll be tough, but if you dig deep, find that extra 10% to take you up to 120% and push through the pain barrier, you will emerge triumphant, with a clean dog and the heady scent of victory that is the domain of the champion.