Sport; it’s an everyday label that we take for granted. It’s usually what’s on the television at your local pub. It’s also what earns you the prestige of donning a Cambridge Blue jumper so everyone knows you play it (and that you’re good at it). But rarely do we ask ourselves what makes something a sport. It’s one of those ‘givens’ that you simply don’t see the need to unpack.
I remembered a jovial conversation I had with my friends upon discovering we lived on the same floor as a Tiddlywinks World Champion. We were admittedly taken aback by the unconventionality of it all – who knew it was a competitive sport? But I realised I probably couldn’t have justified to you why my initial reaction was one of shock rather than admiration. Was it because tiddlywinks was something new? Not really, since it has been around since the 1890s. Or had this been a wake-up call to some internalised misogyny causing me to take it less seriously? That wasn’t it either, because in my mind I already associated tiddlywinks with men – though I seem to have been mistaken here also. So what was it? I didn’t want to say it out loud but I knew what I was thinking: is it really a sport? But that’s just it: what is a ‘real’ sport anyway?
To an extent, we do have a ‘Cambridge culture’ here. Although I would not say we live in a wholly homogenous bubble, we certainly do have common ways of thinking and approaching things. Given this, I sought to deconstruct these shared assumptions by consulting the members of our ‘sporting’ community.
Going into this, I assumed that the results may yield a degree of gender bias, or at least a level of preference toward male-dominated sports. But unsurprisingly, I was first and foremost met with a question in response to my question: “well what do you mean by a real sport?” I assured my interviewees that this was not a supervision, but nonetheless it was an understandable counterpoint. In reality, the idea of a real sport is less of a typology and more so one of those shared implicit narratives that many of us are broadly familiar with or have probably grown up with, irrespective of whether we agree with it or express it out loud.
Another example of this could be the idea of ‘fun’. Typically, we are familiar with the mainstream idea that fun at university looks like going out, and doing the things that are only socially permissible when you’re 18. Many of us measure up our pastimes with this idea of what we’re supposed to be doing as part of ‘student life’, wondering if we’re actually boring. In a similar vein, I think it’s safe to assume that I’m not the only one who has a rough idea of what ‘real’ sports are. Football, running, and swimming are just a few of the first things that tend to come to mind. A decent metric I thought of when clarifying my investigation was: “how impressed would you be if someone told you they played this sport for Varsity?”
In asking around, I was met with a collection of fairly similar responses. A Master’s student at Downing, said that the bias on this matter would lean towards the more physically exertive end of the spectrum. That is, sports like rugby or wrestling garner a lot of respect because of the ‘demand’ and even the ‘danger’. As the sport gets less and less physical, people will tend to veer from classing it as one. The discourse surrounding chess as a sport, for example, potentially points to this pattern. The same could be said for darts or snooker; those who aren’t invested in it as players, or watchers, often pay it little mind when listing examples of sports.
“What constitutes a real sport is ‘in the eye of the beholder’ – it’s a spectrum”
A second year Caius student told me that rugby is “objectively” a sport. When I asked him what he thought about tiddlywinks, he credited that it was certainly ‘detail oriented’, and “respectable,” but mentioned that it is not “physically active in the same way football is,” making it not a sport in the same sense.
A pragmatic second year at Magdalene stopped me in my tracks, expressing that what constitutes a real sport is “in the eye of the beholder” – it’s a spectrum.
This response showed itself to be fairly popular, with my next interviewee delivering a perspective I had not yet considered myself. In conversation with a second year at Fitzwilliam, it took a bit of back-and-forth before I saw his point of view. At first he echoed a similar rhetoric that what is seen as a real sport tends to be an endurance sport. But in digging deeper, he admitted that the commercialised elements of some sports have eclipsed the value of the sport itself.
“So when sport is more of a commodified pantomime you don’t respect it as much?” He responded: “It strips the sport of any fire and authenticity”.
My next interviewee, a second year Jesus student, shared a similar concern to me about the gendered politics behind our assumptions of which sports are to be taken more seriously. “Sports like pole, gymnastics and ice skating are underemphasised just because they’re more female-dominated. They are definitely real sports.” When probed to think of what was not a sport, she informed me of the existence of e-sports. They even had their own Olympics. “It’s not typical,” she continued. “There’s not much physical activity, and therefore I personally wouldn’t consider it to be a sport.” Albeit, she did add that they are definitely strategic.
“So what type of person do you associate with e-sports then?” She joked: “Not a sportsman.”
In consulting another one of Cambridge’s more niche sports, I liaised with the Cambridge University Rifle Association (CURA) Secretary, Ana Vijay. She expressed that, for her, “a sport is anything that needs you to apply coordination skills to succeed competitively in it”. Despite the fact shooting isn’t as ‘physically exhaustive’ as other sports, the line between winning and losing is a thin line, determined by millimetres.
“If your trigger finger, eyes, and positioning aren’t coordinated, what you think is a great shot could easily become a mediocre or bad one. Just like football teaches you to use footwork to respond to what you see and score, shooting teaches you to pull your finger back at the perfect time when your sight picture tells you to shoot.” It seems that the high stakes which come with mastering this skill contributes greatly to its status as a sport, separating it from inattentive hobbies.
My investigation yielded expected results. It does seem that strength and physicality dominate perceptions of what makes a sport. In addition, room was made for strategy and detail, but this alone does not seem to constitute a status of ‘sport’ for most people. But there was one last opinion that I realised ought to be a part of this conversation. I had to go back to where it all began and confront the sport that begged the question in the first place: tiddlywinks. In liaising with CUTwC (the Cambridge University Tiddlywinks Club), I received an interesting piece from Petroc Vyvyan-Jones, the publicity officer.
“We have a long way to go in opening up to more unconventional ideas of what makes a sport”
Having been “reliably informed by a veteran tiddlywinker” [that] a prospective sport must fulfil certain criteria,” Petroc concluded that tiddlywinks satisfied them all. “Speed, manual dexterity and physical strength, usually associated with the mainstream sports of this world, are essential factors in tiddlywinks; the greatest understanding of winks strategy means little without these fundamentals. This unique combination of mental and physical attributes constitutes the difference between a casual player like me and a world champion – likewise, it distinguishes tiddlywinks from other games, such as chess, which some mistakenly demand should be recognised as a sport.”
Informing me of the sport’s long-standing history of tournaments and personal rivalries across the world stage, I realised that my ignorance of the sport may have been more personal than general. CUTwC itself was central in propelling tiddlywinks globally, and formalising it as a sport. Its roots in Cambridge as an institution and community are far more deeply embedded than I thought. Jovially, Petroc added that “the strongest evidence for our status as a sport, however, is our fine-tuned ability to end meetings in the closest pub for a drink, alcoholic or otherwise”. This camaraderie building activity is, in Petroc’s eyes, “perhaps the principal reason for [their] domination of Oxford’s winkers”.
I think it’s safe to say that, as a sporting community, we have a long way to go in opening up to more unconventional ideas of what makes a sport ‘real’. Personally, I enjoyed exploring my own internal biases on the subject. I would now say my answer to the question “what is a ‘real’ sport?” is far more vague and inclusionary than before. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all!
