Silver Adept (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
silveradept) wrote2024-12-08 07:30 pm
silveradept) wrote2024-12-08 07:30 pm
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December Days 02024 #8: Community: Sport Enthusiasts
[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]
Sport is supposed to be a nearly-universal human experience. What sport supposedly is the universal one is much more up for debate than whether or not sport is a regular experience for just about everyone growing up. Sport is now one of the things that having it televised often means some amount of money is changing hands in advertisement dollars, or someone is getting greater exposure (and possibly an audience that is more than just those who are at the arena) by having their performance captured and broadcast for remote viewing. Sport viewing also generally has been enhanced through the overlay of various graphics and graphics systems that keep the viewer aware of the score, where someone is in the game, who is currently the person performing the action, or who the competitors are, and a wealth of other information and data that is carefully orchestrated to supposedly be out of the way of the actual match action. I say "supposedly," because those information bugs rarely seem to take into account the possibility that someone is watching the match with captions/subtitles on, and the captions are often placed right in the middle of someone's score bug in the bottom of the screen. Or there's a digital overlay on top of the score bug for controlling how you are watching the match.
Despite these occasional flaws, the actual watching of sport part is pretty interesting. And not just the usual candidates for a United States audience, but the ones with international provenance. I get excited in Olympic years because it means for a couple weeks, the sport available to watch on primary networks is something other than gridiron football, basketball, ice hockey, baseball, or association football. (And then, for whatever coverage it receives, the Paralympic Games also showcase the different ways that bodies play sport.) Yes, there's also national partisanship, but generally, getting to watch sport played is a delight.
Which is, I suppose, odd. It is not out of having played or attempted many of the sports I view that I watch other people doing so, but other reasons, some of which do have to do with being immersed in a culture that treats sport as something to watch, either remotely or in person, and that measures some amount of partisanship from those who can afford to go to matches and where they sit themselves.
I suspect there is something cathartic about watching sport, as well. The act of partisanship and cheering for things that are ultimately meaningless in a broad geopolitical manner (except, perhaps, for those whose livelihoods depend on good performance) must help dissipate some energy that might otherwise go to less prosocial impulses. Then again, when i hear about antisocial behavior at or related to sport events, I think it's not as much about catharsis as it is about having a shared identity. Or at least a shared partisanship. (Now I wonder about whether political events and speeches or sporting events and speeches are more likely to spawn anti-social behavior, and whether one has a greater degree than the other.)
While I'm not the kind of person who engages in them, I certainly can observe the ways in which sport still retains the connections that Games have had as offerings to various gods. Not only the nation-states that wish to be appeased by having their anthems played and flags venerated, but the idea of ritual athletic contests between persons who are in excellent physical form as an offering and appreciation of the largesse, protection, and active benefit of the god(s) to whom the Games are dedicated. The "superfan" as a self-appointed priest, the laity who dress in the colors of their team, the shouts of appreciation and dismay at the tableau in front of them. The way that fans (and remember, fans is a shortened form of fanatics, another connection to ritual aspects) have their own rituals to beseech the approval of the god/gods/God over the contest, sometimes in mirroring or imitation of any known rituals the participants have for their own part. The shouting, the chanting, the musicality. The occasional requirements that the sanctioning bodies lay down on their members to ensure that the offering is still pleasing by forbidding derogatory chants. I came across a picture that I had stashed away somewhere from my time at university, which was the first page of a letter explaining to us that one of our regular-in-rotation chants (that was a song lyric quote) was considered derogatory and should not be used further. What made the letter interesting was that it had been signed by several members of the women's volleyball team, some of whom had expressed negative opinions about the decision. Because they wanted the partisan atmosphere to help buoy their spirits. (And, quite possibly, because it wasn't being directed at them. I wonder what they would think of it at this point in their lives. And with, perhaps, the knowledge that some of the other acts in pregame included reading out public Facebook profiles of the opposition's players. I do not say we acquitted ourselves well in university, only that the we did while we were there were considered relatively…normal.)
One of the things that has recently returned to prominence, in a significant redux (or, perhaps, continuation) of those Games of old, and other Games and events, is the policing of the bodies that may participate in sport. In our childhoods, while the competition in the summer leagues and the fun leagues is theoretically open to everyone, there are certain body types that are steered away from competing in sport, or competing in certain sports, even if the point of the matter is not for the ultracompetitive circuit, but for the exercise of the body, the camaraderie that can come from being part of a team, and the experience of participation in the activity. Once you get onto the hypercompetitive circuit, the ones who will eventually have athletic scholarships and possibly continue on to do sport as a professional or as an Olympian, the body types of the people who participate in that discipline begin to look very much the same. Body types across disciplines may still vary wildly, but those of a certain discipline begin to look very much the same. Some of that is the nature of the discipline and what it requires for success, to be sure, but when was the last time you saw a medalist Olympic gymnast taller than 1.7 meters? Or even 1.6 meters? And while Tyrone Curtis "Muggsy" Bogues would like to remind you that 1.6 meters is tall enough for a succesful National Basketball Association career, he is definitely an outlier in a league where the minimum height for entry seems to be about 2 meters.
In our current era, however, very much in a continuation from previous Games, the biggest body type debate almost always centers on what an appropriate body is for competing as a woman. Many of the arguments about what body qualifies as a woman's fail to understand the diversity of human bodies and assume there is some universal trait that exists among humans to indicate this particular human is a woman. Those arguments may be summarily dismissed because they persist in this belief despite a complete lack of evidence supporting anything like a universal trait of womanhood. And, as it turns out, a lot of bodies that do exceptionally well in certain disciplines have excellent training from a young age ("excellent" here is in terms of efficacy, not necessarily in terms of the mental and physical health toll that such training takes on the athletes) and/or have developed some part of their body through genetics and training that gives them a higher chance of success at their chosen discipline. This is often unremarkable in men, or a point of pride, but apparently, for an awful lot of people, a woman who doesn't fit some arbitrary and ever-changing standard of being attractive/feminine/white in their outward appearance doesn't qualify as a woman. I sometimes wonder if the standard of womanhood for a lot of men (and women) is "Would I hit that? If so, woman." (BE MORE AFRAID.) A large amount of people pointing at this hormone or that sex characteristic or the belief that the puberty you went through determines your eligibility for womanhood often have a counterexample who is succeeding at high-level competition staring them in the face. And who could probably demolish most of the casuals in their given discipline, even though, for example, in 2019, a survery of over 1700 British people found that 12% of British men believed they could win a point of Serena Williams. How any of them were thinking they would do so through no effort of their own, but her double-faulting on a serve, was not asked. This was also the year that Randall Munroe, doing research for one of this books about serious scientific answers to silly questions, found out that Serena Williams can destroy a drone with her serve, and she only missed twice before scoring the hit.
Anyway. A lot of people have wrong ideas that appeal to them about what the shape, strength, and skill level of a woman athlete is, and even more of those wrong ideas that appeal to them are in relation to how a top-flight woman athlete would compare to a mid-flight or even low-flight man athlete, assuming their disciplines are sufficiently comparable. (Artistic gymnastics, for example, does not really permit direct comparisons, because the apparatuses and exercises for men and for women have different approaches to what they want shown off.)
The thing I like the most about watching sport is watching bodies in motion, especially bodies that are engaged in complex tasks. The human capacity for art is not bound to specific media, to our great enrichment, and it is a variety of forms that the body that can produce art takes. I do not see the same things the commentators do about form and execution, even if there are times where I watch and see something artistic at work. A feat of strength, skill, flexibility, power, sometimes individually, sometimes opposed. I suspect many viewers have a similarly surface-level understanding of what they are viewing, and yet, our collective inability to understand the details does not detract from appreciating the work as a whole. (In the same way, our inability to appreciate the details of most artistic endeavors doesn't detract from our appreciation of the whole.) There's something intuitive about scoring a goal, standout defense, an ippon-scoring throw, or watching a body flip several times in the air and stick the landing that brings out the appreciation of the person who has achieved this and the training they put into being able to achieve it. The use of high-framerate cameras and replay machines allows for minute examination of the details from the people who know what to look for, and can create cinematic experiences of the situations themselves that the audience that is experiencing it in real time often does not get to see. Although the live audience at any given arena of a certain level of wealth in this era also usually has at least one large screen that they can watch the action and the replays on when that action is far away from what they can see themselves. (The affordable seats for the plebes are usually in the space that is politely referred to as "the nosebleed section" for a reason.)
More and more, I guess, watching sport is like watching dance, even in those segments where dances don't happen from something particularly good happening for one side or another, and in those situations where dance ends up being in the sport section, like the inclusion of breaking in the 2024 Olympic program, things get even more artistic in their approach.
It's fun to watch.
(There are serious issues, though, about sport where money, discrimination, the labor of specific skin colors, genders, and those who profit from them, and all the other ways that capitalism, racism, sexism, and plenty of other isms take something that's supposed to be fairly innocuous and "universal" and turns it into proxies for major issues, if not outright scandals. Being part of the community of sport enjoyers does not absolve me from understanding these issues and making decisions about what I will accept and what I will not.)
Sport is supposed to be a nearly-universal human experience. What sport supposedly is the universal one is much more up for debate than whether or not sport is a regular experience for just about everyone growing up. Sport is now one of the things that having it televised often means some amount of money is changing hands in advertisement dollars, or someone is getting greater exposure (and possibly an audience that is more than just those who are at the arena) by having their performance captured and broadcast for remote viewing. Sport viewing also generally has been enhanced through the overlay of various graphics and graphics systems that keep the viewer aware of the score, where someone is in the game, who is currently the person performing the action, or who the competitors are, and a wealth of other information and data that is carefully orchestrated to supposedly be out of the way of the actual match action. I say "supposedly," because those information bugs rarely seem to take into account the possibility that someone is watching the match with captions/subtitles on, and the captions are often placed right in the middle of someone's score bug in the bottom of the screen. Or there's a digital overlay on top of the score bug for controlling how you are watching the match.
Despite these occasional flaws, the actual watching of sport part is pretty interesting. And not just the usual candidates for a United States audience, but the ones with international provenance. I get excited in Olympic years because it means for a couple weeks, the sport available to watch on primary networks is something other than gridiron football, basketball, ice hockey, baseball, or association football. (And then, for whatever coverage it receives, the Paralympic Games also showcase the different ways that bodies play sport.) Yes, there's also national partisanship, but generally, getting to watch sport played is a delight.
Which is, I suppose, odd. It is not out of having played or attempted many of the sports I view that I watch other people doing so, but other reasons, some of which do have to do with being immersed in a culture that treats sport as something to watch, either remotely or in person, and that measures some amount of partisanship from those who can afford to go to matches and where they sit themselves.
I suspect there is something cathartic about watching sport, as well. The act of partisanship and cheering for things that are ultimately meaningless in a broad geopolitical manner (except, perhaps, for those whose livelihoods depend on good performance) must help dissipate some energy that might otherwise go to less prosocial impulses. Then again, when i hear about antisocial behavior at or related to sport events, I think it's not as much about catharsis as it is about having a shared identity. Or at least a shared partisanship. (Now I wonder about whether political events and speeches or sporting events and speeches are more likely to spawn anti-social behavior, and whether one has a greater degree than the other.)
While I'm not the kind of person who engages in them, I certainly can observe the ways in which sport still retains the connections that Games have had as offerings to various gods. Not only the nation-states that wish to be appeased by having their anthems played and flags venerated, but the idea of ritual athletic contests between persons who are in excellent physical form as an offering and appreciation of the largesse, protection, and active benefit of the god(s) to whom the Games are dedicated. The "superfan" as a self-appointed priest, the laity who dress in the colors of their team, the shouts of appreciation and dismay at the tableau in front of them. The way that fans (and remember, fans is a shortened form of fanatics, another connection to ritual aspects) have their own rituals to beseech the approval of the god/gods/God over the contest, sometimes in mirroring or imitation of any known rituals the participants have for their own part. The shouting, the chanting, the musicality. The occasional requirements that the sanctioning bodies lay down on their members to ensure that the offering is still pleasing by forbidding derogatory chants. I came across a picture that I had stashed away somewhere from my time at university, which was the first page of a letter explaining to us that one of our regular-in-rotation chants (that was a song lyric quote) was considered derogatory and should not be used further. What made the letter interesting was that it had been signed by several members of the women's volleyball team, some of whom had expressed negative opinions about the decision. Because they wanted the partisan atmosphere to help buoy their spirits. (And, quite possibly, because it wasn't being directed at them. I wonder what they would think of it at this point in their lives. And with, perhaps, the knowledge that some of the other acts in pregame included reading out public Facebook profiles of the opposition's players. I do not say we acquitted ourselves well in university, only that the we did while we were there were considered relatively…normal.)
One of the things that has recently returned to prominence, in a significant redux (or, perhaps, continuation) of those Games of old, and other Games and events, is the policing of the bodies that may participate in sport. In our childhoods, while the competition in the summer leagues and the fun leagues is theoretically open to everyone, there are certain body types that are steered away from competing in sport, or competing in certain sports, even if the point of the matter is not for the ultracompetitive circuit, but for the exercise of the body, the camaraderie that can come from being part of a team, and the experience of participation in the activity. Once you get onto the hypercompetitive circuit, the ones who will eventually have athletic scholarships and possibly continue on to do sport as a professional or as an Olympian, the body types of the people who participate in that discipline begin to look very much the same. Body types across disciplines may still vary wildly, but those of a certain discipline begin to look very much the same. Some of that is the nature of the discipline and what it requires for success, to be sure, but when was the last time you saw a medalist Olympic gymnast taller than 1.7 meters? Or even 1.6 meters? And while Tyrone Curtis "Muggsy" Bogues would like to remind you that 1.6 meters is tall enough for a succesful National Basketball Association career, he is definitely an outlier in a league where the minimum height for entry seems to be about 2 meters.
In our current era, however, very much in a continuation from previous Games, the biggest body type debate almost always centers on what an appropriate body is for competing as a woman. Many of the arguments about what body qualifies as a woman's fail to understand the diversity of human bodies and assume there is some universal trait that exists among humans to indicate this particular human is a woman. Those arguments may be summarily dismissed because they persist in this belief despite a complete lack of evidence supporting anything like a universal trait of womanhood. And, as it turns out, a lot of bodies that do exceptionally well in certain disciplines have excellent training from a young age ("excellent" here is in terms of efficacy, not necessarily in terms of the mental and physical health toll that such training takes on the athletes) and/or have developed some part of their body through genetics and training that gives them a higher chance of success at their chosen discipline. This is often unremarkable in men, or a point of pride, but apparently, for an awful lot of people, a woman who doesn't fit some arbitrary and ever-changing standard of being attractive/feminine/white in their outward appearance doesn't qualify as a woman. I sometimes wonder if the standard of womanhood for a lot of men (and women) is "Would I hit that? If so, woman." (BE MORE AFRAID.) A large amount of people pointing at this hormone or that sex characteristic or the belief that the puberty you went through determines your eligibility for womanhood often have a counterexample who is succeeding at high-level competition staring them in the face. And who could probably demolish most of the casuals in their given discipline, even though, for example, in 2019, a survery of over 1700 British people found that 12% of British men believed they could win a point of Serena Williams. How any of them were thinking they would do so through no effort of their own, but her double-faulting on a serve, was not asked. This was also the year that Randall Munroe, doing research for one of this books about serious scientific answers to silly questions, found out that Serena Williams can destroy a drone with her serve, and she only missed twice before scoring the hit.
Anyway. A lot of people have wrong ideas that appeal to them about what the shape, strength, and skill level of a woman athlete is, and even more of those wrong ideas that appeal to them are in relation to how a top-flight woman athlete would compare to a mid-flight or even low-flight man athlete, assuming their disciplines are sufficiently comparable. (Artistic gymnastics, for example, does not really permit direct comparisons, because the apparatuses and exercises for men and for women have different approaches to what they want shown off.)
The thing I like the most about watching sport is watching bodies in motion, especially bodies that are engaged in complex tasks. The human capacity for art is not bound to specific media, to our great enrichment, and it is a variety of forms that the body that can produce art takes. I do not see the same things the commentators do about form and execution, even if there are times where I watch and see something artistic at work. A feat of strength, skill, flexibility, power, sometimes individually, sometimes opposed. I suspect many viewers have a similarly surface-level understanding of what they are viewing, and yet, our collective inability to understand the details does not detract from appreciating the work as a whole. (In the same way, our inability to appreciate the details of most artistic endeavors doesn't detract from our appreciation of the whole.) There's something intuitive about scoring a goal, standout defense, an ippon-scoring throw, or watching a body flip several times in the air and stick the landing that brings out the appreciation of the person who has achieved this and the training they put into being able to achieve it. The use of high-framerate cameras and replay machines allows for minute examination of the details from the people who know what to look for, and can create cinematic experiences of the situations themselves that the audience that is experiencing it in real time often does not get to see. Although the live audience at any given arena of a certain level of wealth in this era also usually has at least one large screen that they can watch the action and the replays on when that action is far away from what they can see themselves. (The affordable seats for the plebes are usually in the space that is politely referred to as "the nosebleed section" for a reason.)
More and more, I guess, watching sport is like watching dance, even in those segments where dances don't happen from something particularly good happening for one side or another, and in those situations where dance ends up being in the sport section, like the inclusion of breaking in the 2024 Olympic program, things get even more artistic in their approach.
It's fun to watch.
(There are serious issues, though, about sport where money, discrimination, the labor of specific skin colors, genders, and those who profit from them, and all the other ways that capitalism, racism, sexism, and plenty of other isms take something that's supposed to be fairly innocuous and "universal" and turns it into proxies for major issues, if not outright scandals. Being part of the community of sport enjoyers does not absolve me from understanding these issues and making decisions about what I will accept and what I will not.)
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Weightlifting is one of those things that looks simple and betrays an entire amount of complexity along with the power on display. At the Olympic level, many of those women start with "the average body weight of a human of their gender" or above and go up from there.