Latest Breaking News
In reply to the discussion: Huge car crash mars Nationwide Series race at Daytona [View all]JackRiddler
(24,979 posts)Those are games. So is car-racing. So is any other contest with rules for winning. Game rules and even strenuous activity and rapid reaction in themselves don't make an athletic sport. Athletic sports for me are defined by the primacy of athletic performance and the near-exclusive use of animal muscles and gravity (or wind or sea motion) as the energy sources, not 800 horsepower monster engines. (Is battle of the monster trucks a sport?)
In your dissing figure skating, you're showing your own cultural prejudices. Is it not manly enough for you? Nothing short of gymnastics is more athletic and more of a pure sport, I'd say.
Really NASCAR is culturally and spiritually closer to professional wrestling, and almost as fixed -- given that the most important element is who built the better machine. Drivers are one essential element, but the machine is the main thing. Drivers are human faces to pretend this is mostly a human contest when it is mostly a technological exhibition. It's closer to modern warfare than to the popular team sports (which of course are heavy on their metaphoric relation to war).