Musing more about team sports\u2026\r\n
It was suggested in Another Place that Formula One racing is a team sport. I don\u2019t think it is, but that\u2019s an arbitrary assessment that I don\u2019t think I could easily defend. Is it because the equipment includes a motor engine? Or because all but one of the team remain stationary? Or is it because it\u2019s a race, and I don\u2019t generally include races as team sports? Because I don\u2019t think of relay races as team sports, which is also arbitrary and difficult to defend.\r\n
Thinking about races and sports\u2026 the big difference is that there is no team playing defense<\/i> in a race, isn\u2019t it? I think that\u2019s a big part of what feels like a team sport to me: one team is trying to put a ball in a goal, and the other team is trying to prevent that, and put the ball in a goal themselves, which the first team is trying to prevent. The \u2018ball\u2019 and the \u2018goal\u2019 are different, sport to sport, and the game\u2019s rules and constraints are going to be different, but basically: ball, goal, defense.\r\n
Digression<\/i>: Both cricket and baseball are complicated in this regard, as the team that is trying to put the ball in the goal is generally considered the defense, and the score is not determined by how often the ball is put in the goal but rather by things that the other team is doing while defending the goal by moving the ball far enough from it. The ball-in-goal part is, essentially, the equivalent of other sports\u2019 time-clock. And also there are functional equivalents of the ball-in-goal, to the point where most batters (or batsmen) get out without the ball hitting the catcher\u2019s glove or the wicket at all. I think that in both sports, people tend to not think about them as ball-in-goal sports at all for decades at a time, and then suddenly there\u2019s a trend that focuses more on the pitcher or bowler and everybody remembers that the team that starts with the ball really is the offense. End Digression.\r\n
In a race of any kind, the object is still to put the ball in the goal (the \u2018ball\u2019 being generally the athlete, with or in or on a horse or a car or a bicycle, or just as a person, possibly underwater) but there isn\u2019t anyone trying to prevent that. There can be, in some races, some tactical aspect of delaying the other players, but I believe that it\u2019s always a secondary tactic to maximizing your own speed. I\u2019m not really familiar with auto racing, but that\u2019s true in horseracing, at any rate.\r\n
So maybe I have difficulty thinking of races as team sports. Not that they aren\u2019t sports<\/i>, and not that they aren\u2019t often played in teams<\/i>, but they don\u2019t seem like team sports.\r\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I>
-Vardibidian.\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger doesn't have any category-type reasons or not counting doubles tennis, though.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[210],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20401"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20401\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20406,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20401\/revisions\/20406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}