On Sports That Aren't, part 2

“Everybody was Kung Fu fighting

Those cats were fast as lightning

In fact it was a little bit fright'ning

But they fought with expert timing”

~ ‘Kung Fu Fighting’, by Carl Douglas

from his album “Kung Fu Fighting and Other Great Love Songs”, 1974

A while back, I pondered a bit about the difference, in my mind, between a sport and a game (you can read that post here).  It seems to me that many games seek to see themselves as elite sport when really, they are not.  Elite sport is the very apex of physical and mental competition.  I argued, at the time, that activities such as horse racing, golf, fishing and hunting cannot be seriously considered part of the pantheon we know as sport.

It was on the topic of hunting that I admit that I was challenged.  As a pacifist, I don't like guns.  I understand the need to have them and use them in remarkable circumstances, but I am not a fan.  A gun is a weapon; weapons have no place in elite sport.  Mixing guns and with any other activity (such as skiing, as in the biathlon) does not make it a sport either.  If it did, then anything added to legitimate sport could be considered likewise.  What's preventing some enterprising soul from adding knitting to running and calling it a track and field event?

What then of Olympic pursuits such as the hammer throw, shot put and javelin?  The instruments of such competitions find their origins as weapons too.  Quite true.  It is perhaps amusing to note that the hammer throw was not always a heavy ball on a wire but an actual sledge hammer.  The javelin is essentially a spear.  The shot put was once either a heavy rock or a cannonball.  These facts, and that all the official measurements in the competition rules are expressed in imperial measures, lends these contests a faintly comical air.   

Yes, it's also true that the marathon has similar ancient origins to these 'throwing' sports, celebrating Pheidippides's fabled run from the site of the Battle of Marathon to Athens (whereupon he keeled over dead), but I doubt there's a fair argument against the marathon as indeed an elite activity, even if the exact distance (26 miles, 385 yards) is a rather odd one.

So, to sum up, any contest involving a weapon, ancient or modern, gets the big ol' thumbs down from the On Writing Blog.

Same goes for boxing, and other hand-to-hand combat contests.  I have very similar issues with boxing as I have with hunting; it's barbaric.  Boxing and its ilk have a unique 'quality' that other sports fortunately lack - the object of the exercise is to hurt your opponent as badly and as quickly as possible.  I'll have to cop to the inevitable accusations that I lack the stomach for such things.  As stated, I am something of a pacifist, and there is plenty enough violence in this world without adding to it in the name of sport.  Besides, I suspect that boxing is not dissimilar to horse racing in that it may very well find itself without much following at all if it wasn't for the gambling element, or indeed the pay-per-view receipts.

Another selection of sports that I feel lacks the merits of genuine sport are those activities that are synchronised, such as synchronised swimming or synchronised diving.  Has anyone else ever watched these things in the Olympics and wondered if they'd just stepped into the Twilight Zone?  They are supremely strange.  I'll concede that they take skill, fitness and training, but there is an inherent silliness about it all.  If indeed sports can be improved by merely doubling an element of it, then why not do this with other competitions?  Surely a second football added to an AFL or soccer match is no more a foolish idea than synchronised-anything, or reducing cricket to a mindless twenty tip-it-and-run overs for that matter?

I also take issue with the kinds of competitions where the contest is decided by subjective voting, usually by a panel of judges.  While there is plenty of subjectivity in the process of sport (ever yelled at an umpire who has a seemingly casual familiarity with the rules?), it doesn't take much of a stretch before the Ukrainian judge is making deals with the one from Turkey, and the next thing you know, the Olympics starts becoming the Eurovision Song Contest.  Sure, it may be entertaining, but the winner usually ends up being a cross-eyed hunchback drag queen from Kazakhstan.

I suppose that in the end, I prefer my sport to be a little more meat-and-potatoes.  A physical and mental test.  Sublime skills, gracefully executed.  An exciting spectacle.  True athletes, testing their mettle against each other, and sometimes even against themselves, exploits rising above the achievements of the common man.  And above all, let's call sports sports, and let's call games something other than sports.

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On The Biggest Loser

“Your butt is wide, well mine is too

Just watch your mouth or I'll sit on you

The word is out, better treat me right

'Cause I'm the king of cellulite”

~ ‘Fat’, lyrics by Weird Al Yankovic

from his album “Even Worse”, 1988

Reality TV is an odd beast.  Reality television shows are so named due to their lack of a script and outside of the hosts, the players are supposedly people just like you and I. That's the theory at least.  Since reality TV in most of its current guises doesn't resemble any kind of reality that I'm familiar with, I suspect that those two defining pillars are shaky at best.  Another factor would have to be judicious editing, which creates the strong suggestion of storylines, embellishes characters (both heroic and villainous), and designs dramatic tensions where little likely exist in isolation.

I've been suckered into watching more of these shows than I'm proud to admit.  My family too.  A particular favourite amongst my household, much to my chagrin, is The Biggest Loser (Channel 10).

I remember when this show was first announced, I assumed it was a show designed to humiliate the less fortunate among us.  I was never so naive as to think that reality TV would not slump to such lows, as shows of the calibre of The Bachelor, Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire, Big Brother and Jersey Shore will attest.  It seems reality TV never ceases to find new and unusual ways to take advantage of the physically weak, the intellectually dull, the emotionally frail, and the morally bankrupt in the zealous pursuit of viewers’ loyalties and advertisers’ dollars.

 The Biggest Loser, for the uninitiated, has us follow a number of overweight and obese contestants as they attempt to lose as much weight as possible over a number of weeks.  They do this by altering their diet and exercising under the direction of team leaders, essentially personal trainers.  The trainers are suitable for the task, lean and muscular, both buff and holding an often informal relationship with the English language.  Shannon Ponton, in keeping with the show's custom of never allowing an opportunity for cross-promotion go begging, has released a self-help book entitled (I wish I was kidding) Hard'n Up.  Über-serious pseudo-drill sergeant Steve "The Commando" Willis wears camouflage pants and black boots, and is so tough he wears dark glasses indoors.  Tiffany Hall trains her "ninjas" in a groan-worthy "do-Jane" (as opposed to a dojo).  Never does an episode go by without these cartoon characters delivering some pompous pseudo-intellectual pop-psychology.

Worse still are this season's contestants.  While there have been some remarkable success stories in previous seasons in terms of weight loss and lifestyle changes (mainly consisting of getting jobs hawking weight loss products in the ad breaks during latter seasons of the show - how's that for pop culture eating itself?), it seems that this year's contestants have assumed that they will have similar success by virtue of merely appearing on the show.  Hardly any of them have been willing to allow the trainers to seriously push them to their limits in order to achieve significant weight losses.  The trainers are constantly claiming that they can "sense that something is wrong", that so-and-so is not "doing the work", that they will confront them with some "hard truths", and then breathlessly advise the viewing audience afterwards that the contestant has "really turned a corner".  The contestant is usually just as half-arsed the next day.

Of course this just adds to the incessant, maddening drama of the whole thing.  Given that the contestants are largely secluded from the outside world at "Camp Biggest Loser", supplied plenty of healthy food, educated in regards to their lifestyles and given access to state-of-the-art gym facilities, there is no earthly reason why they shouldn't lose weight hand over chubby fist.  The truth is that these people often have significant psychological baggage associated with their immense size, none of which is helped by appearing on what is essentially a glorified game show.  I've come to a rather stunning conclusion that lends some sense to what is an increasingly bizarre exercise.

The Biggest Loser is not about weight loss.  Not at all.

Consider first the main theme of this year's series, Biggest Loser - Singles.  All the contestants are without partners, ranging from the "never-been-kissed" to the lonely to the divorced, which the show has promoted heavily.  The show’s host mercilessly interrogates the contestants as to their longings and heartbreaks and presents their breakdowns in vivid high-definition technicolour.  The message writ large is that if you are overweight, you can abandon all hope that anyone will ever love you for who you are.  The contestants’ stories are the entertainment, and when two of the younger contestants this season began to show affection towards one another, the production was all over them like white on rice.  The young man involved, a twenty-year-old named Hamish, became a favourite of my kin, due to his propensity to tantrum and bawl at the merest of provocations.  The show pushed his relationship with twenty-four-year-old Michelle hard as the discovery of love between two mature young people, when in reality it seemed more like puppy love between children.  When an exercise-averse Hamish was inevitably given the boot, the producers found several excuses to bring him back into the show.  They did something very similar in the first season when public favourite Adro was dumped near the show's conclusion.  The show's producers created a ludicrous contrivance for Adro to re-enter the show and he went on to eventually win the grand prize.  

Furthermore, consider one of the show's staples: the element of the contest known as Temptation.  Temptation is where the contestants are offered treats in the form of calorie rich foods, the acceptance and consumption of which allows them to compete against each other for immunity from eviction from the show.  Contestants will often gorge themselves stupid during Temptation only to lose to another contestant who was willing to go just that little bit further.  Young Hamish was a frequent player of the Temptation game, his eyes lighting up gleefully every time another tasty morsel was offered to him.  It can't possibly be argued that a show that is dedicated to weight loss would assemble such a group of people, with all their frailties and proclivities and offer them rewards of that which got them to the state they're in to start with.  At best, Temptation is morally suspect.

It's really all about the drama, the wailing and the gnashing of teeth.  This season's been positively obese with it.

The current season of the show is ending very soon, and I doubt this year's denouement will see the examples of extraordinary weight loss that previous seasons have. There just hasn't been much spark with this bunch, no fire in their oversized bellies.  There is often a discernible shift in the mental attitude of the contestants during the season when the lifestyle changes they embark on 'click'.  Not so much this year.  The nature of the current series appears to have delivered participants with more baggage than previous seasons.   Perhaps this is also a conceit aimed at delivering more visceral drama than ever as escalation is needed to maintain the audience's attention and avoid the apathy that comes with familiarity.  This baggage has been more than the beefcake trainers have been able to overcome and, using the show's parlance, the contestants have repeatedly failed to "pull big numbers".  The show is unconcerned; as I said, it's not at all about weight loss.

I'll not be sad to see this season end.  It's also likely I'll rue the day when another season is announced and the overwhelming barrage of cheesy advertisements begins to assault us next year.  I'll be looking for ways to distract the family from engaging with the show.  I'll try, and maybe even succeed.

In the meantime, doesn't this next season of Masterchef look promising?

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