Why Figure Skating Is Not A Sport

A sport needs to have a quantifiable way to determine a winner and a loser. There can be no debate about the scoring system. A ball must go into a goal or through a hoop; a runner must reach home or finish before the others. The winners run faster, jump higher, score more.

this column makes a pretty good point against ice skating (as well as most other Olympic sports that require human judges) being part of the Olympics. The basic gist is just that, a sport needs to have a quantifiable way to determine a winner and a loser and obviously, judged competitions don't exactly have that. It goes on further to say how other factors (such as appearance) plays a factor in ice skating when, how you look shouldn't even be considered in determining who gets the gold medal.

This makes for a pretty interesting sports debate. One that doesn't require you to have specific knowledge on sports, but rather general knowledge that most of you should know anyway. Simplest motion I could think of with regards to this issue would be This house believes that human evaluated competitions should be banned from the Olympics.

If you're wondering how exactly you can argue against a motion like that, think about it in terms of what the Olympics should be and whether or the characteristic of human judges really disqualify competitions like that from the Olympics. Compare and contrast that to other sports which are quantifiable (such as baseball) and determine what really qualifies a sport/competition to be in the Olympics.

Any other suggestions?