Yahoo Sports Writer Says Figure Skating Is Not a Sport

Dan Wetzel -- a sports writer for Yahoo -- says that figure skating is not a sport. Wetzel concedes that figure skaters are athletes and that their craft requires "speed, strength, agility, dexterity, balance and conditioning." Wetzel, however, argues that figure skating cannot qualify as a sport because picking the winner involves subjectivity:

A sport requires a quantifiable way to determine a winner and a loser. There can be no debate about the scoring system. A puck must go into a net. A skier must get down the hill fastest. A short-track speedskater must finish ahead of the pack.

For safety reasons – you can’t have all the bobsleds go down at once – a clock is used to determine the winner in some sports. The clock is not subjective, though.

Figure skating is about what a human judge interprets as success. They bring their own biases, beliefs and preferences. It’s abstract. As such, it should be properly defined as a competition, not a sport.

I agree that figure skating involves subjective judging -- especially the artistic impression marks -- but there are established rules and required elements in figure skating. Failure to include these elements results in a designated point reduction. A 2-foot landing on a jump or a fall also results in a specific reduction.

Furthermore, having numerous judges -- rather than one -- allows for the results to get very close to an objective outcome. Kim Yu Na won by a mile. No one came close.

Furthermore, by Wetzel's definition, a lot of things that he would probably consider "sports" are not sports. In particular, sports that involve referees making decisions about player infractions -- i.e., football, hockey, and basketball -- involve a lot of subjectivity. A "bad" call can determine the outcome of a game.

Referees can also judge a player's progress, and this involves subjectivity as well. Was the player "out of bounds," where was the end of "forward progress," did the player's knee "touch the ground" before catching the ball? These questions involve subjective decision making. It is not scientific.

The situation with referee errors became so bad in the NFL one year, that the league made penalty review available; still, controversies exist. Numerous referees help weed out erroneous calls, but this is exactly what helps make figure skating more objective.

Finally: who cares? An Olympic sport is whatever the Olympics Organization accepts as a sport. From the very inception of the modern Olympics, sports that combine artistry and athleticism (like gymnastics and figure skating) have always been a part of the games. So, I am going to sit back and enjoy all of the games before they end. I advise Wetzel to do the same!

Edited: This article was updated to include examples of a quantifiable merit in figure skating.