A game with a sporting chance: Is recognition in the cards?

The English Bridge Union is pushing for legal recognition of the card game as a sport in the hope of reaping public funding. But will the courts agree? And what is the difference between a sport and a game anyway?

There’s a sure-fire way of starting a conversation in a room full of sports fans. Tell them that football – or cricket, golf, hockey, or whatever it is they’re rooting for – is a game, not a sport.

And then make yourself scarce.

The deceptively simple question, “Is it a sport?”, has almost certainly been around since the 8th century BC, when the ancient Greeks decided that staging regular games at Olympia would be a more agreeable alternative to the bloody and costly wars waged regularly between the various city states.

The ancient Olympics featured a strictly limited menu of sports – chariot races, horse races, discus, long jump, javelin, running and wrestling.

One can only imagine the conversations in the ancient tavernas about 393AD when the Roman emperor Theodosius banned the Olympic Games as too pagan, preferring the more “civilised” events popularised at the Circus Maximus in Rome.

“Yes, Alexander, it’s entertaining and all that, but can two slaves cutting each other to ribbons for the amusement of the hoi polloi really be considered a sport?”

And as a case before a British court demonstrated last week, the question “But is it a sport?” continues to preoccupy us 2,000 years later.

It is, insists the English Bridge Union, time to recognise bridge – the sedate and cerebral card game popular with those of more advanced years – as a sport.

The EBU is the proud official guardian of an internationally popular card game with roots that can be traced back to 16th century England and which, over the centuries, has enjoyed such names as triumph, trump, ruff, slam, ruff and honours, whisk and swabbers, whisk, and whist.

Now, the organisation wants bridge to be classified as a sport by Sport England, the government body that doles out hundreds of millions of pounds of funding through the 46 sport governing bodies it recognises.

For Sport England, the request is a bridge too far. But at the high court of justice in London last week, the EBU won permission to mount a full-blown judicial review of its decision.

Over the years, many have tried to define the essential characteristic that makes a sport a sport, although not all have done so with an entirely open mind. Ernest Hemingway, the macho American author, is often credited with the observation that there are “only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering. All the rest are merely games”.

Likewise, the American comedian George Carlin had a long list of non-sports, including running (“anything we can all do can’t be a sport”), swimming (“just a way to keep from drowning”) and sailing (merely “a way to get somewhere. Riding the bus isn’t a sport, why should sailing be?”).

All this really tells us is that if one is a football fan, then football is a sport and everything else a mere game, played by losers.

But where better to look for a definitive answer to the question than the International Olympic Committee, bearer of the torch handed down by the ancient Greeks.

The motto of the Olympic movement, as reinvented in 1896 by the French nobleman Pierre de Coubertin, is “Citius, Altius, Fortius”, Latin – and not curiously, Greek – for “Faster, Higher, Stronger”.

This could serve as a useful yardstick for working out if an activity measures up as a sport. But de Coubertin also left us with this conveniently Tweet-sized definition: “Sport is the habitual and voluntary cultivation of intensive physical effort.”

In other words, if it is not making you sweat, it is not a sport.

But even de Coubertin’s Olympics could be said to have dropped the ball, right from the off, by including shooting among the otherwise sweat-inducing nine sports featured in the first modern games in Athens in 1896.

In the intervening years, Olympic sports have come and gone. Polo and baseball had their hour in the Olympic sun, while others such as archery and tennis have been introduced, dropped and then reintroduced.

Currently, the Olympic Movement recognises 41 summer sports and disciplines, and 15 winter. But not, so far, any “mind sports”. When it comes to the likes of bridge and chess, the IOC has adopted a slightly confusing stance.

In 1995 it recognised the international bodies of bridge and chess and by 1999, when the IOC “acknowledged that bridge and chess should be considered sports”, their inclusion looked like a slam dunk. But in 2002, while reviewing the request of the sports to be included, the Olympic Programme Commission concluded that “they should not be eligible”.

While there was, said the commission, “no global definition of the difference between a sport and a game, the most commonly accepted element of a sport is physical exertion in the conduct of competition”.

Neither chess nor bridge has taken this defeat lying down, and in setting up alternative “Mind Sport” Olympiads, the advocates of brain games have thrown up an oddity that could challenge the next considerations of the Olympic Programme Commission.

Meet Diving Chess, the world championships of which will be staged in a swimming pool in a London gym this July.

The game is played underwater and players have for as long as they can hold their breath to make their move.

Well, why not? Consider the mystery that is the Olympic sport of synchronised swimming: dancing, with a chance of drowning.

Back in court, meanwhile, the English Bridge Union is rubbing its hands with glee at the prospect of a rematch with Sport England at the high court, and it is cash as much as pride that hangs on the outcome.

The EBU’s bid for sporting status for bridge began back in 2011, when it realised that if Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs could be persuaded to recognise bridge as a sport, its members would no longer have to pay VAT, currently at 20 per cent, on competition fees.

It was then that the EBU discovered the taxman took his definition of what constituted a sport from Sport England, the UK government agency charged with ensuring that, for the sake of national health and honour, as many people as possible take part in a sport.

Then the EBU realised that getting Sport England to change its mind could have other, even more lucrative benefits beyond VAT. “If we’re recognised as a sport by Sport England it opens up funding opportunities for facilities and so on, both for the EBU and for clubs, counties and local bridge groups,” says Peter Stockdale, communications officer for the bridge union.

It certainly does. By the end of its 2013-2017 budget cycle, Sport England will have distributed £493 million of National Lottery money through the 46 sport governing bodies it recognises.

But Sport England’s legal position remains that a sport is not a sport unless it involves physical activity – and that shuffling cards does not count.

“The starting point of the definition of sport is physical activity,” Kate Gallofent QC, the barrister for Sport England, told the court. “Bridge cannot ever satisfy this definition.”

Certainly, if it came down to a people’s vote, the chances are that bridge would not make the cut.

Last year the news site Reddit conducted a poll of readers to see which of 53 activities they would describe as a sport. Fifteen fell by the wayside, and poker – the nearest thing to bridge in the survey – was at the very bottom of the deck, regarded as a sport by only 10 per cent of respondents.

Even darts, croquet and chess fared better. In fact, more people judged even competitive eating to be more of a sport than a card game.

A high court victory for bridge would, of course, raise the possibility of other non-physical games being considered as eligible for a place at the Sport Council funding trough.

“Chess has certainly shown an interest in being involved in the case,” says Mr Stockdale.

But, if bridge and chess are to be sports, why not such games such as tiddlywinks, which does, after all, require a modicum of physical skill and a not insignificant degree of hand-eye coordination?

Why not indeed, says Andrew Garrard, Secretary of the English Tiddlywinks Association. Tiddlywinks, he says, “is a sport at which England has led the world for 60 years, combining the deftness of darts, the complexity of curling and the strategy of sprint cycling”.

What’s more, it remains true to the Olympic ideal. The association, he says “has remained aloof in its belief that it should represent only amateur play, otherwise tiddlywinks would be the bar by which Sport England’s other sports would be judged and found wanting”.

Sport England, limbering up to give battle in the high court to defend its definition of sport – and control of the vast funds at its disposal – remains unimpressed by all of this, and devoted to an ideal first expressed by the ancient Olympians.

“Basically,” a spokesman told The National, “you have to sweat to get the money.”

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