Is chess a sport?
By Rune Vik-Hansen
Before arguing whether chess is a sport and athletics, let’s first do away
with the formalism:
According to (Norwegian) Wikipedia,
“athletics” (“idrett”, from old Norse, “id”, work or activity and
“drott”, power, strength or perseverance), in addition to bodily
or physical accomplishments, which govern contemporary understanding, originally
referred to all forms or expressions of highly regarded skills like music,
poetry and knowledge of runes. While athletics emphasises the athletes’
efforts and control of the body (skiing, skating, boxing, tennis, handball
and football), sports, meaning "anything
humans find amusing or entertaining”, at the same time appreciate the
use of facilities, equipment, tools, devices, means of transport or animal
as a basic condition (sailing, equestrianism and motor racing). Today the
concepts are more often used interchangeably.
To begin with, we might say that all sports or athletic sports belonging
under the Wikipedian definition amount to being “only” “play” or “a game”
since these are ruled based activities. Claiming chess “is just a game”,
because it is rule based, and therefore unworthy of undue attention, is
a tautology and explains nothing. Mind you, the activity we call life
may also be perceived to be a game with rules and recipes. When asking if
chess is a sport or athletics, what we’re really asking is if chess players
perform, and more so, in the physical sense of the word.
When Børre
Rognlien, president or chairman of the Norwegian Athletic Association
(NIF) and Widar
Fossum, former vice president of the Norwegian Chess Federation (NSF)
state that chess is not athletics because the NSF is not a member of the
NIF, this is self-contradictory. The NSF not being a member of the NIF merely
goes to show that the NSF is not a member of the NIF, not that chess in
and of itself is not athletics.
"Sports president: - Carlsen is not an
athlete" says Børre Rognlien in this
VG article, explaining why the country's and world's best chess player
was not nominated for the male athlete of the year award
"Chess is not a sport" says this
article in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten,
which has at the time of writing 65 readers commenting
Despite agreeing in newspapers’ commentary fields that games and activities
like chess, bridge, archery, dart, shooting etc., involve performance of
some kind, still, the physical aspect seems to saturate contemporary understanding
of what a sporting or athletic performance is. In a country obsessed with
countables and quantifiables – what cannot be measured does not exist
– we may ask if not the accent on the physical excludes the possibility
for a finer perception of what “performance” or “achievement” might be.
Few doubt mental gladiators perform, but what, where and how?
Is “blood, sweat and tears” (Johan Kaggestad, Norwegian athletics coach
and TV commentator) or “motion” (1500-meter runner, Henrik Ingebrigtsen)
the only criterion in a sporting or athletic performance or achievement?
The prevalent preference for the physical may be argued to be grounded
in the still deeply rooted Cartesian (after René
Descartes, 1596-1650, above in a Frans Hals painting) dualism matter
(body) vs mind (soul), representing two ontologically separate categories
impossible to combine into a higher unity.
Not until Maurice
Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), in his Phenomenology of Perception (1945),
suggested that we know, experience and are-in-the-world rather through
our body, consciousness (cogito) was perceived as the primary source of
knowledge and experience, and the body a mere appendage. While philosophy
and religion emphasise the mind rather than the body, Ponty reminds us that
the brain (still) is part of the body (sic!) and thus relaunches or reintroduces
man as a homogenous unity consisting both of mind and matter, body
and soul, mutually interdependent.
Just as religion and philosophy ignore the corporeal significance for knowledge
and experience, Rognlien and Ingebrigtsen, in their emphasis of physical
motion, go to the opposite extreme and accentuate the body at the expense
of the brain, as if arms and legs move all by themselves.
Image: Wiki,
courtesy of National Institutes of Health
However, today we know that any corporeal motion starts off with electric
impulses subconsciously triggered in the oubliettes of the brain. The brain,
which processes a 100 million million (0.1 quadrillion) instructions per
second (in daily activities), and the speed of thought clocked at somewhere
between 0.5-100 m/s (between
550 and 750 milliseconds for the information or perception of something
to reach the brain and to be comprehended and interpreted), testify to motion.
Since external corporeal motion, arms and legs, depends on internal cerebral
motion, it is not yet clear why external corporeal motion should weigh heavier
concerning the definition of sports or athletics.
In other words, there is no principal difference between Magnus lifting
his arm and sacking a knight or Petter (Northug, Norwegian cross-country
skier) using his poles to stroke himself forward; both actions spring from
subconsciously triggered impulses in the brain. Strokes and chess moves
have the same source. And voila! We have compared apples with oranges!
We may therefore conclude that the definitions of sports and athletics
are not based on what is really going on but on what we observe,
and stem from a time before organised tournament chess and insights into
the brain. We see arms and legs but not neurons and synapses.
As long as different activities yield different reactions, even if lowest
common multiples may be found, “corporeal or physical performance” as a
criterion on whether you do athletics or not, appears irrelevant because
at times we do have “one of those days” and definitions do not depend on
our day-to-day condition. Are those with the most “blood, sweat and tears”
the greatest athletes? What if you die on the playing field or during physical
exertion? If not, we have to grade and define corporeal performance and
where to draw the line? Do physical or bodily performances or skills lend
themselves to precise defining or grading? Since measuring or quantifying
chess skills and chess knowledge is impossible, the rating system is our
best shot. What, then, makes for a decent rating? Magnus’ latest peak? And
how to decide which activities and disciplines merit to be recognised as
athlethics (idrett)? In the days of yore, music, poetry and runes, but today?
To play chess, professionally or not may be compared to studying for and
taking an exam. Chess players are graduating all the time, before, under
and after tournaments. Professionals work on their chess between 7-8 hours
a day and perform theoretically, practically, mentally and physically. They
practice different types of positions; openings, middlegames and endgames.
They work on their tactics (reflexes and intuition) and scrutinise positions
to improve their positional feeling and ability to calculate variations,
i.e. visualising sequences of moves. During the game they worry about their
preparations (do I remember them and are they good enough?), the result
of the game, their opponent for the next round and the outcome of the tournament.
They have to be red alert (“Beware! The man on the other side, has bad intentions”,
Bent Larsen) and keep their calm in attack as well as in defence. They worry
if they can win good positions against stronger opposition and must take
care not to underestimate lower rated opponents. They get headaches and
sleep poorly while the mind grinds out today’s game.
All this mental tension and exertion manifests itself physically –
well known is Karpov’s ten kilos weight loss during his World Championship
match against Kasparov in 1984/85 – and that the young replace the
old. Just like our experience of headaches hinges on material prerequisites,
chess players’ experience of physical fatigue depends on neural collaboration
during strain and therefore makes it difficult with regard to the definition
of sports or athletics to argue why more traditional physical exertion should
weigh heavier than chess players’ fatigue resulting from strong concentration
over time (in studies as well as in tournament play).
Kaggestad mentions the competitive aspect as essential to whether something
qualifies as a sport and, we may add, the competitive aspect transforms
(any) activity into sport, if not necessarily into athlethics. According
to Wikipedia, chess may therefore be a sport and athletics due to
physical exertion (more so during tournaments than casual games), possible
use of some device, tool or equipment and scoring points; 1 for a
win, ½ for a draw and 0 for a loss. Thus, the definition also covers blindfold
chess, where players exchange only the coordinates while playing. The expression
“to become a sport” precisely ties the competitive aspect to the concept
of sports, since we do not say “to become athletics”, suggesting you may
exercise athletics without competing or scoring points. Since use of equipment,
tools or devices is possible but not imperative, the competitive aspect
appears more relevant to whether chess qualifies as a sport. By scoring
points, one exerts oneself more, because more “is at stake” – Gadamer.
|
Hans Georg
Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics or theory of interpretation,
formulated in his magnum opus, Truth and Method, 1960, deals
with how we, through our prejudices, expectations and presuppositions,
“encounter” a work of art, say a painting or a text, and where this
encounter jeopardises our understanding or interpretative framework,
even if the painting is merely hanging on the wall. Think of a painting
or a text that annoyed you. Congratulations, you’ve been played. A more
convoluted point of bringing Gadamer into the discussion is that something
may be at stake for both those who claim chess is a sport and those
who claim chess is “just a game.” |
The debate over whether chess is a sport and/or athletics (idrett) or “just
a game”, may be more significant than what first meets the eye, and as in
so many other contexts, it’s all about money. Doing sports or athletics
is considered desirable, with athletes serving as examples and role models.
Sports and athletics are thought to develop a host of qualities, attributes
and characteristics, e.g. team spirit, perseverance, ability to plan/analyse
and carry out, not to mention the noble art of defeat, i.e. it’s not the
winning that counts but the taking part etc. If chess, as we have seen,
lends itself to be defined as sports and athletics, chess may attract substantially
increased commercial attention (read: sponsorships).
About the author
 |
Born in 1968, Rune Vik-Hansen graduated from the
University of Tromsø in 1999 with a thesis on Heidegger's concept of
Dasein. Other fields of interests are metaphysics, ontology, theory
of science and political ethics.
Besides having worked as a teacher on different levels, Vik-Hansen also
writes philosophical texts, chronicles, papers and essays as well as
children’s literature. He is currently actively involved as a mentor
on writing, philosophy and chess projects with school children in New
York City. |
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