aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart") wrote:
Some of these are pretty reasonable! If you allow them for anyone, you probably make it so to compete at all requires everyone to follow suit. That's bad when those things have life-altering health implications.
But all of these things ultimately shape who is allowed to compete at the peak levels.
it's not always good! Honestly baseball is way less interesting to watch in the majors because everyone's great, all the plays are maximal capability, and it's kinda predictable. You don't end up with many of those "holy shit what just happened? that was awesome!" plays that are so much fun to watch. So as a spectator, these rules aren't always great. Sometimes you want to nerf the peak performance until the game is interesting. Sometimes you don't.
In F1, a huge part of the game is the nerding out about the rules and how to evade them cleverly to get peak performance. And the inside baseball on that is way more fun to watch than the race. The race is just cars going zoom and occasionally crashing, interrupted by amazing choreography in the pits.
There's a reason women's soccer is so much more fun for me to watch than men's. It's not been optimized so hard that the game isn't predictable in kind if not outcome. Plus the camaraderie shown is great.
But looking at all this, we gotta ask, what's sport's function in our societies? Why do we do this?