What Is A Sport?

It has been quite awhile since I have done a presentation and it really wasn’t as bad as I remember. In previous years I made it a goal to myself to get better at presenting as I used to hate how nervous I got before I walked to the front of the class to present. I’m happy to say, I don’t even think about it at all before I do a presentation anymore.

The topic of my presentation was about the continuity and change in mountain biking since the 1950s. If you don’t know already, mountain biking has only been around since the 70s so I had to expand outside of the sport to really understand how it came to be. I found in the late 1800s. The US military tried to use bikes to transport troops instead of using a car or horse. This lead to other countries catching on and bikes were soon made to be stronger and they could handle biking through rough terrain. If you want to learn more click here.

Moving onto the 70s, a group of friends from Marin County took some bikes and rode it down Mt. Tamalpais. Somewhere between then and today, it was considered a sport. I noticed this on many other presentations too. For example, Owen’s presentation was about motocross and he too had this jump from an activity to a popular sport. Same thing happened with Noah’s, Jude’s, and Thomas’ presentation. 

I remember asking Owen if there were any competitions in the 50s for motocross and he said there were a few small competitions. Wouldn’t this make it a sport? Or is it still just a fun activity?

In the 70s when mountain biking was first discovered, there weren’t any competitions but according to Google it was finally considered a sport then. Which doesn’t make sense as the definition says there has to be teams competing. So in conclusion I believe mountain biking and other sports similar are only considered sports when the best athletes are apart of a sponsored team (similar to F1 teams) and for mountain biking specifically I believe it was only really a sport in the late 80s when the UCI started to host bike races.

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