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Fencing as done now looks legit stupid, so does racewalking. Javelin, while slightly more cool, is you throwing a stick. Mildly interesting for a few seconds.
by jalapenos 2y ago
Fencing as done now looks legit stupid, so does racewalking.
Javelin, while slightly more cool, is you throwing a stick. Mildly interesting for a few seconds.
Football is a top tier sport because it's entertaining. People will pay to see it. Hence there's money to be earned.
If someone wants to spend their time seeing how far they can throw a stick, cool, but they shouldn't be surprised they're waking up to an empty bank account every day.
- WalterBright 2y agoA contest between a man with a short sword and shield vs a man with a trident and a net would be very popular.
- wiether 2y agoActually, most of the sports are boring to watch. Everything is about context. Football is more entertaining than fencing? Go to a Sunday local game against two amateur teams where the only attendance is you and one of the player's uncle and you have to stay standing up next to the field while its pouring rain. Then go to a fencing contest with 100+ people in attendance, music and a great speaker. Now tell me which one looks more entertaining? I used to think like you, until I watched big darts tournaments and curling with a great speaker. It went from "uh, who watches darts? it's stupid!" to "quiet, I'm watching darts!". That's also why, depending on the country, popular sports are not the same, because they developped a culture and know how to make it entertaining.
- lupusreal 2y agoThe local football team matches in my small town cause traffic jams. The local fencing contest doesn't exist. I have no idea why so many people in this thread are trying to deny obvious trends in relative popularity between sports.
- graemep 2y agoWhat looks stupid and cool is purely subjective. Fencing is hard to follow because its fast and movements are subtle. > If someone wants to spend their time seeing how far they can throw a stick, cool, but they shouldn't be surprised they're waking up to an empty bank account every day. But if someone wants to see how well they can kick a ball its somehow worth paying them? The biggest factor here is that team sports are brandable and build brand loyalty in a way individual sports cannot.
- sahila 2y agoNo, the biggest factor is that certain sports are more entertaining than others - even individual sports - and I'd pay to watch some but not others. I'd pay more to watch cyclists do the tour de france or tony hawk go on a half-pipe or Mike Tyson fight someone than someone do a long jump; it's just more fun!
- iamacyborg 2y agoI dunno, the atmosphere at certain track and field events can be pretty great. See the Night of 10k PB’s in London as an example of an event done right, even if it’s just watching people run 25 laps.
- echoangle 2y agoThe criterium is "does it bring viewers" though, which is mostly objective. That a lot of people watch football games on TV and not a lot of people watch fencing is something that can be measured.
- shakna 2y agoMany sports have lost and struggled to get an audience again, before suddenly booming. Like cricket in Australia going downhill, and then Big Bash and women's leagues reigniting. What brings in viewers isn't a predictable measure of much. Like the weather forecast, you're not going to have much more than vague generalisations each season - and they can turn out very wrong.
- michpoch 2y ago> Football is a top tier sport because it's entertaining. Some dudes running and kicking a ball from left to right for 90+ minutes? They’re not even allowed to fight… From all the sports this is certainly one of the most boring ones.
- lupusreal 2y agoI don't like football, or American football either, but the numbers don't lie. Both those sports easily sustain themselves by drawing in audiences.
- jalapenos 2y agoI don't watch it either, tedious unless got skin in the result, but my tastes aren't the public's. Would be great if they wound back all the dainty fouls stuff though. Bring back two leg slide tackles etc. But they did all that precisely because the sport got so popular - costs of multi million dollar players getting legs broken wasn't acceptible.
- palata 2y agoHow to say you have no clue about those sports without saying you have no clue about those sports :-).
- mvc 2y ago[flagged]
- jalapenos 2y agoI use in real life, albeit much less than on the internet because there are more costs to being a disagreeable prick in real life - so I have to say the same thing but ten times slower as I word it diplomatically. No it doesn't make people like me but I get much more pleasure from disagreeing with and pushing against bad or wrongful things than being liked. Not saying that's good or bad, but that's how I am.
- perlgeek 2y agoPreference for specific sports is highly cultural. Example: In China, table tennis is king. Germany has the strongest table tennis league in Europe, and yet mainstream media mostly ignores it. Even the second and third soccer leagues get more media attention. If you ask me, most of soccer is very boring, players safely passing the ball back and forth, looking for openings. Somewhere between 0 and 5 goals in 90 minutes, if you see the 3 to 10 most interesting minutes, you haven't missed anything. How exciting /s. If we care about Olympic games, and maybe even medal rankings, we'd do well to discard notions that some forms of sport being more or less interesting based on cultural and personal preferences.
- braza 2y agoI know where the argument comes from, but at an extreme watching football with 22 folks running behind a ball in a slow game where 97% of the time nothing happens in terms of scoring, and in terms of tactics, today sounds like a handball game; it's boring (and I say that as a Brazilian and having attended more than 100+ in the stadium and more than 600 on TV). The entertainment in the Olympic games is in the fact that those folks (especially track and field) go to the extreme and human limit. In other words, for regular sports entertainment, I can go to watch Green Bay Packers vs. Vikings or Chelsea vs. Manchester City; for olympic entertainment (athletes pushing to their limits), Olympics are the place to watch.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Tesl 2y agoHow do you pick a number as specific as 600? I have absolutely no idea how many football games I've ever watched.
- thoroughburro 2y agohttps://youtu.be/C29OU8Zu-sg https://youtu.be/C29OU8Zu-sg
- diggan 2y agoHow is 600 more specific than any other number?
- filoleg 2y agoLikely just napkin math of “I watch about one game every week, that’s roughly 50 games per year, so over the course of 12 years i should be around 600 games”
- jalapenos 2y agoWhat you say sounds logical, but it's nevertheless observably obviously wrong, and that's what's important. All the figures bear out that people find football more entertaining than extreme feats. Maybe they like the slow pace and tension as it's more relatable to their own lives, or because the lulls in action allow some socializing or whatever. Otherwise they'd spend their weekends watching hours of shark wrestling or whatever.
- atwrk 2y agoThat's all purely a social construct - e.g. almost nobody on the planet outside the US watches football (or Cricket in the UK/India, or ...). Football is a thing in the US because it is a thing in the US: You can bond with your peers around it. The objective technicalities of the sport itself have nothing to do with it.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- DontchaKnowit 2y agoYo idk what youre talki g about with fencing. Its entertaining as hell
- jalapenos 2y agoOlympic fencing is straight up dumb - they do the equivalent of immediately charging to their deaths with a goofy flexi-"sword". If you want some real entertainment in that area watch HEMA fencing.
- Symbiote 2y agoFootball could be described in similarly demeaning terms, it isn't a useful point.
- pessimizer 2y agoSoccer is objectively more readable by spectators (even educated ones) than Olympic fencing. You're using the Law of Averages, which is not real.
- xen0 2y agoYour perception of Fencing and HEMA aside; I can promise you that if HEMA was an Olympic sport: * The same money problems that Fencing athletes face would apply to potential 'HEMA athletes'. * You would hate what HEMA becomes because now it's a sport that people try to win at, with the 'realism' aspect all but destroyed.
- jalapenos 2y agoYeah there still wouldn't be much money in it, it's pretty niche, and would probably only grow the viewership slightly. But at least it wouldn't be dumb.
- forgotpwd16 2y ago>HEMA fencing HEMA rapier fights look like Olympic fencing but in a ring (although seems linear movement is preferred anyway).
- datadrivenangel 2y agoFencing is a really fun sport to watch. Fast, high energy, high skill. Also swords.
- jalapenos 2y agoHow it's done at the Olympics is dumb, and pales in comparison in entertainment value to say HEMA fencing, where they actually wield the original weapons, rather than running at each other with goofy floppy wand sticks.
- edu 2y agoI’m biased because I’ve practiced fencing for a long time, but you keep saying it’s dumb without explaining why. First of all, which weapon do you refer to? Foil, epee or saber? They look quite different. Saber is very fast and might look as you say, both fencers jumping quickly to each other to get their right of way and score. Epee looks quite different, there’s no right of way and the score target is the whole body, so it tends to be slower. Foil is in the middle in terms of speed, and much more technical. IMO the issue with fencing is not that it looks “dumb”, but that it’s not easy to understand what is happening without knowing the rules. And then things happen fast.
- jalapenos 2y agoSo a layman like me finds it instinctively dumb for the following reasons. If I watch the hundred meter sprint, I kind of get it. They're aiming to run super fast. It's a relatable activity. See it in the movies. Would do it if a dog is chasing you. Swimming - crocodile chasing you. Javelin, they're chucking a spear really far - not so useful now, but I get it. People used to do that to fight or hunt. Others, like pole vault or weight lifting or gymnastics etc, have spectacle appeal. Now we come to fencing. I see two guys with what look somewhat like swords. A bit floppier, but I get they're not going to a real sword. They face off apart from each other. They look poised. All of this, so far, is not dumb. I get this. This is mimicking a sword fight. Like boxing is mimicking a fist fight. I feel suspense. I am ready to see this fight play out. Then they rush into each other and stab and get stabbed as if the swords were pool noodles. This is now clearly a dumb activity with no real world parallel, and there's also no spectacle since they're just poking or slapping each other with floppy little sticks. Not so entertaining. Basically, unlike say boxing, there's a distinct lack of hurt. Fight sports must include hurt of some kind to not appear dumb. My opinion is this could be rectified quite simply - raise the costs of getting hit, until the fight looks real. If a stab to the torso meant you're out of the competition, even if you stab them first, the whole thing would adjust immediately to stop looking dumb. So they could restructure the point system until the behaviour of the contestants was clearly trying to avoid getting stabbed (as if that were actually painful or deadly) while trying to stab the other person. More substantial swords that spectators can actually see would help too. Make the saber actually a saber.