Are golf,motor racing, horse riding sports ? (soccer, pro, olympics)

[nzrugby]

One thing I have an issue with is any pastime being called a sport when old men and women can compete on a equal footing with young men.
Bit of a joke when some highly tuned golfer lights a cigarette on his way around the course, they are athletes ?.
Same as that young lady who drives single seat cars, an athlete ?

Then we have horse riding at the olympics where the horse does all the work again with women competing against men.

Unfair, they are strong,fit athletes ? fair enough, I retired from representative rugby union as a 280lb prop some time back , care to name one pro golfer, driver, or gee gee rider who could last longer than ten seconds in the front row of a union scrum ?

[sunsprit]

LOL ... OK, if you think that equine "sports" don't require physical ability, coordination, endurance, and communication skills of exceptional levels, so be it. But you'd be very wrong, and I bet you couldn't compete in endurance trail riding, cattle roping, dressage, steeplechase, or any of the equine "sports" at any level with all your muscle and brawn on the best day of your life and career bashing around in the "front row of a union scrum".

Nor could you be competitive as a horse race rider at 280 lbs of muscle and brawn.

I'd bet you couldn't last a couple of minutes on some of our stock horses before they'd have your sorry butt on the ground .... your 280 lbs is of muscle is no match for the strength of a 1,000 lb horse when he starts telling you he doesn't like what you're doing and wants you off his back, or when the horse's attention is on a perceived threat on the trail and you don't have the skills to tell the horse it's OK and to walk on. Those top level Olympic dresssage horses are not little machines waiting for your every command; they are very high strung athletes in their own right and demand a lot of skill and rider physical ability to pair up and perform.

There's a lot more to many "sports" than just pure muscle and brawn ....

At 280lbs, I doubt you could even fit into most competitive racing cars, let alone drive one competitively at the speeds that pro racers achieve. Again, if you think that all the happens there is the driver sits in luxury while the car does all the work ... you've just displayed your total ignorance of the "sport". There's a lot of physical activity going on in racing over the hours of a race; if it was "easy", everybody could be doing it at top competitive levels and it wouldn't be the crowd draw that it is ... but it's not easy.

It'd almost be funny to see a lightweight little old tennis player run your a** all over the court to exhaustion in a couple of minutes ... and that's a lot smaller "playing field" to be running around on than a soccer field. I wouldn't be surprised at all to see a 50 year old 110lb woman with much less than pro level skills run you around, and you'd even get to "rest" between the serves and action of the game. A pro would make hash of you in no time ....