There’s a hoary old debate about what constitutes a sport as opposed to a pastime or an activity. Is darts, for example, a sport? Angling? Mountaineering? There are all manner of ways of answering the question that are to do with codification, exertion, competition. But ultimately, particularly for participants, sharp lines of definition probably seem rather arbitrary.
In recent years those intense activities that were once deemed to lie beyond the borders of sport have been granted a new and inclusive designation: extreme sports, a group where you’ll find such diverse enterprises as cave diving, free climbing and base jumping. Each to his own, even if, to borrow Nabokov’s phrase, I would sooner open a sardine can with my penis than go cave diving. But perhaps the distinction is to be made not between sports and activities but the spirit in which they are taken up. I am thinking here of the celebrated return to competitive rowing of the Olympic gold medallist James Cracknell, when, last Sunday, he became the oldest man, at 46, to win the Boat Race.
Related: James Cracknell is a great Boat Race story but should age eclipse youth? | Richard Williams
Related: James Cracknell, 46, rows himself into the Boat Race record books
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