James Cracknell’s milestone is not sport but masochism in search of meaning | Andrew Anthony
The obsessive pursuit of impressive but empty accomplishments gives cause for psychological concernThere’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...