Why don't some sport activities, like swimming not qualify as athletic?

You are wrong. Swimming is athletics, swimmers are athletes.

What? Where did you get the idea that swimming isn’t an athletic event?

I think sitting in a “hot tub” is not athletics, with or without a glass of wine.

Well…depending on who you’re with it can become an athletic event. Especially with wine.

@Dutchess_III

You got my “drift”.

That’s just sinful, Trop Willie!

@flo!!! Where did you get the idea that swimming was not athletic?

You see the guys on the men’s team? They look like athletes to me! ;)

I dunno. Check out the Olympic swimmer dudes. I’m a straight guy, but damn, look at that.

@Call_Me_Jay Loll! You will appreciate this then. ;)

They do qualify as a sport.

Have you missed all the news regarding members of the USA swim teams earning medals?

Swimming is an Olympic sport. I have no idea why you think it’s not a sport.

They even have competition for synchronised swimming which is quite artistic, almost balletic and that qualifies as a sport as well.

I think they have Olympic badminton and ping pong too, don’t they?

And there’s Olympic golf this year. If you can do it while drinking beer, you’re not an athlete.

Hey yes, huh! I mean you have to have special rules, like, if you knock over the pitcher’s beer it’s a strike but it is too an athletic event!

Good point, softball is an athletic event. I’m not conceding golf, though. I hate golf. I was a caddy.

Golf is more like yoga. Plus you walk about 60 miles, unless you cheat and use a cart, which my mom refused to ever do.

We watched women’s beach volleyball last night. It was cool watching a sport that I’m “expert” in, that Rick is not, and being able to explain why something happened the way it did. To yell, “THERE IT IS!!” just based on the set up, before the ball is even spiked. I did my best to blather non-stop through the whole thing, like he does when he’s watching football, but I just didn’t have that much to say, other than, “Block it block it block it!...NICE!!!”
Then “Hey! Yo! One of my best hits ever, was a block I made that dropped down on my side of the night, right in front of me. From my soaring position in the air, arms reaching up, I folded my legs and brought my arms down and around, landed on my knees and picked that ball right back up and put it into play. It was great!”

I always believed swimming is an athletic activity, it didn’t make sense when I heard it’s not. But I guess I was wrong in trusting whoever said that. I tried to Google it “What makes an activity qualify as athletic?”

You need to stop talking to those people @flo!

@Dutchess_III I wasn’t talking to them, I don’t know them personally.

But I would like to see the description of what makes a sport atheletic, officially I mean. Isn’t there a search result for that?

Well, anything involving motion and exertion, I would think.

Definition of “athletics.”

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/athletics

“sports, games, and exercises that require strength and skill”

A runner friend of mine who was a college track runner and also competed in the Olympic Marathon trials told me that traditionally multi-sport organizers refer to track and field events as “athletics”. Of course competitors in other sports like swimming, volleyball, boxing etc are also athletes.

The Amateur Athletic Union oversaw all US Olympic participation until 1988, when the U S Olympic Committee was formed. Semantically, that means all Olympic sports qualify as athletic.

As someone who lives near Oakland California but has always been a San Francisco Giants fan, the “Oakland Athletics” might be considered a misnomer, but I think filmfann disagrees with me.

“We are all athletes. It’s just that some of us are in training and some of us aren’t.”
-Dr. George Sheehan

But where would someone get the idea that swimming doesn’t come under the heading athletics?

I didn’t bother with dictionaries’ definition because it wouldn’t help, the same way the average person would tell me iceberg lettuce is nutritional food, but a nutritionist would tell me nooo it’s not.

@flo because someone is very stupid? Who told you this and what was the context?