Ninth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

There has been a long standing discussion whether sports can be considered as an art form. Various scholars have laid down their arguments on why sports can or cannot be considered as an art form. The sports-art conundrum originates from the lack of a formal definition of sports. The aim of this paper is to put an end to the sport - art conundrum by constructing the tools required to arrive at a formal analysis of sports. Building and gathering the tools required to arrive at a formal grammar of sports, thus formalizing sports, contributes to the majority of the work.The tools constructed for the formal analysis are graphical representation of sports, typologies and vocabulary. The graphical representation of sports takes shape with the help of the serializability factor, events and the governing rules of the sports. The graphical representation of sport allows us to glance at the concept of sport in a technical point of view - as a list of events and as a list of sequence of events, instead of granting sports, a higher respectability by juxtaposing sport with art. Typologies and Vocabularies help in the abstraction of the graphical representations of sports.The abstraction allows us to arrive at a formal analysis of sports, which is the main focus of this paper.