Competitively, athletes have been throwing balls for thousands of years, they have been frantically mashing buttons for twenty. 

The Olympic Committee have announced an e-sports series taking place in June of 2023, adding fuel to the fire of a difficult conversation amongst a generation of athletes and on-lookers.

Electronic sports, or e-sports as they are widely known, is a multi-billion dollar industry with a rapidly growing viewership. By 2024, 570 million people are expected to be at least a casual viewer of them - an 8% increase in just five years. 

To say the industry is young would be an understatement. This is not a genre of sport that was attempting to find its footing, or waiting for a competent promotion to give it a boost into the mainstream - it didn't exist.

In the past, plenty of other competitive activities have had controversies surrounding their classification as sport, but nothing quite like this. The ‘liberally-challenged’ sports pundits and athletes with glory passed have been entirely clear on their view: ‘computer games are not a sport’. 

Their collective reasoning does not make much sense. 

Sport, is by definition: 

“An activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment.”

No one is arguing whether or not e-sports professionals are competing. Just one glance at YouTube or an online forum will show you the same rage and fever of any other sport. Smashed controllers, glorious celebrations and bitter defeats permeate the men and women competing - as well as their fans. 

In fact, e-sports have received a great majority of their external interest through viral videos of poor sportsmanship in cramped, sweaty conference halls. While, perhaps accidental, these videos propelled these athletes out of conference halls and into arenas. Hosting thousands of rabid attendees and at its peak, 60 million online viewers.

The tricky part of meeting the definition is ‘involving physical exertion’. Typically the main argument for those attesting its place at an event hosted by the Olympics in 2023. 

It’s not difficult to see why. To spend untold hours training weights, running or getting punched in the liver and sacrificing physical health for a medal, only to be told that a pale introvert behind a computer screen will also be receiving that medal, must hurt. 

On closer inspection, however, e-sports competitors are often training just as hard, and comparing brain trauma to repetitive strain injury might be more opaque. 

Would it be sensible to compare the rough-housing of rugby to the barbaric gladiator fights of ancient Rome? Probably not.

And therein lies the problem. The definition of ‘physical exertion’ in the context of sports has been shifting for millennia; boxers of even the 1960s would laugh at the modern standard of 12 rounds for a title fight, when they were fighting 15.

There are, of course, more subjective reasoning behind the disrespect that e-sports has been treated with. Abstract reasoning that is far more difficult to answer; are these competitors' using creativity to achieve their goals and focus under pressure. 

While it may look fast paced and brainless, these athletes have trained their central nervous system to react terrifyingly quickly. The elite of the elite are making fast-twitch decisions at a rate of 10 moves per second; Interspersing this honed ferocity with creative decision making - a lot like traditional athletes.

A 2019 study looked at the difference in reaction time between traditional athletes and e-sports athletes, no difference was found in their reaction times. Brains, both equally sharp and athletic, regardless of how it is used.

The pedestal that athletes are placed upon when this argument is brought up is also a factor. 

It is common for the sports-fan to make an idol and martyr of athletes, positioning the elite of the elite as so far away from the average person, in a field all of their own. 

These stories of legends are the best things about sports as a whole, they motivate us and show us a higher ideal. This argument isn’t about computer games or reaction times, it's about ensuring that the glory of human beings competing stays alive. 

So the question changes. Becoming not, ‘are e-sports a sport?’ but, ‘ how do we keep the deification of sporting stars alive when a sweaty fourteen-year-old with a controller can become one?’.