Book on the Origins of Athletics and Recognised Sports
The official taxonomy of sport. All sport is derivative.
True sport descends.
Foreword
This document constitutes the official taxonomy of sport as recognised by the Sporting Hierarchy Of Australian Taxonomical Standards (SHOATS).
All sport is derivative. True sport descends.
The following entries represent our best attempt to remember what we already knew.
Introduction
Sport is not invented. It is revealed.
Every game, match, bout or meet is a degraded echo of a deeper athletic impulse; a primal form glimpsed through the fog of modernity. Over time, this impulse accrues rules, audiences, and branding, drifting from its true essence. BOARS exists to correct this drift.
Each parent sport in this register is defined not by tradition or popularity but by mechanism: what is done, and how. The included definition for each serves as liturgical anchor; an operational creed. If a variant matches the mechanism, it belongs. If not, it is apostate.
BOARS, this document, is our record of sportic descent: a lineage of exertions striving toward coherence. It is not exhaustive, nor aspirational. It is taxonomical; a mapping of psychic memory.
Do not mistake novelty for origin. Spikeball is not a sport; it is a symptom.
The so-called "ancestral" sports: shuffleboard, bocce, and trampoline dodgeball, were not origins. They were attempts. Unknowing, misguided, but sincere attempts to gestate the true parent sports that would one day emerge in full. Their players felt a yearning, an unarticulated doctrine stirring in the flesh. BOARS is what they were trying to write with their bodies.
We do not claim to create structure. We simply give names to what has always been played.