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 revealed, not invented.
Every game, match, bout or meet is a degraded echo of an older athletic impulse; a primal form glimpsed through the fog of modernity. Over time, this impulse accrues rules and branding, drifting from its true essence. BOARS exists to correct this drift.
Each parent sport in this register is defined by mechanism: what is done, and how. Tradition and popularity do not enter into it. 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 taxonomical, a mapping of psychic memory. We make no claim that it is complete.
Do not mistake novelty for origin. Spikeball is not a sport; it is a symptom.
The so-called "ancestral" sports (shuffleboard, bocce, trampoline dodgeball) were attempts, not origins: misguided but sincere efforts 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 invent nothing here. We name only what was always played.