Our Mission

SHOATS exists to safeguard the taxonomical integrity of sport. Every athletic endeavour practised on this continent, and, where jurisdictionally defensible, beyond it, falls within our remit. We do not invent categories. We reveal them. The hierarchy of sport is not a matter of opinion; it is a matter of descent, and descent is a matter of record.

Our mandate is threefold: to identify the ancestral origins of all recognised sports; to maintain the official register of parent sports, derivatives, fringe kin, and disputed descendants; and to adjudicate reclassification petitions submitted by the public, sporting bodies, and, on occasion, aggrieved individuals at pubs.

Without SHOATS, sport would be ungoverned. Not in the sense of lawlessness, but in the deeper sense of unplacedness — every game floating in the void, unmoored from its ancestral line, ignorant of its own parentage. We will not permit this.

History

The organisation traces its origins to an informal gathering in 1987 at the Civic Pub on Bunda Street, where Mr. Jacques Beaumont-Lefèvre — then a Senior Lecturer in Applied Kinesiology at the University of Canberra — and several colleagues became involved in a protracted argument regarding whether darts constituted a sport. The argument, which began at approximately 6:40 PM on a Thursday and did not resolve, produced in the assembled group a shared conviction that would shape the remainder of their professional lives: that sport had no agreed-upon definition because no one had bothered to build a proper taxonomy.

Mr. Beaumont-Lefèvre, acting as the group's principal investigator, spent the following eighteen months interviewing publicans, retired athletes, and two confused librarians. In 1989 the working group produced the first draft of the Book on the Origins of Athletics and Recognised Sports (BOARS), a fourteen-page pamphlet that classified all sport into three parent categories. The pamphlet was submitted to the Department of Sport, Recreation and Racing, where it sat in a filing cabinet for two years before being accidentally included in a brief to the Minister. The Minister, reportedly amused, approved a small operational grant. SHOATS was formally gazetted on 14 March 1991.

The early years were productive but not without controversy. The Great Schism of 1994 saw Deputy Taxonomist Maureen Calder and three junior staff resign over what became known as the Horizontal Falling Hypothesis, the assertion that swimming was not a derivative of any parent sport but was merely "falling, done sideways, in water." Mr. Beaumont-Lefèvre rejected the hypothesis on procedural grounds, noting that falling was not a recognised parent sport and that the hypothesis, if accepted, would also reclassify bobsled, luge, and "most of what happens in cricket after lunch." Calder's faction briefly established a rival body, the Australian Institute of Athletic Descent (AIAD), which published one newsletter before disbanding.

During an experiment supervised by Dr. Firth-Kendall, it was revealed to Mr. Beaumont-Lefèvre that SHOATS should pursue the digitisation of BOARS. This project was completed in 2026. The organisation continues to operate under its original mandate. The argument about darts remains unresolved.

Board of Oligarchs

The SHOATS Board convenes quarterly, or as required by taxonomical emergency. Current membership:

Board positions are appointed by the Minister for Sport on the recommendation of the outgoing Chair. There is no application process. Expressions of interest are noted but not encouraged.

Our Office

SHOATS operates from a single-storey annexe at 5 Hoats Street, Capital Hill, ACT 2600. The building, originally constructed in 1974 as a temporary records storage facility for the Department of Administrative Services, was allocated to SHOATS in 1991 on the understanding that a purpose-built premises would follow "within the forward estimates." The forward estimates have not, to date, included such a premises.

The annexe comprises a reception area, the Fenwick Reading Room (capacity: four), two offices, and a kitchenette that also serves as the archive overflow. The building is heritage-listed, though the specific heritage value has never been formally articulated.

Visiting hours: Tuesday and Thursday, 10:00 AM – 2:30 PM, by appointment only. Walk-ins are received at the discretion of the duty taxonomist. The premises are currently subject to an ongoing Workplace Health and Safety review following an incident involving a collapsible display board and a visiting delegation from the New Zealand Sports Council. Normal operations continue.

Contact

General enquiries may be directed to the SHOATS reception desk during visiting hours. Correspondence by post is preferred and should be addressed to the Registrar.

Reclassification petitions, disputed lineage claims, and formal objections to the taxonomy must be submitted through the official Reclassification Request process. Petitions received by other means, including but not limited to handwritten notes, overheard remarks, and unsolicited emails to the Chair's personal address, will not be entered into the register.