Comment by onlypassingthru 2 days ago
Your first list of sports are all single participant because of safety. Every one of those has a significant risk of injury or death that is unavoidable for the sport and nobody wants to die because the competitor next to you makes a mistake. Spectators would absolutely pay to watch it, however (see MMA, boxing, etc).
The second list are not judged by racing against the clock and therefore pointless to compete simultaneously.
That's not true.
It's not just a tradition or conditioning out of nothing: it was also feasibility to do so. Eg. you don't get that gymnastics podium seven times over, you only get one. Whereas for bowling and darts, adding one extra spot is not that much extra space. You also completely ignored one reason GP brought up: safety (in rally driving). To save on time, they still usually start with a few minutes delay on the same track.
Where it is feasible to compare side-by-side, we do (swimming, running but not eg. discus throw or high jump), and we award medals on direct result. Where it isn't, we use other independently tracked scores (time, points...).
Rally driving is less to do with safety and more to do with the complexity of adding more cars. There are also plenty of motor racing sports where multiple vehicle are on the track at any one time. But those courses are wider. Why aren’t Rally tracks wider? Well there’s no reason they couldn’t be, but the sport was never intended to operate that way. Whereas other motor sports was intended to be head to head.
But that aside, you’re building a strawman argument here (eg I was never arguing against safety elements) doing so actually agreeing with the point I was making:
Spectators are not the only, or even in many cases, primary, reason that events are structured the way they are.
I agree there are a plethora of other reasons and made that point myself. Safety being just one of them. Feasibility being another. But a lot of the time these problems can be solved by one means or another if event organisers truly wanted ways to run their event differently.
> Your first list of sports are all single participant because of safety.
That’s irrelevant in terms of spectators. Which was the GPs point.
If the spectators can watch solo runs in X then they can watch it in Y.
> The second list are not judged by racing against the clock
I know, I said that already.
> and therefore pointless to compete simultaneously.
There are plenty of point-based competitions which are still competed simultaneously. Like Paralympic races. Darts. Shooting. Dancing competitions. I could list plenty more.
You’re conflating requirements with tradition.
———
The real crux of the matter isn’t any arbitrarily defined condition. It’s just what people are conditioned to expect.
Certain sports and even specific competitions within certain sports are structured a certain why because that’s how the organisers have decided. Yeah ticket sales will always be a factor in the decision making, but that doesn’t mean that one format is inherently incompatible with spectators than another format.
The real reason I think swimming is unlikely to ever be swam solo is for the same reasons Paralympic swimming races combine people with different disabilities: there just isn’t enough time in the calendar to fit every swimming event in if everyone swam solo. There are a multitude of different strokes and distances that get competed. It’s not like mountain biking where there’s only one way down the hill.