For those of you who might someday be members of international governing bodies of sporting events, a warning: Don’t mix art and sport. If this simple rule had been followed, we could have avoided the Ice Dancing Compulsory Program, an abortion of both art and sport, and an unfortunate black mark on human civilization.
The differentiator: Art is about originality and expression and creativity. Sports (and games in general) are about rules, and excelling within a system of rules (don’t touch the ball with your hands, don’t run without bouncing the ball–and football is just a vast collection of rules).
When you mix expression with a strict system of rules, you get the Olympic compulsory routine, in which ice dancers are given a map of specific dance steps to execute, and then they all do the exact same routine to the exact same music.
That makes for terrible television AND terrible art AND terrible sport.
