At long last, many people are recognizing bridge as the legitimate sport that it is.
And many are hoping for its inclusion in the next Olympiad.
The Oxford English dictionary defines sport as a “pleasant pastime; entertainment or amusement; recreation, diversion.”
Other dictionaries differ slightly on the physicality or competitiveness of a particular game.
As anyone familiar with the game can tell you, bridge can be a tricky mistress.
The bridge game can have cutthroat competition.
And long games are extraordinarily fatiguing.
An advantage to bridge is that winners are determined by a strict and unambiguous scoring system. As recent occurrences have shown, judging can be faulty due to incompetence or corruption.
Currently there has been an oft-heated discussion on how an Olympic event should be structured.
One school of thought is that there should be separate men’s and women’s events.
Others believe that both sexes should be lumped together.
I agree with the former idea.
Besides keeping with Olympic tradition of separating the events based on gender, as a long-time bridger I can tell you that men and women play very differently.
Men, with greater spatial and sequential memory, play tight, strategic games based on statistics.
Women, with greater emotionality, play impassioned games that often result in near donnybrooks.
While both styles have their own merits, one style is not superior to the other. A combination of men and women making up the tetrad of players frequently results in clashing forms and befuddles the game, ruining enjoyment for the players or spectators.
The segregation of the sexes in Olympic Bridge would give the millions of bridge fans worldwide the opportunity to enjoy games of both styles rather than the chaotic performances that could result when they are mixed.
