There is physical exertion involved in cooking/baking competitions are they now to be considered sports?
I would say a sport needs to have clearly definded rules, so that there are objective criteria to determine a winner. Winning a cooking competition has a lot to do with creativity, which cannot be objectively measured, so I’d say it’s not a sport. You could make a sport out of certain aspects of cooking, though. For example, who can cut the most onions in a given time.
there are multiple sports that are left to opinion to decide the winner. gymnastics, figure skating, boxing(if there is no KO or TKO). These things are left to judges to decide.
Ok, but I would say that objective winning criteria can qualify something as a sport. Chess, darts, car racing and also video games do have objective criteria, that’s why I would call them sports.
Baking and figure skating don’t have such a clearly defined goal, so in order to call them sports, there have to be more aspects. A baking competition has a lot to do with creativity, which is impossible to objectively judge. In figure skating, you can at least look at the difficulty of the jumps and how well they are executed and they are trying to be make the judging more and more objective and transparent.
Another important difference between a baking competition and a sport with a jury is that in a baking competition, the final result is judged, while for the sport, the overall performance matters. That’s why the physical extortion during figure skating is an inherent part of it, while physical extortion during baking is more of a side-effect.
In the end, every sport relies on the interpretation of the rules by a referee, so there is no 100% objectivity.