I have not been following the Winter Olympics, or even watching any of it, but I have seen a few comments about it which remind me of the hill I will die on: it is not a sport if you can’t measure it.

By that I mean that I feel any so-called sport is diminished if it relies on any sort of opinion or judgement. Referees, stewards or marshalls are fine but any hint of a judge and it is, at best, an entertainment.

I am not denying that ice dancing is difficult, or suggesting that I could do synchronised swimming. I just think that they are no more a sport than ballroom dancing or any number of circus skills.

For the summer games there are a lot of subjective ‘sports’, including all of gymnastics as far as I can see. Boxing could be a sport if it was based on knockouts or counts, but not while it is based on points. All of the track and field and cycling is measurable, even the silly events, though I do have a couple of controversial exceptions.

Basically, the criteria should be, as the Olympics slogan says “faster, higher, stronger”. The slogan is not “faster, higher, stronger, most aesthetically pleasing according to the opinion of a panel of judges”.

Ironically, one of the winter sports that most often get the piss taken out of it – curling – is absolutely measurable and so is more of a sport than ice dancing. All of the flying downhill at dangerous speed events like luge and bobsled are completely measurable, even if it feels like gravity is doing a lot of the work.

So what are my controversial exceptions to the track and field events? Well its the decathlon and heptathlon. Each individual event is completely objective and you can measure who is fastest, or jumps highest, or throws furthest, or whatever, but the overall rating is based on points where somebody has decided how much weight to give each individual event. You could tweak the scoring system and get different results. This might also apply to the biathlon, but the triathlon works because all three parts are just races of different types and so it is really just a race with three different modes involved.

Unfortunately, these criteria mean that a stupid sport like golf counts as a sport. And the indulgent sport of tennis also counts. Why indulgent? Well, if you have two contestants but an army of officials it becomes a bit top-heavy. With a referee, and umpteen line judges there must be four times as many officials as players. Meanwhile, football gets by with four officials to manage 22 players.

Which reminds me of a supplementary criterion. If you have to observe strict silence rather than cheering your side on, then its not really a sport. So that’s Wimbledon out, and also why darts is a sport but snooker isn’t, at least not the way competitions are run! This also might also be the loophole to get golf out of the Olympics.

Of course the other option is to decide that the Olympics are not a sporting event but for any sort of competition and then you can include ballroom dancing, skateboarding, juggling, military fast jet display teams, close-up magic, singing, breakdancing, and even rhythmic bloody gymnastics or dressage.