who could blame fans for being wary about attending games? Sports shouldn’t be taken for granted. In the great scheme of things, organized sports are a relatively recent phenomenon – less than 200 years old in the United States. Who knows what sports will look like 50, 100, or 200 years from now. Starting at about 776 B.C., the ancient Olympic Games lasted for 12 centuries. Today they’re long gone. Could, over time, the steady threat of global calamity also relegate our current conception of sports to ancient history? Already, one relative newcomer to the sporting scene has filled a void. Despite some initial hiccups, televised e-sport tournaments are still being held as planned. With 1.3 million viewers following a virtual race, the recent inaugural eNASCAR iRacing Pro Invitational Series on Fox Sports became the most-watched e-sport competition in American television history. © The Conversation Lars Dzikus is an Associate Professor in Sport Studies at the University of Tennessee. He is a member of the North American Society for Sport History and the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport. He has published in Sportwissenschaft , Journal of Sport and Social Issues , and The Sport Psychologist , among others.
– over the next six days, 91 games were canceled. The last time the league had canceled games without a player strike had been D-Day in 1944. Yet games resumed on Sept. 17, and
the World Series was played in November. The Super Bowl was also pushed back but went on as planned. According to sports scholar Rebecca Kraus, baseball’s return, in particular, “provided an emotional release, sense of hope and a place for the community to gather in its time of need, thus fulfilling its role as the national pastime.” E-SPORTS INTO THE VOID? The current sports stoppage, however, is unprecedented. It touches every level of every game, in every country in the world, from the Olympics down to pickup basketball. In the battle against the coronavirus, sports cannot be relied upon. In fact, sports are among the culprits: Officials have discovered that a February soccer match in Milan, Italy, led to a massive outbreak that accelerated the spread of the virus. In all of this, there’s an important point to consider. We’re still processing the many jarring changes to our routines. And when sports return in a year or two, our perception of this strange hiatus will have certainly changed. We might marvel at how quickly sports bounce back and pick up right where they left off. At the same time, when sports do resume,
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