Sitting down to play a few hands of bridge is sport, rules judge
IT takes a degree of skill and cunning but could hardly be considered an energetic pursuit.
Yet although i t merely involves four people sitting round a table, the card game of bridge may now be considered a sport.
A High Court judge yesterday dismissed the idea that sport must involve physical activity and declared: ‘ The brain is a muscle.’
Mr Justice Mostyn – who admitted to playing an occasional hand of bridge – cleared the way for a landmark court case to decide whether contract bridge should be classified as a sport.
He granted the English Bridge Union a judicial review against a refusal by funding quango Sport England to recognise it as a sport and ordered that chess authorities should be alerted so they can join the action if they wish. Richard Clayton QC, for the EBU, told the court that other EU countries, including the Netherlands, Ireland and Poland, recognise bridge as a sport.
The International Olympic Committee also recognised in 1999 that bridge and chess should be seen as mind sports, he added. Mr Clayton said: ‘There is nothing in the Sport England charter that l i mits sports to physical activities, and the health benefit of playing bridge is well documented.’
Sport England’s barrister Kate Gallofent, QC, argued that playing bridge was no more sport than ‘sitting at home reading a book’. She added: ‘Sport means all forms of physical activity aimed at improving physical fitness and well being, forming social relations and gaining results in competition at all levels.’
She added that definition is based on a European Sports Charter, agreed in 1992.
‘The starting point of the definition of sport is physical activity. Bridge cannot ever satisfy this definition,’ she said.
Mr Justice Mostyn said that if the brain was a muscle, bridge qualified as physical, adding: ‘You are doing more physical activity playing bridge, with all that dealing and playing, than in rifle shooting.
‘There are a number of strong indicators that an essential ingredient of sport, even if it is not competitive, has to embrace physical activity.
‘However, in 1999, the International Olympic Committee recognised that bridge and chess should be recognised as mind sports. The fact that the IOC recognised that bridge and chess were sports is very significant.
‘I do not conclude that this case is completely unarguable, or that this challenge is vexatious or frivolous.’
The Bridge Union has mounted a long campaign for recognition as a sport. Last year its claims failed at a tax tribunal, which ruled that the game involved too little physical exercise to count as sport and attract VAT concessions on competition fees.
Its triumph in winning recognition from the IOC has also failed to produce a place in Olympic competition.
‘More activity than rifle shooting’