Birdnow's Aviary

May 15, 2026

What's in a Word? Are Race Car Drivers "Athletes"?

Timothy Birdnow

Well, they AREN'T!

Jeff Gordon and Kyle Larson Ridicule Stephen A. Smith for Dismissing NASCAR Drivers as Non-Athletes

An athlete is doing something that can get them out of breath; it is aerobic by it's very nature, in my humble opinion. Race car drivers, jockeys, bowlers, pool players, golfers, curlers are not athletes. They are very skillful but I wouldn't call them athletes.

If they are athletes so too are video gamers, ping-pong players, tiddly winkers, cornholers, horseshoers, suffle-boarders, and any other game player. We don't call them athletes by and large so why do we call race car drivers athletes?

May as well call high school mathletes "athletes" because they could get tired from using a compass or a slide rule.

In fact those chicks who run around with ribbons or competitive cheerleaders are more athletes than race car drivers.

This may not be an earth-shattering issue but it is a sign of our times; an unwillingness to call a thing by it's true name. Confucious said that to restore a nation you must "first true the language". We have degraded our language for a long time in this fashion, and while this may be a harmless issue in this case other things are not so harmless - like "marriage equality" for homosexual unions or "abortion rights" for murdering unborn babies or "gender affirming care" for cutting of a little boy's penis or a chopping the breasts off a girl.

George Carlin once did a bit about the misuse of euphemisms. As he pointed out, we will soon be calling rape victims "involuntary sperm recepticles".

Using language to obfuscate becomes a habit and until we improve the precision of our language it will be ripe for weaponization and abuse.

So while this might be a minor thing it speaks to a culture that essentially lies to itself.

Jeff Gordon's reply to Stephen A Smith was:

"But at the same time, clearly he doesn’t know a whole lot about the sport, and he doesn’t know what it takes to be an athlete in motorsports. There’s no doubt about the mental fatigue it takes to be in the car for hours, the competitiveness and things that make drivers true athletes,” the NASCAR legend added. "It’s just in a different sense of how a stick-and-ball sport is perceived as an athlete.”

But mental fatigue is NOT athletics; you get mental fatigue playing chess. And you can be competitive while playing any game; if a lot of money was involved in Chutes and Ladders you would find "athletes" in the "sport" who stressed about it. Professional poker players certainly do; do we call them athletes?

Kyle Larson had this to say:

"I just accept that they won’t understand, because they will never be able to strap into a race car that goes 200 miles an hour. If they did, I don’t think they would be able to make it a lap without feeling like they’re going to die."

Again, nobody is questioning the skill of the drivers, nor the degree of difficulty involved in driving over 200 mph on a track full of other cars, nor the tension that leads to elevated heart rates. But it is not a sport nor are they athletes. It's a contest and they are players. World of difference.

We live in a world that prefers delusion to the truth.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 10:35 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 573 words, total size 4 kb.

1 Give thanks that people aren't trying to call them "athaletes!"

Posted by: Dana Mathewson at May 17, 2026 09:14 PM (+oLFx)

Hide Comments | Add Comment