Sports and Games

1) Talk about sports in general.

Sports play an important part in the life of people all over the world. Sport is a physical activity that results in good physical skills of a man, his mental relaxation and bodily fitness. Sports help to keep fit both physical and mentally. Sport gives people enjoyment, happiness, friendship, health, popularity, and money… During sports events one can meet a lot of new people and see how it feels to be a winner or a looser.

We can classify sports in a following way: Winter – summer, outdoor – indoor, team -individual, professional – amateur. There are various sports competitions and championships on various levels – local, city, regional, national, international competitions, European and World championships. The top contest is said to be the Olympics games.

Most sports and almost all games can be done both indoors and outdoors. It could be track and field events for instance. These events take place in summer stadiums as well as in athletic halls. The games are usually all-season activities. The most numerous group of games are the ball games such as soccer, volleyball or basketball. Sports might be differentiated into individual sports and collective sports. Individual sports are for example boxing, rock climbing, fencing, weight lifting, skiing or cycling. Collective sports include for example football, baseball, basketball, voleyball or hockey. There are many other ways to separate sports in groups known such as motor sports, water sports act.

There are two ways how to make sports. Professionally or amateur. Professionals are paid for making sports and for playing games. Professionalism makes sports turn into a business. People who make sports and play games professionally don’t usually take it like a fun, but they make it because of money and fame. Teams are buying, selling and trading the players between them. The professionalism makes a corruption in sports because of money. There is big money in professional sports. The biggest amount of money is from sponsors. Sponsors are usually people or companies who pay money to players or teams for advertising their companies. It’s really effective way to get known for companies. It’s also good way to make money for people in sport. Games turned into a big shows in which the sports stars make s lot of money. The other part of business in sport is buying and selling players. Every professional player or team has a manager who is supposed to take care about good image, sponsors and the business around the game. Some of sponsors advertise their products that are unhealthy such as tobacco or alcohol companies. For example one of the biggest sponsors of Formula 1 is Marlboro, the tobacco monopoly company. In some of the countries is this advertising illegal, but in most of the countries around the world the governments don’t care. Where the money is, there are politics too. Some of the politics use sport meets to make their own campaigns

In all of these competitions there is a big pressure on the people in sports. There is a pressure from family, sponsors, couch, manager and from public. So they are trying to win all the time. Many of sportsmen and sportswomen are not good enough to be the best, so some of them take a drugs to get better, to have fame and make a big money. Drugs are illegal in sports so sometimes the sport organisations make blood tests after the competitions. Many good sportsmen and sportswomen were caught taking the drugs. There are many kinds of drugs known and some of them are not detectable. Drugs are not the only the one unhealthy stuff in sports. Some of the sports are unhealthy themselves. Every sport could be unhealthy, but some of them are really dangerous, for example boxing, hockey, American football, act. Most of the professional boxers have problems with their bodies when they get older. Their hands are shaking and many of them have problems to think like a normal people anymore. There isn’t only a risk of physical problems in boxing, but mentally also.

There are fans in every sport and they like to participate on game. Fans go on stadiums to see their favourite teams or players. One of the most popular sports for fans is soccer. Some of the soccer stadiums can effort 60-80 thousand people. Among those thousands of people are always some who don’t know how to behave. One of the worst groups of vandals are „Rowdies“. It is a British group of soccer fans. There was a soccer match between FC Liverpool and Juventus Turin on May 29th in Brussel, on Heysel Stadium. Rowdies couldn’t miss that match. Stadium was crowded. During the game, Rowdies got in fight with another group of fans. They were acting like wild animals. Many of people were trying to run away down on the field. They couldn’t, because of fences. 39 people died in couple of seconds because of terrible behaviour of enthusiastic admirers of sport. After this game many of soccer stadiums were divided in more sections, so big groups of fans don’t get a chance of physical contact.