The card game of bridge requires as much physical activity as playing darts, a lawyer today claimed in a bizarre High Court hearing to decide whether the pursuit should be classed as a sport.
Enthusiasts for the game have taken Sport England to court because the funding body last year excluded bridge from a list of recognised sports.
That means it could miss out on cash and recognition – something the English Bridge Union is unhappy about.
Sport England used “physical activity” as its yardstick to decide what should and should not count as a sport.
"Physical activity is a very uncertain yardstick," lawyer Richard Clayton, representing the EBU, told the High Court.
Apart from lifting pints of beer, he alleged, the amount of physical activity involved in playing darts is not much greater than that involved in shuffling and dealing cards to play bridge.
Darts involves a level of physical skill not required in bridge, he admitted, but that is not what the definition calls for.
Lawyer Kate Gallafent, acting for Sport England, told the court the case was “not about bridge at all”, and that the characteristics of bridge, chess, poker or any other pursuit were irrelevant to the “rather dry point of law” at issue.
Judge Ian Dove, who informed the court at the start of the two-day hearing that his wife was a member of a bridge club, rejected an application by Clayton to refer to a witness statement from a representative of the English Chess Federation.
The judge said bringing chess into the debate would “generate more heat than light” in terms of the legal issue he had to resolve, which was whether Sport England had unlawfully restricted its own powers by adopting too narrow a definition.
The EBU says 300,000 people in Britain regularly play the game, which it says brings health benefits by exercising the mind and is one of few sports available to older people.
Additional reporting by Press Association
