Different Kinds of Perfect: The Pursuit of Excellence in Nature-Based Sports

Excellence in sport performance is normally taken to be a matter of superior performance of physical movements or quantitative outcomes of movements.This paper considers whether a wider conception can be afforded by certain kinds of nature based sport.The interplay between technical skill and aesthetic experience in nature based sports is explored, and the extent to which it contributes to a distinction between different sport-based approaches to natural environments.The potential for aesthetic appreciation of environmental engagement is found to be strongly dependent on whether or not environmental engagement is exploited for the end of producing a quantifiable result or enhancing technical skill.It is also argued that an existential rather than spectatorial attitude to aesthetic experience is offered by specifically nature oriented sport.Aesthetic experience achieved in this way is therefore neither passive nor detached, but extends Berleant's concept of participatory environmental aesthetics and underpins both an alternate (wide) conception of excellence in sport activity and a richer experience of aesthetic engagement than more objectivised standpoints.The pursuit of excellence is a constitutive aim of sport.This is not a (very) contestable claim in itself, but it masks what is highly contestable, namely, what precisely it is that constitutes excellence in sport.Normally, excellence is taken to be measurable in at least one of its aspects, although the precise means of measurement or elements to be measured may be subject to dispute (as in judged sports).In conventional urban based sports, excellence in performance is commonly taken to be a matter of superior performance of a more or less constrained set of physical movements or, preferentially, the outcomes of such movements.These outcomes may be internal to a given sport practice, such as wins, goals, points, and the like, or external, such as revenues, fan base, or brand recognition.Some, myself included, would dispute this assessment and assert that sport isn't only a matter of wins, goals, and medals, but that sport excellence is a complex achievement, comprising not only the quantifiable but the qualitative reflection of sport practice in the development of self and the subjective experience of bodily movement and expression for both participant and engaged observer.These qualitative aspects include what we may designate the characteriological, the phenomenological, and the aesthetic, among others.The present paper undertakes two main tasks.First, I shall consider some complications for the conception of sport as the pursuit of excellence where such sport is practised in "natural" environments; in particular, I argue that where excellence is narrowly construed as the expert exercise of sport specific technical skills the qualitatively "natural" aspect of the environment in