TORONTO—It’s fast, it’s violent, it’s administered by guys in striped shirts working with a pre-determined set of rules, the competitors are in amazing physical shape, and every contest produces a definite winner. But is it sport? I’m talking, of course, about NBC’s reincarnation of American Gladiators, an updated version of what was the single greatest television show on the planet if you surveyed fifty twelve-year-olds sometime around 1992.

I remember watching the original Gladiators with bug-eyed attention every week. In first-run syndication from 1989 to 1996, the show was an amazing spectacle: extremely fit but otherwise ordinary Joes and Jodies competing in ingeniously conceived contests of physical strength and agility against the hulking Gladiators: Laser, Zap, Ice, Turbo, Sabre, the deaf hottie Siren, and my all-time favourite, Nitro.

When NBC began airing the show’s reincarnation two weeks ago, I was super-psyched, and everyone I told about it — admittedly, most of whom grew up in the same era I did — remembered the original in a split second. “New Gladiators? Wicked!â€? was the typical, sincere response, and I never failed to notice a twinkle of nostalgic recognition popping into my friend’s eyes. Is this how television producers prey on people? By bringing back shows that appeal to nostalgia for childhood? Is this why every summer movie blockbuster from ten years ago seemed to be based on a TV show from the 1970s? I don’t know whether to feel grateful or used.

Back to the original point: is American Gladiators sport, or just entertainment? It’s the same argument that comes up every time, say, ballroom dancing is added to the Olympics roster. My editor seemed to implicitly support the validity of this position by agreeing to let me write about the show in what is ostensibly supposed to be a sports blog. Though on second thought, he did allow it under the guidance that I focus on the “is it sport?� question — I believe the warning was “…as long as we don’t take a left turn into Celebrity Apprentice.�

So: is American Gladiators governed by a set of rules? Check. Points are awarded to the competitors for achieving certain benchmarks in events such as Assault, Gauntlet, Pyramid and Powerball, all of which were reprised in the new series. Even a stupid new event called Hit and Run has clear rules: competitors must cross a fifteen-metre suspension bridge while four gladiators hurl 100-pound padded wrecking balls at them, and points are awarded for every crossing completed in the one-minute time period.

Now: is the physical performance of the competitors the primary determining factor in who wins and loses? Again, that’s a check. The new incarnation of the show is focusing heavily on the back-story of each competitor — one winner, Adonis Lockett, revealed that his mother was serving in Iraq, and he was competing to win the $100,000 grand prize so that he could afford to let his mother retire from the military. Sure, it’s a little heavy-handed, but we see the same high-drama back stories every Sunday during NFL broadcasts, about how players have overcome great odds to reach the pinnacle of their sport. Did you know that New England Patriots linebacker Tedy Bruschi returned to football in 2005 just eight months after suffering a stroke and having a hole in his heart replaced? Trust me, if the Pats win the AFC Championship this weekend to advance to the Super Bowl, you’ll be hearing a lot about it in the next two weeks.

The point is, we know who these people are, but their stories do not influence who wins or loses each week. That’s left up to the physical performance of the competitors, no matter how much last week’s Christian youth minister, Andy Konigsmark (who entered the competition mid-show to replace another competitor, Adam Levin, who’d torn his ACL playing Powerball!) might have thought that God was on his side in leading him to victory.

(Andy mentioned in an interview that he thought his appearance on Gladiators represented a good opportunity to spread Christianity. History tells us that it was in fact the moral concerns of Christians that ended the original (ie. Roman) gladiator games, which were taken off the air in 404 AD.)

Despite the fact that this is an entertaining television program first and foremost; the presence of co-host Hulk Hogan alongside Leila Ali is a reminder of how something that we might otherwise consider sport can be scripted and managed as pure entertainment, brother! But the clincher is the physical exertion that’s clear to see in the program’s final event, the Eliminator. The new Eliminator, not to put too fine a point on it, is a brutal kick in the ass to every highly fit human being that takes it on. So far, through two weeks of programming, we’ve seen a marine crack her head on a metal bar in the underwater swim portion and finish with a bloodied face, and plenty more competitors have been wiped of every shred of strength and knocked to the canvas by the final obstacle, the travelator. And consider this: the original Eliminator was routinely conquered in under a minute, while nobody’s managed to complete the current incarnation in under two minutes.

So to hell with it, I’m calling American Gladiators a sport. And I’ll continue to tune in to NBC on Mondays not because it’s a sport, but because of the amazing entertainment value. It’s certainly more competitive and enjoyable than such inferior sports as baby tossing and Celebrity Apprentice.

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Posted on Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 5:23 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment, or trackback .