‘Wimpy Goat’ may or may not be sports
At the very least, there’s room for debate.
We understand all this. How the internet works, and how internet animals work, and what is and is not sports. We know sports when we see it, and whether we’re seeing it in Bounding DMX Llama or Free Jazz Baby Otters, we see it fairly often. And so there is the temptation, where the hard-working baby goat above is concerned, to say that we are, once again, looking at sports.
All the ingredients are there. This is inarguable: there’s an extremely silly animal, there is the distinctly and definitionally sports-ian sense of pursuit, and there is the fact that I enjoy it and therefore wish it to be sports. And in the gently remixed YouTube video of the Vine above, by YouTube user Made By Sam, there is some coach-em-up narration that adds a notably sports-y dynamic to the baby goat’s effortful bleat.
Taken together, it works astonishingly well. It is no stretch to say that the result is richer and more moving than significantly longer films such as Radio; it is also, as Ryan Perry points out at Uproxx, much more readily meme’d. But.
But perhaps this is not sports. Yes, this is a goat giving its absolute utmost, and producing the biggest and goatiest sound it can manage and, yes, there is a small (and ridiculous-sounding) triumph in that. There is a case to be made that this is, for those reasons, sports. But it’s hard to get past the sense that this might just be a baby goat making a goofy sound. Who am I -- who is anyone -- to say what’s sports, anyway?
