Should something so close to smoking be considered a sport?

Definitely not.

If you were to look up the dictionary definition of a sport you would get “an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment.” So would you really count Vaping, among more deserving activities, as a sport?

One instance that almost made me spit out my drink was an article about how vaping became a professional sport. Rising in popularity so suddenly, it shocked me even more to find out that it wasn’t a prank.

The vaping professional competition consists of an event called ‘cloud chasing’, which is literally blowing large clouds of the vapor into the surrounding area.

Let’s come back to the definition of a sport. It is an activity that involves “physical exertion and skill.” Vaping does not fit that category, as physical exertion allow one’s physical abilities to become the best they can be over a course of time.

When you look at vaping, it seems like a cool hobby to do. Saturating the media with all sorts videos where people suck up smoke from their vape pens and preceed to perform tricks with the smoke they blow.

Vaping contains no good attributes to benefit a person’s health and shouldn’t be portrayed as an appealing hobby to do. In fact, many studies actually tell us it’s bad for our health. Some those studies even say that vaping might be worse than smoking cigarettes.

Almost everybody could learn ‘cloud chasing’ if they were to try it out for a couple of minutes. Inhale as much as you can and exhale right after. This action, this “new sport” amounts to nothing in the face of an actual sport such as professional basketball or soccer. These two for example, take the marshalling of different skills to be able to perform properly.

The main problem with considering vaping as a sport is its implications on smoking. It is being promoted as a fun and cool thing to do, following the same model that smoking set decades before to young audiences.

Promoting it as a sport is a highly dangerous risk, masking it as something else entirely for the purpose of increasing its prominence. Clear all the smoke surrounding this belief and breathe some fresh air.