[CQ-Contest] Dedicated to my USA friends

[Zack Widup]

On Tue, 3 Jun 2003, Marijan Miletic, S56A wrote:

> Number 29. The Olympians
> 
> Insofar as competition is the measure of oneself against another, it entails
> the view that the other is more important than oneself. Otherwise, it would
> be sufficient to measure oneself against oneself (a past self, a hoped-for
> future self) or against some absolute standard not necessarily related to
> any self. Such an other-regarding view usually indicates low self-esteem.
> 
> It does no good to claim that one competes, rather, to better one's own
> best: it must be asked why one needs to perform alongside another in order
> to better oneself - a stopwatch or tape measure or videotape should suffice.
> That such competing against oneself is insufficient to bring out one's best
> suggests, again, that what matters is what the other does, thinks, etc.
> 

Ham radio contesting is quite different from other sports.  In other
sports, for example discus throwing, one does not have to depend on any
other contestants to determine how far he can throw the discus.  In the
case of ham radio contesting, one needs the other contestants in order to
get any score at all!  If the rules of discus throwing were changed so
that you had to get another discus thrower's discus and throw it, and
another and another, and then add up the total distances of all the
discuses you threw, you might have something vaguely approaching ham radio
contesting.

It's a many-faceted hobby; you can make of it whatever you want to make.

73, Zack W9SZ