For us to have a Code of Ethic is new in 2026. At the beginning, in 2012, what we did was just about starting memory competitions because we liked the activity and we felt it would help raise the profile of our activity to have a formal Canadian Memory Champion. Perhaps this would help to popularize memorizing as a hobby and make memory techniques better known by the public. The aim of our organization seemed self-obvious to us and therefore, we didn’t even consider having a Code of Ethics.
But without a Code of Ethics that says out loud what we are about, we basically found ourselves abiding by the ethics of those who first started this sport in the 90s. And then we eventually discovered that some memory athletes aren’t into this sport for the same obvious goals we had as we started this organization. And with time, we felt we should be progressing faster in developing the sport. To that end, reviewing our goals and objectives seemed to a good place where to start. It’s the same basic principle that applies to memory training: if you don’t like your progress, then try something new and exciting that might work better for you.
The Canadian Memory Championships’ Code of Ethics
Fair play is the basis for all sports and unfortunately, this important ethical value isn’t being promoted nearly enough to provide athletes with the full rewards that sports should be associated with. And showing respect for the environment in which the sport takes place is, in our opinion, something important that all athletes need to be mindful of.
Right now, our planet is in the midst of climate emergency that is expected to have a terrible impact across the world. Urgent actions to reduce our greenhouse gases emissions is required. So, it’s time for change. To address this, we propose a Code of Ethics where:
1) We want memory athletes to demonstrate –as they participate in our competitions– concerns for the environment’s well being because we see this as an essential part of fair play. This is both revolutionary and not very special. Good behavior is typically mandated in Code of Ethics of other sports and include to refrain from destroying or damaging the venue where the sport is played. And so, we’re arguing the same trite thing. What is new here is that we expand the scope of this rule to include the whole world!
2) Solving class problems is a priority. In order to effectively fight against climate change, knowledgeable people on this issue claim that solving social class issues is key to making progress. And sports often produce classes of players. Therefore solving class problems in the world of sports could certainly be the place where to begin experimenting to create a leading example for the rest of society.
In light of the 2 points above, the best sports games out there should be the ones that modify their rules and goals so as to form an effective response to the climate emergency while keeping athletes engaged in the activity. We want to lead that way.
Climate change scientists inform us that everyone can integrate in their life styles actions that help put global warming in check. That’s good behavior toward the environment. We feel that sports rules and goals should ensure that such steps are being taken up by their participants.
And in a reasonable world, that would mean that sports who do take such actions should see a sharp increase in their popularity at the expense of those other sports who opt to remain in the past. Any proposed sports rule change should be able to demonstrate the prospect of benefits in the fight against global warming.
Addressing the key issue of sports influences
A key problem in sports that is related to the class issues we need to deal with are the external influences that determine which athletes can or will get substantial rewards and which athletes cannot. These external influences can exert control over the sport and leave players with their hands tied, powerless to make of their sport what they want.
When external influences control the rules and goals of the game, a certain dominance of a group over another appears. In practice, this means wealthy league or team owners set the rules by which all the athletes must play. And lets keep in mind that the class of rich people is the class that’s associated with causing the climate emergency we’re in. So, this issue is important and needs to be addressed effectively.
Our Code of Ethics needs to be critical of all and every professional sports where and when top athletes are clearly not in control of the rules of the game they play. In order to help these players gain control of their sports, a boycott of their sports events may be the best thing we can do to help.
Sports tend to attract young people eager to follow the rules of the game they like. They’re often never told and remain unaware that these rules are set up by a class of people that promotes world ending fossil fuels. Young people need to be taught that control of all rules of a game should be left to the players themselves and that if this isn’t happening, it even represents a failure to take action on the climate issue, among other things.
When sports amateurs pay to watch highly paid slave athletes play, they do not support true sports because true sports need to strive toward fair play. What they support is some business person’s show of some sort, but not sports as sports don’t create slaves and aren’t played by them either.
You might wonder why the CMC Code of Ethics would bother to discuss these issues. It’s because CMC could ask its participants if they help sponsor other sports that have no plan to take action on climate change. If they do, it could negatively affect the way their scores are being tabulated at the CMC. We value ethical activists who are consistent across the board with their ethics.
Responding to our Code of Ethics critiques
Sports that “grade” a team’s value (as we propose) not based upon anything the team did during the game but based on apparently arbitrary social or environmental values that have little to nothing do with the action within the game may be offending to some because they don’t believe the results of such “adjusted score” games would allow you to find who the better team really was during the game.
If you need to outdistance your opponent by a 4 goals margin in order to win a game because unlike your team the other team features all vegans, then you may think that registering a loss when you’re 3 goals ahead simply doesn’t do justice to the actual game’s play. Normally, all games are on equal footing until someone scores point(s). A higher points value for goals achieved given to some players or team does sound unfair, or like giving some team better odds for no game-justifiable reason. Yet, what is truly unfair is failing to adjust the score for pre-game reasons and you have understand the true goal of sports to accept this.
Online Memory Competitions
In our view, sports competitions must occur in a single theater of activities. We reject the notion of online competitions as real competitions that are an integral part of any sport. The purpose of sports is achieved when athletes gather together to compete. A computer screen and camera set-up is no way to get together in the same environment. Such competition aren’t sport and they fail to achieve key sports objectives.
Have you ever wondered if it is ethical to play sports games with robots? Is it even possible to “play” with robots? Robots are a thing’s physical properties in action and so you can “play” with that just as a tennis player can “play” against a wall. There’s certainly nothing unethical with that. However, you can’t really “win” against a wall. And so we suggest that what is considered as “play” requires the possibility of winning. When you play and can’t win, it may be a rehearsal of sports or training but it’s not sport.
While most people would think that computers and internet put you in touch with others and that you’re competing with them and not with “a thing’s physical proprieties or robot”, the fact remains that the “channel” putting you in touch with others isn’t human and that the “channel” appears to replace a human presence in a sports theater. A fair competition needs to put the competitors in the same theater of activities so that any environmental interference gets to be the same for every competitor. We also want to repeat here that the basis of sports friendship is to share a common environment together.
Continually skimming the top of the cream will not always get you the best
Without a sports Code of Ethics that explicitly states your goals and how to achieve them, what seems to become most important in any sport is to find the best athlete in the sport anywhere, and once found, for all others to pay tribute to that sports person’s skill with a big “World Champions” title and maybe some cash prize. This aligns generally well with capitalist values who keep seeking out the cream of the cream and aren’t all that concerned about any environmental impact of pursuing such goal of creating a rare and exceptional product that will draw everyone’s attention.
Yet, the concept of any world champion is dubious because the world is simply too big for all contestants to gather in one spot and fairly compete. A local athlete would not be suffering from jet-lag and therefore would have an unfair advantage. If you need the time to wait until everyone has overcome jet-lag before starting the competition, then the costs involved in the competition becomes a factor in making it impossible for all contestants to participate. And so the notion of world champion is dubious because it hardly can be the product of a fair competition.
The fairest competitions are local and affordable; they can determine who truly is the champion there. The notion of “World Champion” is therefore more about creating an upper class in a group. In our view, this should never be one of the goals of any sport, especially in our world today when the dominant financial group of people is actively undermining the earth’s ecological integrity.
Therefore, a sports person’s recognition as a world top athlete should not be any serious athlete’s objective. Or at least, such objectives shouldn’t be recognized as ethical sports objectives.
When athletes work hard to improve their skills and get better at their game, it should both reveal their talent and their love of the game. It certainly appears fair for them to seek out the means to play against others as talented as they are for the challenge. Unfortunately this competitiveness is in the selfish interests of those zealous players (particularly when sports are lead by external influences) and not truly in the general interests of sports.
Competitiveness is “sport” because it will get the cream of the sport to play together, which is sure to create outstanding games from the fan’s perspective. But when a sport is overly focused on rewarding this cream, the sport becomes less sport because the sport becomes elitist. An elitist sport will be like the world’s financial elite; it will unethically bring about distractions from the need to take urgent action on climate change.
The solution here is for the sport to limit each player’s ability to star individually. And there is precedent in this respect: Toastmasters International do not allow anyone to win more than one World Championship of Public Speaking. But is one already too much? Would it not be better, in the interest of not making an elite list of “past World Champions of Public Speaking” to limit how far one can go with that? Might it not make more sense to limit these championships to areas not exceeding that of a large city in any country? Here at the Canadian Memory Championships we think that is the way to go. And so the Canadian Memory Championships cannot be any longer about finding a single memory champion for Canada but rather we need to find many champions mostly at the municipal or regional level.
Empowering Arbiters
Under our code of ethics, arbitration must be given a more prominent role. As mentioned earlier, the players need to be in control of the rules and goals of the game. This means that the arbiter’s task needs to be overseen by the collective will of the players. Now having said this, arbiters must have the final words in the interpretation of those sports rules.
For instance, an arbiter must have a sense of the attitudes of each team or player. Are they there to achieve a score over their opponents? An arbiter needs to have the power to penalize a team or player for taking any action contributing to a sense that there’s no camaraderie in the game. If a hockey team is way ahead in the final period leading the score by say, 8 to 0 and in the last minutes, they don’t even let the opposing team get close to scoring just once, then this should be considered as a non-sport gesture and an arbiter should have, within the rules, the means to punish the winning team to ensure that the final score is perhaps 4-0 instead of 8-0. And the players who scored during the game could see the points they made cut in half as well. And so arbiters should have a much greater influence on the game in the interest of the sport and of the environment.
Also, the presence of good arbitration will ensure that no sports game degenerate into fighting, or that the game isn’t fighting to begin with. This can be tricky because it is possible to play while being in the state of mind of being in a fight. That’s not even a bad thing so long as the player understands that this state of mind is for play, not for war. Arbiters should be able to pick up those who don’t belong in a game because they are turning it into fighting because they prefer that. Fear for your life –either as a means to motivate yourself or due to the power of your adversary–has no place in participants in any sports.
We reject the idea that sports can be used as a means to introduce hate and aggression –that are normally unacceptable in civil society– into our world in a controlled way in sports games. No, the purpose of sports is to introduce challenging physical activities of a type that leads to the gain of specific athletic skills.
If, as an athlete, you want to develop combatant skills, you need to understand that combat can only take place outside of sports and the combatant skills used in the sport are acting skills, not real combatant skills. These acting skills can be used in combat and when this occurs, it isn’t sport anymore even if the actions in the two different theater of activities is exactly the same. It’s like the difference between acting and real life; paradoxically, you can’t always tell them apart but they are different things.
In other words, there is a difference between sports and war and so combat sports are possible, but it’s very easy to miss what’s really going on, and that’s why good arbitrating skills are so important. And that’s also why the result of the game does not always need to be the key factor in determining who the winner is.
For instance, if it’s important for you to win a game as opposed to play a game, or if winning the championship is more important to you than participating in it, (or if you are participating for the purpose of winning it, and not simply to enjoy and promote the activity) and the arbiter picks this up somehow, you could and should be penalized. If you believe that it is the game that determines the winner and not the arbiter, then you may want to consider another sports league with a different Code of Ethics more in line with your views.
Sports must be inclusive and fair to all participants
Often, sports do look at the appearances of athletes and deny them access to some sports for gender based reasons. For instance, it may “feel right” not to allow women boxers to fight against male boxers. Which man wants to be found knocking out a woman? There’s nothing cool or sexy about that. And so segregation sounds natural at times.
However, we rather see this as evidence to believe that boxing is a misfit as a sport because it seems to be much more about featuring male dominance, and to us this means the activity isn’t entirely focused on sports. It’s more like male dominance fights trying to squeeze themselves into the world of sports. When a “sport” needs to exclude one gender from the activity, it’s a red flag to suggest this ain’t truly a sport.
A sport should be defined as an activity where the gender of the contestants is not much relevant. Weigh classes for some sports do make sense provided there’s a class for everyone. Due to physical difference between men and women, it would make sense for arbiters to give a certain amount of bonus to the gender that appears physically disfavored so as to make the competition of more interest to all.
A quick word about another “sport” that isn’t a sport, and that’s sport hunting. Hunting to kill animals is no game, and calling it a sport is to insult what human sports really are about. It promotes war much more than it promotes sports and there’s no ambiguity about that here. Such activities have nothing to do with the fine goals of sports and as matter of fact, they clearly undermine those fine goals.
As a sports organization we’re not about opposing sports hunting but we could impose a penalty on anyone that enter our games while openly standing against what we feel are commendable sports goals, and so known sports hunters could have their scores reduced by some amount if they enter our games.
Some final words
As I wrote this Code of Ethics, I realized that it has the potential to cause controversy. Because on one hand we suggest ways to deal with the climate emergency through sports activities and on the other hand, you have climate change deniers who think climate change isn’t happening and oppose any action to reduce one’s contribution to climate change. And so, if this Code of Ethics ends up being considered controversial, it’s likely because it’s standing for the right things.
Canadian Memory Championships 