The competitors stood nervously on stage, awaiting the judges’ decisions. As each name was called the crowd cheered, and the winner stepped forward to claim a prize, bowing his or her head to accept a medal.
“Wow, that was a miracle,” said Kyoko Katsura, the winner in the women’s division of the New York Regional Yoga Championship.
Yoga championship?
Yoga enthusiasts like to talk about the many benefits of their practice — good health, inner peace, killer abs — but seldom do they brag about the thrill of victory. Yoga as a competitive sport has been almost unknown in the US, largely because the practice is seen as a spiritual quest rather than an exclusively physical exercise like gymnastics.
But now Rajashree Choudhury and her husband, Bikram Choudhury, who created the style of yoga known as Bikram, are trying to build momentum for competitive yoga in the US. Rajashree Choudhury has set up two nonprofit organizations, the US Yoga Federation and the World Yoga Foundation, and she has been staging competitions for the last seven years. This fall and winter, regional championships are being held in several states, and the winners will advance to a national championship in Los Angeles in February.
The ultimate goal of the Choudhurys, who emigrated from India to Los Angeles, is to have yoga qualify as an Olympic sport. “It’s far away,” Rajashree Choudhury said in an interview. “A lot of work needs to be done before we really get into it, but this is our dream.”
One big obstacle may be the yoga community itself. To many people, the idea of competition goes against the philosophy of yoga, which emphasizes self-acceptance and inner growth. Although yoga does tend to attract people who are limber, the physical poses, or asanas, are only one aspect of the practice; others include chanting, meditation and reading Sanskrit.
“The initial reaction from most people is always the same thing: competition yoga? Those things don’t belong in the same sentence,” said John Philp, a filmmaker in New York who directed a documentary film, Yoga, Inc, about the commercialization of Western yoga, and wrote a book with the same title.
Also in dispute is the extent to which the Choudhurys could benefit if Bikram yoga — also known as “hot” yoga, because it is usually practiced in a room heated to 41° Celsius — were to become the accepted standard for competition yoga, which already takes place in India and more than a dozen other countries.
Choudhury says that promoting Bikram yoga is not her intention. She said she had made a determined effort to keep the brand separate from the competition — for example, by forming the two nonprofits and encouraging event organizers to hold competitions in theaters and cultural centers rather than Bikram studios. She also noted that yoga competitions were not conducted in hot rooms.
“I don’t want the Bikram name on it,” she said. “I want something that is accessible to everyone.”
Her husband has a US copyright on a sequence of 26 postures and two breathing exercises, and his efforts to use the legal system to protect his copyright have caused friction in the yoga community. Some people bristle at the notion that an ancient practice aimed at health and enlightenment can be governed by copyright and trademark laws.
Choudhury notes that her husband has not copyrighted individual postures, only a very particular sequence, which is not used in the competitions.
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