The geography of sport from the aspect of tetrahedron

It has become clear that the geographic environment consists of both the natural and social environments. Throughout centuries human mankind have been overrunning their natural environment so as to use it for their own benefits. If  our social environment is broken down into three components, that is, society, economics and infrastructure then geographic environment can be illustrated with a tetrahedron (see figure 1).

Figure 1. The tetrahedron model of geographic environment.  Tóth, J (1981)

Tetrahedron always “stands” on natural environment whereas the social, economic and infrastructural spheres interact along the edges. Each sphere makes contact with the other three ones. It simply means that if any change occurs in a sphere it will affect the other ones, otherwise the form of the model gets distorted. Its consequence is that the geographic environment gets damaged. This theory was elaborated by József Tóth (1981). Originally it was planned and used for illustrating settlement system but soon this model was applied with the aim of studying sport geography. Evidently the above listed three spheres constantly interact with sports.