The term “sport” is polysemous and the diversification of sporting activities makes it even more difficult to gain a proper grasp of the true range of practices it covers. This word, as used without distinction in the common parlance, cannot be reduced down to the practitioners, to the public show event, the equipment, or to the sports market. Like tourism, it is a complete set of fields operating as a system. This complex system brings together these diverse elements, lending itself to the interplay of social institutions. However, whereas in tourism it is the non-everyday journeys which create the links, sport derives its specificity from practices organized from motivational situations by individuals acting in specific places. This article aims first to clarify the use of the concept by showing the radical difference that should be established between the competitive sports and purely recreational sporting activities. These two types of activity can be brought together under the expression “sporting cultures” because in their various different ways they set motivating situations to work. The paper goes on to show that geography, the science of space and societies, provides keys to understanding these sporting cultures by using revised methods of the discipline, particularly those based on observation, cognition and action.