There seems to be an insatiable appetite among the public for competitions. This results in some enterprising people turning even the most unlikely practices into contests with prizes and the works. The annual hot dog eating contest is one such thing. But at least that contest has a quantifiable measure with which to judge the outcome.

Harder to understand is a massage competition. But it appears that there is a world championship for this.

[O]ne Saturday morning in June, in Copenhagen, I found myself in a classroom filled with twelve massage tables, around which massage therapists from across the world prepared to ply their trade on their receivers, or “body models,” in front of an audience.
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The eighth annual World Championship in Massage was under way in a modernist, glass-and-concrete building owned by University College Copenhagen. For a weekend, more than two hundred and sixty competitors from fifty-eight countries would face off in nine categories, including Swedish, Thai, chair, and Eastern- and Western-freestyle massage.

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The competition awards no prize money; the main reward is glory. Therapists pay for their own travel and lodging, plus an entrance fee, and judges volunteer—sometimes after earning a certificate from a massage-judge training course that Tengbjerg leads.
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A secondary reward is gaining perspective.
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The championship has two stages. In the preliminary rounds, competitors massage fellow massage therapists—“It basically functions as a giant massage trade,” one told me—in classrooms full of numbered stations, under the watchful eye of judges holding clipboards. Judges grade on an eighty-five-point scale, assessing technique, innovation, client communication, ergonomics, and flow. Winners then proceed to the championship round, in which they massage the judges. As at an élite dog show, starkly different categories have competitions within themselves, then against one another; at the end, a chair massage might beat a facial or a Thai massage, like a Yorkie besting a Weimaraner.
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In the United States, massage wasn’t regulated for a long time, and has been used as a cover for sex work; even today, jokes about happy endings persist, something that rankles therapists. So do the terms “massage parlor,” “masseuse,” and “masseur,” which are longtime euphemisms, though laypeople can use them unwittingly. “Phoebe, on ‘Friends,’ kind of destroyed it for us in a way, too, because she called herself a masseuse,” Hoyme told me. “In America, we don’t use that term, because it’s considered a female prostitute.”

But massage has become more mainstream in North America—the realm of the strip mall, where affordable massage franchises have proliferated (Massage Envy, the biggest, has nearly a thousand locations and offers a subscription option), and a pillar of the fitness and wellness industries. (Many insurers cover massage for rehabilitation purposes.) Though new massage therapists can struggle to make ends meet—franchises generally don’t pay well—they are in high demand.
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To outsiders, including noncompetitive massage practitioners, the whole thing can seem nuts. In Manhattan, at a low-frills spa I’ve been going to for years—everybody they hire has a good touch—one of the owners was incredulous. “I mean, imagine being a cardiothoracic surgeon and having a cardiothoracic-surgery competition,” he said.

It may be that the only thing that prevents cardiothoracic-surgery from being turned into a competition is that its practitioners earn so much money that it would not be worth their while to take part in competitions. But although massage therapists may struggle to make a living, on the plus side they are among the least likely to be replaced by AI.

Who knows, some day this may become an Olympics event.

Incidentally, I was not aware of the negative connotations of the word ‘masseuse’ and that the preferred label is ‘massage therapist’.