Corrected entry: For an alleged spectator sport, the Triwizard Tournament is remarkably unfriendly to spectators, with the First Task the only one of the three in which they are able to witness the action going on (since the second task takes place at the bottom of the school lake and the third in an overgrown maze of hedges). Watching the three tasks is presumably the whole point of the tournament, and the justification for cancelling an entire year of Quidditch, a much more spectator-friendly game.
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Correction: For one thing, at no point is it ever stated to any degree that the Triwizard Tournament is a spectator sport. Quidditch is cancelled so the champions can focus on the tournament instead of the Quidditch season, and so the maze can be grown on the pitch. For another, the audience for the third task is sitting in bleachers a hundred feet up; they can see everything just fine.
Phixius ★
If they could see everything in the maze, Moody would have been caught helping, Krum would have been arrested for using unforgivable curses and everybody would have freaked when Harry and Cedric disappeared for a few hours.
This is quite a good plot hole IMHO. They ship several years' worth of students from two schools to Hogwarts for the Tournament and cancel Quiddich etc. for everyone, for the purposes of the tournament. It's not like they share classes or anything - the Ball and that's about it. If not a spectator sport - and what sport isn't? - why not just send the champions off by themselves and not disrupt anyone else. And why have the crowds at the lake, staring at the surface of the lake for hour?
It's not a sport. It's a brutal competition between the 3 best students of 3 schools. All year around the students of 1 year of the other 2 schools are at Hogwarts and the tournament is going on. There are still classes, since only 3 students are supposed to participate anyway but if they don't allow students to go watch the 3 tasks when they happen they'd probably refuse to follow classes and riot. So they let them watch, even though they can't see anything of it.
lionhead