What is the hardest sport?
I am glad that I got this question,
because it was the topic of discussion on Coast to Coast AM at
one point, and I did not like the reasoning the callers were using.
I can remember one guy said that it was baseball because of how hard
it is to hit something so small that is traveling so fast with a
little ashwood stick. I know that what he says is correct, as I saw
a show in which they were trying to make robots hit a baseball and it
was almost impossible. People are amazing, and it is good to reflect
a while on how many remarkable things you see every day without
thinking about it. That being said, a lot of people can hit a
baseball. I can hit a baseball, and I have hit baseballs that were
thrown by college players at high speeds, so it can't be the hardest
sport.
I have
two criteria for a sport being hard:
1.
Hundreds or thousands of people try to master the sport.
2.
Almost nobody does.
The
reason for the first criterion is that there are some sports that
only about eight people have tried. For a sport like that, maybe the
reason nobody really mastered it is that no skilled people have
dedicated adequate effort into trying. The reason for the second
criterion is obvious; if there is something that seems really hard if
you look at the physics of it, such as hitting a baseball, but
thousands of people can do it, then it can't be the hardest.
That
being said, I don't think you can say there is a hardest sport. In
this age of extreme sports, probably any athletic competition that
can done anywhere can be taken to an extreme level that only a
handful of people can compete at. Take holding your breath, for
example. Kids compete at it all the time. Probably anybody who has
access to a swimming pool has tried this sport at one time or
another. On the international level, though, there are very few
people who can hope to compete. Most people know about magician
David Blaine, who combined intense self-discipline and excessive
self-promotion to make himself famous by breaking the record for
extreme submerged breath holding (17 minutes and 4 seconds) – a
record that was broken by less well-known Stig Severinsen in 2012 (22
minutes).
Extreme
sports qualify for the title of “hardest sport” for the reasons I
gave, but also because you can die competing in them. In one famous
example, extreme diver Nicholas Mevoli died soon after a dive to a
depth of 236 feet.
Another
example of an extreme sport that many athletic and dedicated people
try is the ultramarathon. Perhaps the most grueling is the Badwater
Ultramarathon, which is 135 miles run in Death Valley in July. I
live in Mesa, AZ – which is HOT, but not as hot as Death Valley –
and it is hard for me to imagine running water, much less running a
race, in July. Everyone who competes in this race is an
ultramarathoner who has trained years in various extreme conditions,
but very few people complete the race. I know sometimes baseball
players can't finish a game, but it would be an entirely different
sport if almost the entire team didn't make it through the ninth
inning.
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