>>6362

Wait, which order is this? I'm fairly sure surfing is a bit harder than football. None of this makes any sense. Tennis is harder than water skiiing? Ski jumping (competitive suicide attempts) is number 29?

>Ten years ago, ESPN put together a panel of experts to determine which sports were most and least difficult. The group was made up of sports scientists from the United States Olympic Committee, academicians who study the science of muscles and movement, top athletes, and sports journalists.
>They scored each sport from 1 to 10 in ten different categories: endurance, strength, power, speed, agility, flexibility, nerve, durability, hand-eye coordination, and analytic aptitude.
>Here's their resulting list, ranked from hardest (boxing) to easiest (fishing).

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/sportSkills

>>6364

Can't we just all agree that the Yanks know very little about sport outside their own borders (i.e. all but 4 sports) and move on?

>>6362
Seems a bit meaningless and pointless, to be honest.

>>6362

Fishing is difficult, but it doesn't require any innate skill in order to do. You can learn all the things you need to know about catching a certain type of fish in a couple of days and then find 12 new things on your own through experience.

The idea that Rugby isn't as difficult as Hand Egg bugs me though. The rest seem fine.

It seems like a totally arbitrary apples-to-oranges comparison, and the variables seem very narrowly defined.

For example, shooting and billiards rate very low on endurance and nerve, but they require an incredible amount of mental endurance. At the highest level, shooting demands absolute and unbroken concentration, and shooters have been known to faint from sheer mental exhaustion. An international air rifle match can be irrevocably lost on a single error of two millimetres. Anyone who saw the Black Ball Final knows that snooker requires an incredible level of psychological strength and fortitude. Snooker might just be a very elaborate game of hitting balls with a stick, but strange things happen to the human mind over the course of a 35 frame match.

Distance cycling is rated low on flexibility and hand-eye coordination, but elite time-triallists, breakaway specialists and sprinters need enormous flexibility to contort themselves into an aerodynamic tuck, and Classics riders need tremendous bike handling skills to negotiate rough and twisting roads as part of a crowded bunch.

I just don't think that the question makes sense. What's harder, sprinting or middle distance? It depends on whether you're a musclebound Jamaican or a lean Kenyan. Different disciplines within the same sport can differ so greatly as to defy meaningful comparison. Elite sport is all about the weird things that happen to the human mind and body at the last 1% of performance, the magic spark of genetic talent or genius or sheer bloody determination that pushes you ahead of a field who all train just as hard as you. I think that the whole exercise denigrates and diminishes the joy of sport, just as it would diminish the arts to argue that painting is "harder" than music or dance.

A thread died for this. Think about that.

Cheese is better than chalk IMO.

>>6368

Agreed, it's arbitrary, but it does at least lend itself to interesting discussion. I love reading about the top levels of athletics and seeing how the body/mind can become so specialised to a specific task. I couldn't have worded it better than in your post.

Where the fuck is shinty and Highland dancing???

>>6372

Shinty is a lynch mob with uniforms.

I was on a proper junior ice hockey team and raced proper junior cycle races in my yoof, so those are the only two I can speak for - so I will. Ice hockey and cycling need to be switched around.

Skating isn't hard or even that tiring once you get used to it, a lot of the time you're gliding. Aiming a puck is also not that difficult with a bit of trial and error. Cycling on the other hand is sheer unadulterated willpower, and racing in a team is far more strategic than skating in a team. To win a bike race you need to be able to correctly guess the condition of every single other rider in your group, and how to take advantage of that. You also have to push your body to the point of collapse. Not to mention in professional hockey you play in five minute shifts, not three hour races.

I would imagine this is the same for any endurance sport, or indeed any sprint based competitions.

I don't think you need to separate distance and sprint cycling, either, and if you must, the sprinter has it much easier, as he's protected by his team for 120km+ of the race.

Kickboxing is so much more brutal than boxing.

>>6377

Maybe, in Muay Thai in particular you can really see competitors rock eachother badly with the elbows and knees, but the image doesn't specify in what way one sport is more difficult than the other. I don't think anyone would argue baseball is more brutal than rugby, so it's hard to guess what measure was used in compiling the list.

I think the OP indicated that it's the result of some kind of poll, so there's probably results scattered across everyone's idea of 'difficult'.

>>6378

The scoring methodology is described in the link in the first comment.

No Test Match cricket?

Quite difficult when Mitchell Johnson is bowling at 90mph aiming for your throat.

Boxing and football are quite easy compared to this terror.

Rugby listed as single sport and squash/racquetball considered of equal difficulty.

I honestly can't express my disgust.

>>6381

6380lad here.

This is Americunt logic. It doesn't make sense. I suggest thus;

Rugby Leage v Ice Hockey in a ice hockey game. Northern Rugby League players spend a month learning how to play ice hockey against ice hockeryists. Result - ice hockeryists many broken bones.

Ice Hockey v Rugby League in a rugby league game. Northern rugby league players against reserveist ice hockey players. Result - terrorism act amended to prevent anyone from Wigan going to America,

>>6382
>wigan

Everyone knows the hardest league lads come from t'other side ut Pennines.

Archery at 55? Fucking ridiculous.

>>6383

Everyone knows t'ardest rugby tis League.

Union is fer poshos like t'nob out o' t'Coldplay an James Blunt.

I don't have much to add, but I can vouch for singles tennis being pretty bloody difficult.

>>6385
It's just standin' abowt an' fukin' clappin' int it

Volley ball is higher than Fencing? Utter nonsense.

>>6382
You're so wrong it hurts. If you take every player in the Super League and let them have a week skating, then choose the ones with highest affinity for it and school them on hockey for a year they still won't come close to the level of skill the NHL players have. These guys have been spending hours a week on the ice for practically their whole lives to the point that the otherwise alien movements required to skate properly are second-nature to them.

After a year of training, not even all of them would be able to get the puck off the ground when they shoot and only very few of them would actually be able to pick their shots effectively enough to score on a well-drilled goaltender. As for the broken bones you're proposing, hitting in hockey isn't a trivial task at all.

You've hit a nerve there, lad, I'm all for blanket disagreeing with Americans and demanding that everything from the north of England is better, but ice hockey is without a doubt the most difficult team sport in the world.

That rugby game would be worth a watch, though.

>>6389

Athletes perform better than Joe Bloggs in scenarios such as that, they've done similar tests with different sports in the past.

I think the Rugby League players would surprise you in how fast they picked up Ice Hockey.