The Hardest Sports in the World, Ranked by What They Demand

Ask a hockey player, a wrestler and a gymnast which sport is the hardest and you will get three confident, different answers. All of them have a point. "Hard" can mean physically exhausting, technically complex, dangerous or mentally draining, and every sport mixes those ingredients differently.

The fairest way to compare sports is to break difficulty into specific abilities and see which sports demand the most of them at once. That is what the best-known attempt at a ranking did, and it is still the most useful starting point.

How difficulty is measured

A widely cited study commissioned by ESPN asked a panel of sports scientists, academics and athletes to score 60 sports on ten attributes, each from one to ten:

• Endurance – keeping up a high level of effort over time
• Strength – the ability to produce force
• Power – producing force quickly, as in a jump or a punch
• Speed – moving quickly from one point to another
• Agility – changing direction in response to a stimulus
• Flexibility – range of motion in the joints
• Nerve – overcoming fear
• Durability – withstanding physical punishment over time
• Hand-eye coordination – reacting to what you see
• Analytic aptitude – evaluating and responding to strategy

The scores were added up to rank the sports. The method is not perfect, since every attribute counts the same and the panel's judgments are subjective, but it captures something real: the hardest sports are the ones where an athlete cannot get away with a weakness.

The top ten

Rank	Sport	Why it scores so high
1	Boxing	High marks almost everywhere: endurance, power, durability and nerve
2	Ice hockey	Speed, agility and hand-eye coordination on skates, plus constant contact
3	American football	Strength, power and durability under repeated high-speed collisions
4	Basketball	Endurance, agility, jumping power and fast decisions
5	Wrestling	Strength and endurance in a fight for control of another body
6	Martial arts	Flexibility, power and technical precision
7	Tennis	Agility, hand-eye coordination and hours of repeated sprints
8	Gymnastics	Flexibility, strength-to-weight ratio and nerve
9	Baseball and softball	Hand-eye coordination at the highest level of any sport
10	Soccer	Endurance and agility over 90 minutes

Why boxing comes out on top

Boxing is the clearest example of a sport without a weak attribute. A fighter needs the endurance to last twelve three-minute rounds, the power to end a fight with one punch and the speed and agility to avoid being hit. On top of that come two qualities most sports rarely test together: nerve, because the opponent is trying to hurt you, and durability, because you will be hit anyway. The mental side is just as demanding. A boxer has to read patterns and change tactics between rounds while exhausted.

The case for ice hockey and football

Ice hockey adds a layer that no other team sport has: the athlete is on skates. Every skill, from shooting to absorbing a check, is performed on an unstable surface at high speed. Shifts last under a minute because the effort is close to an all-out sprint. American football asks for a different mix. Linemen need raw strength, receivers need speed and every player needs to absorb collisions dozens of times a game. Few sports require such different body types on the same field.

Sports that deserve a higher spot

Any ranking based on averages leaves out sports that are extreme in a single dimension.

Gymnastics

Many coaches argue gymnastics is the hardest sport to master, even if it ranks eighth here. Gymnasts start training as young children, put in thousands of hours of repetition and perform routines where a small error can cause serious injury. The strength-to-body-weight ratio of elite gymnasts is among the highest in sport.

Water polo

Water polo players swim several kilometers per match, tread water constantly and wrestle for position under the surface where referees cannot see. It rarely tops popular rankings mostly because so few people have tried it.

Rowing and cross-country skiing

These are the endurance extremes. Elite rowers and cross-country skiers record some of the highest aerobic capacities ever measured. They score lower in rankings like ESPN's only because they demand less hand-eye coordination and agility.

Baseball hitting

Hitting a pitched baseball is often called the hardest single skill in sport. A fastball reaches the plate in roughly four-tenths of a second, leaving the batter a fraction of that time to decide whether to swing. Even the best hitters fail about seven times out of ten.

So which sport is really the hardest?

If the question is which sport demands the most from the whole athlete, boxing has the strongest claim, with ice hockey and American football close behind. If the question is which skill is hardest to master, gymnastics and baseball hitting have good arguments. And if the question is which sport hurts the most to train for, ask a rower. The honest answer depends on which kind of hard you mean, and that is exactly why the debate never ends.

For a look at which sports the most people play and watch, see our guide to sports facts and comparisons.