Which sport in the toughest to be an elite athlete in? My vote is for running. First, nearly every society and country participates in this sport. Sure more Americans may dream of being pro baseball players, but how kids in Africa or Europe will ever try baseball? Second, people who are skilled at running are easy to identify. It not hard to see who the people who can run fast or far are. Third, it is super cheap. Little Billy might be the most promising hockey player in the world, but without a small fortune being spent on him he will never achieve great success.
Don’t be offended if the mods move this to IMHO.
I don’t understand your logic at all, and in fact I would argue the exact opposite for the reasons you outline. For example:
That seems a pretty compelling reason to nominate hockey.
You need to define “toughest”. Most physically demanding, most difficult to master, or the one with the most competitive depth?
My vote is a no-brainer: GOLF. One of the (if not the) most difficult sports to master, and it has a tremendous depth of competition. (If you’re a man, that is.)
I guess my toughest I mean which sport has the strongest competition.
You think golf is more difficult to master than running at the elite level? Do they even play golf in Africa, South America, Northern Europe?
There are numerous great golfers from Africa, mostly from South Africa. Gary Player won all four Grand Slam tournaments in his career. Ernie Els has won several majors. There have been stars from South America too.
Northern Europe has had many stars in golf! Unless you don’t consider the UK part of Northern Europe.
Now Eastern Europe has not had any good golfers that I can think of.
You should also include things like genetics then. I don’t think golf is genetic, but something like running is. Muscles are either ‘fast twitch’ or ‘slow twitch’ and marathoners have up to 80%ish slow twitch fibers while sprinters have up to 80ish% fast twitch.
The point is, no matter how hard a person tries to be a sprinter without being genetically endowed for it they won’t be able to compete.
I was watching a documentary on lance armstrong and they were covering all of his genetic physical traits that make him a better biker. His heart is bigger, he produces less lactic acid, his body clears it up faster, his lungs absorb more oxygen, his lungs extract more oxygen from each breath, etc. These can’t be trained, these are genetic traits.
Right, which is just another reason running is harder. The person has to perfect for his/her distance. So much so that the best 1500 meter is not necessarily the best miler.
I have to agree with Ellis Dee that the OP has it exactly backwards. The ones with the most competition to excel are, as he said, supercheap. But just because the competition is greater doesn’t mean it’s much tougher for you to become the one of the elite. You can run anywhere; the competition is therefore greater but there’s fewer financial and obstacles of terrain.
In my opinion, the toughest sport(s) to excel in are economically elitist; the one(s) requiring specific equipment and environmental terrain in which to practice. The inherent inequity of even being able to afford the proper equipment and living in a culture where the sport is practiced tends to eliminate the poor and the unexposed. It’s much harder to be an elite football player, equestrian, golfer, swimmer, polo player, tennis player because the outlays of coaching lessons, equipment and terrain are so much greater and the window of opportunity in which to practice are so short.
My choice is bicylist. Racing bikes are extremely expensive, you have to be a specific lean frame physical type and it’s a outdoor sport not practiced in certain weather conditions.
I see on PREVIEW John Stewart Pie has changed the OP to “which sport has the most competition?” It’s hard to argue running but a close second is probrably basketball.
I think the answer would depend on how you defiine “tough” and “elite”.
But I think I would say gymnast. The demands on the body are enormous. By the time you get to the nationals you are competing against people that have both the right genetics (body: musculature, flexibility) and the best training. You have to be amazingly consistent and beat out your peers by nuances in your performance that can often not be detected by the untrained eye.
HELLO!
The obvious answer is Soccer. More people play soccer around the world than any other sport. You have to be in excellent shape, and have great endurance. The next would probably boxing.
Something tells me you have absolutely no idea about profesional cycling and the background/salaries of most of the athletes involved in it.
1-By the time bike frames make a significant diference chances are you’re sponsored.
2-Sprinters are hardly “lean.”
3-Plenty of racing in foul weather.
4-In Europe (the hotbed of bike races) at least, the majority of racers, have little/nothing to do with the upper class.
It is never “cheap” to become an elite athlete. You must dedicate your life to it, that means you can’t have a day job, you need an outside source of income. In the poorer countries, this is exactly why they have a tough time putting together world class teams. They can’t dedicate enough resources to their teams, too many top athletes are out there working instead of competing.
The toughest sport, IMHO, is the sport that is the most competitive, having the highest ratio of gifted athletes to the number of available “elite” slots. This lends itself to a structured league style game, since many gifted athletes (not quite elite, just gifted) can make the sport their career. Hard to do that with running. The ability to make a living at the sport at the less-than-elite level means a lot more gifted athletes pursue it full time, that pumps up the level of competition.
I don’t know the structure of soccer leagues, whether or not there is one top league, or if each country has their own top leagues. Soccer probably has the highest number of top athletes playing the sport competitively.
Basketball is pretty global these days, and the NBA is the top league, players from all over the world come to this league to play. I’m not thrilled with the play in the NBA, though, the game’s fundamentals seem to be suffering in favor of athletic prowess. It is the most international of the big US sports. Basketball is the most global sport I know where there is definitely one top league. 30 teams, 12 per team, 360 players, that’s it.
As global as golf is, it’s tough for me to claim it’s the top, because there are very few non-white faces playing that game. Same deal with hockey.
Probably a poor choice of distances; 1500 meters is often called “the metric mile”. 1500 meters = 0.93205678. Your point about runners being distance specialists is valid, though. Milers generally don’t sprint.
0.93205678 miles. :smack:
You think the pool of soccer players is bigger than running?
I’m going to go with swimming/diving. The self-confidence required to put on one of those little speedos rules out 99% of us. 
It goes much further than that. Without his attack by cancer, Lance would not have had many of thigns you describe. It fundamentally altered his physiology, slimming him down and changing his metabolism permanently.
There are golf courses everywhere in the world, including much of the third world. There are millions of “non-white players”. Hockey, of course, only really appears in the northern climes, where obviously most people are white.
Norm McDonald (from memory): “There’s only two levels of cliff diver: ‘Grand Champion’, and ‘Stuff On A Rock’.”
I think so, though anyone might run, the number of people who may consider running to be a desirable or possible sport for them is much smaller than the number who might consider soccer as a sport for them to particiapate in.
Most Elite sport is probably Polo, the cost and associated snobbishness ensures this. Though the level of compertition is probably far below most other serious sports.
Formula 1 Racing. Any way you look at it. World-wide competition, only twentyish spots, costs of hundreds of millions of dollars, snobbish as all-get-out.
FWIW I recall a Sports Illustrated article several years ago that listed the most difficult things to do in pro-sports and at the top of the list was hitting a baseball against a pro-pitcher. If you buy that then I would say the hardest thing to become elite in sports in would be a top notch hitter in baseball.