The Hardest Sport to Become #1 In?

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81

[quote]legendaryblaze wrote:
malonetd wrote:
legendaryblaze wrote:
Would you consider darts a sport?

Yes

You’ll have to elaborate.

While we’re at it, do you think chess is a sport?

I think people are confusing activity with sport.

bushidobadboy wrote:

I don’t know if you realise,but motorsport drivers, especially formula one or 24 hour endurance drivers, have to be extremely fit. For example just a couple of weeks ago, the Porsche endurance team drivers broke the world record for the number of miles run in (I think) 48 hours.
http://www.autobloggreen.com/2009/07/06/porsche-enhances-humans-to-break-world-record-48-hour-distance-r/

12 guys each running on a treadmill for 45 minutes at an average speed of 11 miles an hour.
That means that runner A would have a 9 hour break in between runs since they were using one treadmill for the entire thing.

One thing that you missed out on, though, is that those were hired runners. Those weren’t the drivers themselves. Porsche was doing a promotion for human endurance (i guess?) and hired 12 runners to break a distance record.

"The team of 12 runners, who drew on every ounce of their experience gained in contests such as marathon, duathlon, adventure racing and Ironman competitions, set a remarkable pace from the outset. "

bushidobadboy wrote:
They have to have some of the sharpest reflexes and the best vision on the planet, travelling at close to 200 mph in rain, mist, heat, etc.

A formula one race is over an hour of non-stop (well one or two short pit-stops but that’s all) concentration. Plus you have to listen to and drive to, the team orders.

Damn, engineering students have 3 hour long non stop exams (of concentration). I guess engineering must be harder than driving an F1 car!
Concentration and being hot are not criteria for something being a sport.
That’s pretty silly.

bushidobadboy wrote:
Leading the race requires extreme mental fortitude, to be able to continuously push, push, push, right on the knife edge of handling and speed. Consistency is key - for over an hour, whilst slowly cooking in your fire-proof clothing, becoming more dehydrated by the minute.

Triathletes push push and push more than F1 racers. While i’m sure driving a car takes tremendous skill and some physical attributes, you’re starting to make them sound like the navy SEALS.
F1 racers also have drinking tubes in their helmets, so your thirsty and dehydrated argument flies out the window.

bushidobadboy wrote:
One slip and you risk possibly your life, but certainly many millions of dollars worth of motorcar. Yes, you are just one man, but you represent a massive investment and a huge team of people behind you. Pressure? There’s nothing else like it, I’m sure.

All jobs and sports have a risk of injury. Millions of dollars invested into something and corporate pressure does not mean something is a sport.

[/quote]

You might want to check out this video on the forces and pressures on F1 drivers Explains the Effects of G-Force on Formula 1 Drivers - YouTube

They lose on average 4Kg of weight during a 1.5 hr race, your body cannot rehydrate fast enough to counteract the water loss during a race.

82

If you consider Poker a sport, then it would be that. Let’s just say for arguments sake that everyone considers it a sport, well it is the hardest to be top in every tournament as there are so many invariables in every tournaments like bad hands, bad players, bad beats and bad position.

That is one thing that even if you are the best player in the world you can still have a streak where you finish among the bottom players.

84

Didn’t read the entire thread so I don’t know if this has been mentioned…

But the hardest sport should be a sport in which most the variables for individual success are out of the hands of the individual. Think about it, if the way to #1 involves variables that you can’t control, than obviously this means that being the best at your sport in terms of ability isn’t enough.

This alone disqualifies many sports, most of them individual sports, as and individual in these sports doesn’t need to worry about the skill set of his/her team. While many individual sports have factors that competitors have no control over (dominant playing style, size of the pool of talent, etc.), such factors exist in team sports as well so we’ll leave that for later.

Team sports offer many more variables that are out of the hands of an individual athlete: the caliber of your teammates, how cohesively your teams is assembled against other teams, and end how cohesively they end up playing.

If you end up disadvantaged in these categories, being the most talented player will not matter when it comes to being considered the best player (#1). Imagine Wilt Chamberlain playing with a team as good as Bill Russell’s Celtics, for as long as Bill’s Celtics were a team. Or imagine Mario Lemieux and Wayne Gretzky switching places, who would be considered the better player?

Another big factor that affects team sports that doesn’t matter in individual sports is position. If you are an offensive linesman in pro football, you WILL NOT be considered the greatest player in history or currently for a number of reasons, including the perceived importance of your position in the overall structure of the game, and just the recognition these players get for a job well done. It’s hard to be considered the greatest when no one really pays attention to you.

There ARE other factors that are out of the individual’s hands that affect the perceived ‘greatness’ of an individual in sports.

These include the quality of the competition, which is influenced by the size of the talent pool, the influence one has over future generations of players and the style of play (think Michael Jordan), quality of coaching, and the time period in which a player dominates the game (Was it the peak of the sports popularity?

Was it when the sport was getting more popular? Yes to either of these questions puts a player at an advantage when it comes to sports canon). However these factors are present in both individual and team sports, and as such one cannot really count them in the discussion without really going into each of these factors in depth for each major contender.

I don’t know if you could find a sport to be the most difficult to be #1 in , but I’d imagine soccer is the sport that comes closest. It has the largest talent pool, has all of the barriers to being considered the greatest that I’ve mentioned, and it probably has the largest framework of different leagues and authorities in the sport, which leads to conflicting views on the current best player at any given time.

85

Definitely masturbation!

lol on a serious note, i’d say Mixed Martial Arts.

86

[quote]bushidobadboy wrote:

Don’t give me that rubbish about engineering students in an exam being in any way comparable to an F1 race. I have sat my fair share of tough exams. There is ALWAYS time to stop, stretch, look around, have a drink, take a piss and check out the tits on the girl next to you. That is a completely different scenario to F1 or indeed any form of motorsport.[/quote]

It’s their job and the event is only an hour long. I understand that the two are completely different. It was meant more in a sarcastic tone. What the fuck does concentration have to do with it being a sport though? The reason it requires long periods of concentration is because they are racing long distances. Does not qualify it as a sport.

[quote]bushidobadboy wrote:
I suspect that you are being deliberatly obtuse, to try and draw me into an argument. Don’t bother, lol. Besides your accurate assessment of the Porsche endurance ‘challenge’, your argument is almost entirely fallacious. F1 not a sport, lol. So why is it called ‘motorsport’?
[/quote] I’m not and my argument is fine.
Ever heard the expression “good sport”? That usually involves someone who follows the rules of a game and accepts defeat or victory honorably.
Motor sports are games that involve competition and rules where the participants are in motorized vehicles. Hence the “sport” part.

[quote]bushidobadboy wrote:
As someone with some common sense pointed out above, the rate of dehydration of an F1 driver in a race overcomes all attempts at rehydration. The G-forces on their bodies place huge strain on muscles and joints.

Mental concentration has to be way higher than any triathlete who has to think about technique and pushing away pain and fatigue only, not all of that PLUS holding the racing line, braking points, tyre wear, fuel reserves, lap number, race position and the other drivers around them, any one of whom could (and often do) take them out of the race with a tyre-touch.

BBB[/quote]

Being subjected to high G forces, dehydration and driving at a high level does not make someone an athlete and it certainly does not make F1 a sport (in my definition which involves athletism). You honestly think knowing when to change tires, seeing how much fuel you have left, the lap number and race position is something that takes tremendous concentration? Really? That’s your argument?

You seem to know very little about triathlons though.
Pacing, hydration, food intake, speed, tire wear (depending on terrain) and all that good stuff is present in triathlons. I like the “only” part.
Ironman triathlons are 8 hours long for the elite. For your average go-er, they range anywhere from 12 to 17 hours.

The courses are very difficult (open water swim and rough terrain in some courses) and there are many things to be regulated.
3.8km (2.3 miles) swim, 180km (112 miles) bike and then a marathon.

You see, my definition of sport is something that takes more than just skill (such as golf and driving) but also takes stamina, endurance, strength, power and speed.
Also takes training! Lots and lots of training!

Being able to cover 140 miles using your own body and a piece of metal with two wheels (which must be powered by you!). Powering the movement all on your own while continuously moving onwards from 8-17 hours while regulating pace, adapting to changes in weather and terrain, water and food intake, use and repair of gear and following the rules.

Not to mention the other competitors. That’s a sport.

Watch only the first two minutes if you like. You’ll get the idea.

Compared to a person who relies entirely on skill and a machine’s capabilities.

Doesn’t even compare.
F1 is not a sport.

87

Bushido BadBoy - You haven’t even mentioned the main reason that F1 is one of the hardest sports to rise to the top in. It has nothing to do with athletic ability or the amount of people participating in the sport or the skillset it takes.

It’s the plain fact that very few doors are open to the average kid born in the average town will not be afforded an opportunity. There are extremely few spots open and the ones that are will no doubt given to drivers with the last names Piquet and Senna who have been coddled since early childhood and given the opportunity to race Karts and F3 and be around the sport.

The average kid born today on a farm in Tumbleweed, Iowa or in a normal American city has 0.0% chance of rising to the top in Formula One – that figure may jump to .00001% if his parents are very wealthy and could get him into Kart racing at a very early age and progress from there. Still there is virtually no chance of him getting a ride with one of the top two or three teams no matter how talented he is.

That same kid could pick up a football, chalk out a baseball field, lift weights or wrestle in his basement, go down to the gym to box, or run down to the park and shoot hoops and with extremely hard work and lifelong dedication at least have a .000001% chance.

How’s some working-class kid going to prove he’s destined to be a first class Formula One racer to his parents on a farm in Tumbleweed, Iowa? By expertly maneuvering his Big Wheel around some cones in the driveway?

88

[quote]LiveFromThe781 wrote:
FightinIrish26 wrote:
Boxing.

No one will ever be better than Sugar Ray Robinson.

And if you want to become #1, you have to have the heart of lion and the willingness to take more physical abuse than any other sport dishes out… when that bell rings, ain’t nowhere to hide…

Mike Tyson = best boxer to ever life

[/quote]
Not even close. If by best you mean most confused and personally tormented yes

89

There is no single 1 sport. But I would definitely say golf, hockey, wrestling, soccer.

91

[quote]stokedporcupine8 wrote:
malonetd wrote:
LOL@ all the people calling golf not a sport. I’d love to hear your definition of a sport. And yes, I’ve heard them all before and they’ve all been torn apart.

LOL@ stokedporcupine for bringing math and probability into this discussion.

I’m not bringing probability into the discussion, I’m bringing common sense into it. Almost everyone in this thread is talking about anything BUT what sport it is the hardest to become the best in.

Some people are talking about which sport is the hardest to play, some people are talking about which sport is the hardest to rate who’s the best in, some people are having an overall “my sport is more badass then your sport” argument, etc.

Most of you guys are also confusing how hard a sport potentially is with how high the actual skill players of the game have. I’ll given an example. Say that it’s really really hard to hit a baseball which is thrown at 90 mph… this doesn’t mean that there’s something intrinsically hard about hitting a baseball, it just means that the current level in skill in baseball is really high.

If there were only a hand full of people playing baseball as a hobby the fastest pitches might only be 50 mph, and in that case hitting a baseball wouldn’t be hard at all.

Anyway the point is that even the skills or athleticism needed to play a sport depends largely on who’s playing, not the sport itself. Since more people playing tends to create higher standards, again even this comes down to how many people play the game.

The predominant factor at how hard it is to become the best at a sport is how many people play the sport–the more people that play the more people there are to compete against and the higher the standards of competition will be raised.

EDIT: I’m not the only one in this thread who’s made this point either.[/quote]

I was LOL’ing in a good way. And I basically agree with you.

92

[quote]legendaryblaze wrote:
malonetd wrote:
legendaryblaze wrote:
Would you consider darts a sport?

Yes

You’ll have to elaborate.

While we’re at it, do you think chess is a sport?

I think people are confusing activity with sport.

[/quote]

I don’t have to elaborate. I’m not making claims of what is and isn’t a sport. You asked me a simple question and I answered. And, yes, chess is a sport. So is poker, bowling, spelling bee’s, rock-paper-scissors, and competitive eating. A sport doesn’t have to be physical.

93

[quote]bushidobadboy wrote:

Sorry dude, you lost me with this comment.

I’ll leave you to your opinion that something requiring high levels of fitness, skill, co-ordination and mental and physical fortitude is not a sport.

But before I go, I should point out that I (or anyone on this site, I would guess) could get a hell of a lot further in a triathlon than in a formula one car. I would bet that not a man here could even get an F1 car out of the pits, without multiple stalls due to the hypersensitive nature of the clutch, tyres, etc.

But put me in the water and I can swim, put me on a bike and I can cycle and I can run (with difficulty, due to flat feet, lol). Sure, I might not finish the race, but in an F1 car, you wouldn’t even be able to start the race.

Ergo, it would be much easier to compete in triathlon or ultra-endurance , than in F1. Which would be harder to become #1 in? I honestly don’t know, I’m beyond caring, haha.

BBB[/quote]
High levels of fitness? No.
High level of skill? Yes.
Physical fortitude? Not really.
Mental fortitude? Negative.

You see? You are attributing my ability to drive an F1 car to skill and skill ONLY. I’m saying you can’t do an ironman because you are physically unable to and you lack the skill.
A skill is not the only determining point of what is and what isn’t a sport.
When that skill is mixed with a demanding physical effort (turning the steering and applying the cluth are not deemed difficult physical efforts ) then we’re talking about a sport.

That’s my problem with calling F1 driving a sport. I’m not saying it’s easy. Far from it.
Being able to apply the clutch properly and change gear with an F1 car is a matter of muscle memory and skill. Physical fortitude has nothing to do with it.

[quote]malonetd wrote:
legendaryblaze wrote:
malonetd wrote:
legendaryblaze wrote:
Would you consider darts a sport?

Yes

You’ll have to elaborate.

While we’re at it, do you think chess is a sport?

I think people are confusing activity with sport.

I don’t have to elaborate. I’m not making claims of what is and isn’t a sport. You asked me a simple question and I answered. And, yes, chess is a sport. So is poker, bowling, spelling bee’s, rock-paper-scissors, and competitive eating. A sport doesn’t have to be physical.[/quote]

Elaborate means i would like you to define the word sport.

94

[quote]daneq wrote:
hardest? football.

Simple, there isn’t one stand alone best player in the NFL, you have to surpass all them and become “the best”? pffft impossible[/quote]

I’d say Ladainian spent some time at the top.

96

Every sport is hard, but if I would have to make a choice I would probably go with basketball. A lot of politics etc.

97

Going to a nude beach in spain and seeing who cant withstand an erection the longest.

98

[quote]legendaryblaze wrote:
bushidobadboy wrote:

Sorry dude, you lost me with this comment.

I’ll leave you to your opinion that something requiring high levels of fitness, skill, co-ordination and mental and physical fortitude is not a sport.

But before I go, I should point out that I (or anyone on this site, I would guess) could get a hell of a lot further in a triathlon than in a formula one car. I would bet that not a man here could even get an F1 car out of the pits, without multiple stalls due to the hypersensitive nature of the clutch, tyres, etc.

But put me in the water and I can swim, put me on a bike and I can cycle and I can run (with difficulty, due to flat feet, lol). Sure, I might not finish the race, but in an F1 car, you wouldn’t even be able to start the race.

Ergo, it would be much easier to compete in triathlon or ultra-endurance , than in F1. Which would be harder to become #1 in? I honestly don’t know, I’m beyond caring, haha.

BBB
High levels of fitness? No.
High level of skill? Yes.
Physical fortitude? Not really.
Mental fortitude? Negative.

You see? You are attributing my ability to drive an F1 car to skill and skill ONLY. I’m saying you can’t do an ironman because you are physically unable to and you lack the skill.
A skill is not the only determining point of what is and what isn’t a sport.
When that skill is mixed with a demanding physical effort (turning the steering and applying the cluth are not deemed difficult physical efforts ) then we’re talking about a sport.

That’s my problem with calling F1 driving a sport. I’m not saying it’s easy. Far from it.
Being able to apply the clutch properly and change gear with an F1 car is a matter of muscle memory and skill. Physical fortitude has nothing to do with it.

malonetd wrote:
legendaryblaze wrote:
malonetd wrote:
legendaryblaze wrote:
Would you consider darts a sport?

Yes

You’ll have to elaborate.

While we’re at it, do you think chess is a sport?

I think people are confusing activity with sport.

I don’t have to elaborate. I’m not making claims of what is and isn’t a sport. You asked me a simple question and I answered. And, yes, chess is a sport. So is poker, bowling, spelling bee’s, rock-paper-scissors, and competitive eating. A sport doesn’t have to be physical.

Elaborate means i would like you to define the word sport.
[/quote]

Did you watch the video I posted? You would not physically be able to drive an F1 car around a track. Forget the technical difficulty of controlling it, your neck muscles would not be up to it, when you hit the accelerator you would not be able to breath. When you got to a corner you would not be able to turn the wheel. It is incredibly physically demanding.

99

Isle of man TT

How many of the men here have the balls to ride a bike at 200mph not on a race track but on an open road?

Watch this crash at 200mph:

Valentino Rossi, ‘The Doctor’, said he would not race the Isle of man TT because it took ‘a lot of courage’.

Most of the comments on youtube on the video for the fastest lap were:

“Imagine the size of the seat to accommodate these guys balls”

I don’t know if one can call them athletes but they are definitely fearless.

100

I have a frisbee golf course down the street from me and I see the competitors smoking, drinking, and having fun so I would say that’s a sport.

Women’s flattrack rollerderby with the Lowcountry Highrollers qualifies as a team sport.
How about paintball? You run around with an adrenaline rush trying to take out the other team.

Hunting wild boar with a knife. That’s a contact sport.
BMX requires stamina, skill, and good insurance.
Rock climbing is a sport in every sense. If you don’t think it’s dangerous try soloing.

If you’re going to dis a sport try it first so you can talk from experience, otherwise your just blowing smoke out your ass like a politician from a rich family saying he understands what it’s like being poor.