[quote]We sized them up. We measured them, top to bottom. We've done our own Tale of the Tape, and we've come to a surprising conclusion. Pound for pound, the toughest sport in the world is . . .
Boxing.
The Sweet Science.
That's the sport that demands the most from the athletes who compete in it. It's harder than football, harder than baseball, harder than basketball, harder than hockey or soccer or cycling or skiing or fishing or billiards or any other of the 60 sports we rated.
In Page 2's Ultimate Degree of Difficulty Grid, boxing scores higher than them all.
But don't take our word for it. Take the word of our panel of experts, a group made up of sports scientists from the United States Olympic Committee, of academicians who study the science of muscles and movement, of a star two-sport athlete, and of journalists who spend their professional lives watching athletes succeed and fail.
They're the ones who told us that boxing is the most demanding sport -- and that fishing is the least demanding sport.
We identified 10 categories, or skills, that go into athleticism, and then asked our eight panelists to assign a number from 1 to 10 to the demands each sport makes of each of those 10 skills. By totalling and averaging their responses, we arrived at a degree-of-difficulty number for each sport on a 1 to 100 scale. That number places the difficulty of performing each sport in context with the other sports we rated. [/quote]
"Pound for pound..." - that would be gymnastics!
The categories are: endurance, strength, power, speed, agility, flexibility, nerve, durability, hand-eye coordination, analytic aptitude - if you check how they score it for gymnastics, it's way off. In order: 5.38 6.13 6.63 5.00 6.38 10.00 7.50 6.88 4.50 4.13 total:62.500 rank:8.
