Tennis player Andy Murray (L), boxer Tyson Fury, and big wave surfer Joaoa Maceda. Photo / Getty Images.
What are the world’s toughest sports? It’s a debate that has, and will continue to rage, due to its subjective nature. How do you even define tough? Liam Napier delves into the divide to offer his views.
For the purpose of this exercise I settled on the premise that all team sports must be excluded. Teams encompass difficult dynamics in high stakes environments, sure.
There are personality clashes and inflated egos to manage when it comes to selection, roles and responsibilities. Over time culture and cohesion ideals have adopted near mythical status as every team chases a greater tangible incentive to drive collective desire.
Every team embraces its stars, its workhorses, grinders, role players. Rugby and league with their repeat heavy collisions boast strong claims for inclusion among the world’s toughest sports.
Yet for every league prop charging off the back fence into muscle-laden shoulders each week, there’s a playmaker or rugby first five-eighth shielded from defending on the wing or at fullback. No one position is the same.
The very nature of team sports involves individuals relying on others. Inevitably, that allows some to rest, to go missing, to step out of focus, while others make a bucket, break, tackle or offload. Synergy is required but that’s not comparable to individual sporting pursuits that dictate it is them, and them alone, suffering to attain success.
No specific scientific formula could be conducted to determine the planet’s toughest sports. Such a topic is too hard to define by box ticking.
And so my loose criteria essentially specifies the need to combine mental and physical prowess under duress.
But first, some honourable mentions.
Free climbing:
Ever stood over a cliff face gazing down to the sea or snow pondering the thrill that would accompany (safely) jumping? Adrenaline is, indeed, a powerful lure. Now imagine scaling a 1066-metre granite wall in Yosemite National Park as legendary free climber Alex Honnold did - without a rope, safety gear, or equipment – in 8.5 hours. Gulp.
Big wave surfing:
Ever been pummelled off your feet or barrelled to the depths of the ocean by the full force of a breaking wave? Now picture Sebastian Steudtner riding a 26.21m wave in Praia do Norte, Portugal, and consider the scale of how wrong that could have gone.
In both these extreme sports the margin for error is so slim that so few attempt the feats, let alone pull them off.
Gymnastics also warrants a, perhaps, surprising mention for the underrated strength and skill required on the bar, beam and rings.
Without further ado... drum roll please, here are my toughest sports:
Yes, tennis; a sport that inspires beautiful groundstrokes and imposes brutally taxing fatigue.
Take Andy Murray. Last week the Scotsman spent almost 11 hours on court in two matches over two days at the Australian Open.
Four years after his second career-saving surgery that left him with a metal hip, Murray defeated Italian Matteo Berrettini in five sets before returning against Australian Thanasi Kokkinakis in a five hour, 45-minute, duel that finished at 4.05am to spark player welfare criticism and frustration over limited toilet breaks for players.
John Isner and Nicolas Mahut hold the record for the longest tennis contest – their infamous Wimbledon match spanning 11 hours five minutes. They needed three days to complete it as the light faded. By the finish, the electronic scoreboard stopped working.
Tennis requires physical and mental strength of the highest order, particularly on the grand slam stage. The scrutiny, and pressure, attached to every serve, return, volley can cripple even those who have been there, done that, countless times.
For every match point saved a very public mental meltdown, spraying of an umpire, or breaking a racquet, is a millimeter away. Such scenes leave many players emotionally shattered, isolated, and falling out of love with the sport.
Former world No 1 Ash Barty retired last year aged 25 points to the sport’s intensive toll.
Touch, skill, freakish fitness; tennis is ruthlessly demanding as the aptly-titled ‘Break Point’ Netflix documentary series portrays.
At the exclusive elite end tennis icons enjoy an entourage – coach, trainer, physio, nutritionist, and family. Yet come game time, there is no one else to turn to.
Below that echelon the vast majority struggle to afford travel costs to compete on tour let alone pay for travelling support. This cut-throat industry often dictates financial backers are needed to stand a fighting chance.
There is no lonelier place in sport than the square office. In a ring or a cage, there is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
The gruesome brutality of fight sports, where the objective is to knock out or pound your opponent into submission, speaks for itself. Blood is shed. Scars and status gained. Brain cells lost.
For many, the premise remains too barrack to watch.
While those, such as Tyson Fury and Floyd Mayweather Jr, who reach the pinnacle earn multi-millions for their scheduled 36-minute battles, the majority grind away with a minimal profile in the hope of one life-changing payday that may never come.
Fighting provides hope for the disadvantaged. It’s a way out of poverty, an avenue to a better life. It can offer a purpose to stay off the streets and away from gang life. But it also comes with extreme highs and lows; raw and real consequences. Prospect to prestigious champion is a tired Hollywood script. Chasing that dream is, more often than not, a distant reality. Not all champions hold equal earning capacity, either. Far from it.
Elite fighters endure much more punishment than we witness, too. Getting to fight night demands gruelling eight-to-12-week camps that feature repetitive blows in sparing alongside dieting and draining weight cutting. These days the wider industry has spread to welcome Russian fights in phone boxes and stomach-turning slapping contests.
With no governing body acting in their best interests, history is littered with fighters ripped off by dodgy promoters and hangers-on only there for the good times.
Even now, the UFC somehow treats their fighters with no duty of care. Heavyweight champion Francis Ngannou recently walked away from the organisation in part because it refused to provide basic health insurance in all contracts, and steadfastly maintained restricted in-cage sponsorship.
The kicker has to be that, of all sporting pursuits, none puts its athletes at more risk to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) - a brain condition linked to repeated head injuries that lead to dementia.
A broad-brush header to encapsulate the many outrageous events mere mortals may suggest a level of psychosis is required to compete.
In but a small collection of events that set out to trump each other for the maddest on earth, let’s start on home soil with the Revenant which states: ‘A true challenge is when failure is the most likely outcome.’ Fitting, given four people have finished in the last four years.
Navigating their way through Southland goldrush country entrants have 60 hours to scale 200km in a 16,000m vertical ascent – the equivalent of climbing up and down Mt Everest twice. Ah, yeah, good luck.
Nedd Brockmann, the 23-year-old electrician, arrived to a hero’s welcome after running 4000km in 46 days from Perth to Sydney last year, raising $1.85m for homelessness along the way and leaving himself badly broken by the finish. “Grab life by the balls, I reckon,” Brockmann said. “Ya only get one of them.”
Badwater is dubbed the holy grail for ultramarathoners. Set in Death Valley, California, one of the world’s hottest places, the invitation-only event consists of a 217km race with a 4450m cumulative vertical ascent in under 48 hours – often in 50-degree heat.
Competitors have hallucinated by seeing dinosaurs in the desert; watched eggs fry on the pavement, encountered rattlesnakes and scorpions along the roadside at night and experienced melting shoes.
On a similar theme, the Marathon Des Sables claims to be the toughest footrace on earth. Six days of running over 250kms through the Saharan desert - across endless dunes, rocky jebels and white-hot salt plains, carrying what you need to survive on your back. Sounds fun, right?
Ironman Kona is widely considered the hardest in its 3.86km swim, 180km bike and 42.2km run field. Comparative to other events, though, an argument exists that the different disciplines somewhat alleviate pressure on one specific muscle.
The motivation to put body and mind through such suffering stems from different sources. Some are driven by illness. Others by grief. For all the pain, tackling extreme challenges can evoke euphoric satisfaction.
Endurance athletes live and breathe adversity. They race through vomiting, diarrhoea and severe dehydration in China. They push through running out of water three hours from the finish line in Abu Dhabi. No race ever goes to plan. Of all the ailments blisters and chafing for minutes, hours, days on end to reveal raw flesh is among the worst.
Anyone who drives through these dark, lonely places deserves a spot on the world’s toughest sports.
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