ESPN's Ranking of Sports by Degree Of Difficulty

Eurasian =--(O) said:
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/sportSkills

I don't agree with a lot of this. Its biased. Their panel of experts is two people who have played / coached a total of 5 sports. All 5 of those sports make it in the top 15. Both 'experts' are white from western culture.... I can't believe they would actually publish something like that without a huge study. The numbers seem arbitrary. It says you need more endurance to figure skate, field hockey, basketball, ice hockey than badminton. Unless they actually test the athletes how would they know. I'm going to send them an email....
Click to expand...

First off, I'd be interested to know why being white and from a western culture should disqualify them from being able to compile a list of sports and rank them by using a methodology of their choosing (flawed though it may be). I object to your insinuation that race and culture effect the quality of the list.
 
ESPN is an american company if im not mistaken, and badminton is not as popular over here in north america than in asia, thus leading towards the bias of popular american sports as difficult
 
Interesting how they can group martial arts as one big group but have 4 different groups for skiing (5 with water skiing... )

Fishing isn't physically demanding (maybe deep sea fishing as an exception) but it still is a difficult sport.

The whole "difficulty" thing is kind of ambiguous to begin with... There are lots of players that cross over from NFL to NBA and vice versa in a matter of months but put up decent statistics... If it really was ranked that difficult then it shouldn't be that easy to transition from completely different sports. (Not that I'm undermining the efforts of the players/trainers... but still)
 
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