Hannah Roberts of the U.S. in midair at the Olympic qualifier series for BMX freestyle in Shanghai on May 17, 2024 Credit – Tyrone Siu—Reuters
Athletes are competitive by nature, so when they get together for a massive sporting event like the Olympics, there’s likely a bit of good-natured one-upmanship when it comes to whose event is the hardest.
Yes, it’s a bit of a parlor game, and everyone has an opinion. But while difficulty is somewhat subjective, there are ways to stratify sports that could start to isolatinge which sports take the biggest toll on the body–by the highest number of injuries racked up by athletes, by what types of injuries they develop, and by which injuries tend to have bigger impacts on their long-term health.
That data, unfortunately, is not as complete as it could be. The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) runs several national training centers, but not all sports take advantage of them. And the USOPC doesn’t track overall injuries experienced by Team USA athletes since those are collected by individual national sport organizations—USA Gymnastics, for example, or USA Rugby. Still, during the two weeks each of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, the USOPC does have the entire universe of U.S. athletes competing in 32 sports under its purview, and similarly, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) also tracks injuries during the Olympic Games and reports them in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
Sports physiologists divide sports into two broad categories: those that involve direct physical contact (—the combat or collision sports), which include those involving dangerous pieces of equipment such as bikes or horses—and can cause traumatic injuries, and those that test the body’s endurance skills, which and are more likely to cause chronic, overuse problems. Injury information collected by the IOC during the Olympic Games is biased toward traumatic, or acute, injuries because “overuse injuries tend to happen in the buildup to the Games or after the Games,” says Dr. Jonathan Finnoff, chief medical officer of the USOPC. According to the IOC, at the last Summer Olympics in Tokyo, the sport with the highest injury rate was boxing, with nearly 14% of boxers requiring medical care during the Games, followed by 12.5% of sport climbers and 11% of skateboarders. “Speaking generally, during the Olympic Games, the high-speed, high-force and big-air or combat sports cause more injuries,” says Finnoff. During the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro, BMX bikers topped the list at 38%, followed by boxing at 30%, mountain-bike cycling at 25%, and water polo and rugby both at 19%. Among Team USA athletes, more than half of rugby players experienced injuries at recent Summer Games, while about half of wrestlers and divers did.
But that doesn’t mean that swimmers or marathon runners are in the clear – chronic injuries due to repetitive motions in their sports are more likely to cause problems that may not appear until years later, because they are harder to identify and more challenging to treat. “Traumatic injuries like muscle tears and broken bones are fixable,” says Dr. Alexis Colvin, professor of sports medicine at Mount Sinai, “whereas chronic overuse issues sometimes linger and aren’t necessarily something that can be fixed.”
