h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It's a fairly pointless question because all sports require a different combination of pressures.

In terms of physical demand, it would be natural to nominate extreme long-distance running. To test your visual-spatial skills, it would have to be snooker. Muscular or hand-eye co-ordination is a complicated topic, but presumably something like squash would come out tops. For mental pressure, you'd have to go a long way to beat chess. Many sports require a great degree of consistency, such as archery. All of these could be justifiably labelled 'the hardest'.

From a statistical point of view, I would nominate golf. Many, many people play golf, but there only seems to be one who's any good at it.

B

I agree. All depends what basic abilities you have whether or not you'll find any particular sport hard to master.

Interestingly, people can enjoy participating in sports that they're not good at, especially if non-competitive ones or competing against others of a similar ability.

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I read somewhere (Hugh McIllvaney?) that hitting a baseball pitch is *the* most difficult single activity in any sport. Even the greatest players of all time managed it about one time in three.