OT: What is the Most Dangerous Sport?

Submitted by the_big_house 500th on May 10th, 2010 at 12:29 PM


In the world of professional sports there is always a danger that comes with it. In football it's head to head contact. In hockey it's sticks and pucks to face. In baseball its hits to the face or chest or even being run over. In boxing it's constant hits to the body and head. Each of these sports has dangerous elements within them but which sport out of all the professional sports in the world is the most deadly? How about hockey? A game where players skate with sharp blades, thin sticks and smack around a piece of rubber as hard as a rock. The average hockey player usually is hit between 2 to 10 times in a game by either a puck or stick. If serious enough bleeding occurs, stitches will need to be administered on the wound. Skates can be deadly when player flies into the air after being hit causing a severe threat to a situation such as slashed face, slit neck or even the loss of an eye. Even with all of the danger of hockey it is not the most dangerous sport. Boxing involved physical beatings and constant hand to head punches which overtime can lead to brain failure and brain damage. If the hit is serious enough it can even kill a fighter.

According to the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which recently released its 26th annual report on the topic, the sport that causes more serious and deadly injuries among women than any other sport is cheerleading. Cheerleading accounted for a whopping 65 percent of high school and 71 percent of college, catastrophic sports injuries among females from 1982-2008. And to be honest I can sort of believe them because I've seen some really bad cheerleading accidents and some of them were pretty bad while others weren't that bad. If you stop and think about it and compare to the physical aspect of football, hockey and boxing to the actual "physics at work" in cheerleading, (flips, jumps, tosses, human formations) during a bad fall could be both fatal or even paralyze the person. Tough call in my opinion but I still say hockey is the most deadly.