What’s the most dangerous sport?

What’s the most dangerous sport?

Although this depends on how we measure risk, there’s one sport that climbs to the heights of dangerous activities.


Asked by:Steve Grantham, Preston

This is surprisingly hard to answer, as it depends both on how the risk is measured – per participant, say, or per event – and the availability of reliable data.

But according to a 2014 analysis by Prof Sir DavidSpiegelhalter at Cambridge University, the UK’s leading authority on risk, mountaineering is probably the most dangerous sport, carrying a risk of death of around 1 per cent per climb. By comparison, running a marathon is around 1,000 times safer.

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