What's the hardest sport to medal at?

[HangTime]

One of the lines I've seen Adlington come out with a lot over the past week is how hard it is to win a medal in her sport relative to others, not just in post-race interviews while emotions are running high, but also later on. Before I go on I should point out that I am not seeking to belittle her achievements or "stick the boot in", I just felt I had to raise the issue.

"Swimming is one of the hardest sports to medal at. We're not like other sports. It is so, so difficult

I think that cycling is a hell of a lot different to swimming," Adlington added.
"It's a lot harder to try and win a medal

In my opinion, to claim that the sport you participate in is one of the hardest to medal at could be viewed as somewhat disrespectful to people competing in other sports. I am sure the the road to becoming an Olympic swimmer is a tough one and that the level of competition is also very high. But the same can probably be said for some other sports too. Mo Farah did not just rock up to the Olympics and go for a jog.

Yes, if you look at sports that have complex apparatus, such as the Heptathalon, Cycling, Rowing etc, you could suggest that there is likely to be less competition, because fewer individuals around the world are going to have access to the requisite equipment at a young age and maybe some nations have a much better infrastructure to support such sports than others. So fewer people have the chance to develop and potentially become elite in those sports. But surely if you continue that argument on, swimming is maybe not as all-inclusive as say the generic event of 'running'. Not everyone around the world has access to sufficient volumes of water to learn/practice swimming, but nearly everyone is able to go running.

So then folks, what do you believe are the hardest sport(s) to medal at, and most importantly, why?

 

[HangTime]

Surely its just a case of how many people are competing combined with how spread out those competitors are from the winner.

The sport itself has nothing to do with it.

I think the point/inference is that the number of people competing and the spread of competitors may vary between sports and possibly be down to more than just chance. So in other words some sports typically have more competitors with a narrower spread than others and therefore are harder to medal at.

Personally I am not convinced in terms of elite level competition that there is a massive inherent difference between sports in this regard, you will get phases in a sport where 'freak' individuals are dominant over a few years making it harder for others to medal, particularly if you get multiple freaks in the same discipline, but I don't believe that necessarily means over the longer term that a given sport is harder than others to medal at.

That said I can see an argument to suggest that the more barriers to entry there are to a given sport, the easier it is for people to medal at. So for example sports with lots of complex equipment like sailing, a lot of people won't have access boats, environmental conditions etc to be able to practice that, so maybe across the world the potential talent pool is greatly reduced compared to a generic running event. Therefore there is more chance of somebody who is naturally gifted at a given event never even getting the opportunity to try it.

 

[HangTime]

Are you talking about the hardest medal to win right now, or over all time?

Because if's the latter, then there's no such thing. It would be a statistical freak for the top band of competitors in a sport to always be impossible to break into.

I was talking primarily the former, i.e. you get 'unlucky' in that you are competing at a time when there are exceptional talents around, but perhaps with a dashing of the latter (maybe not all time but lets say over more than just one Olympic cycle). There may be a suggestion from some quarters that some sports are indeed more likely to have slight discrepencies in terms of the 'spread of the field' due to barriers to entry and such like, e.g. lets say one nation has some sort of long term advantage (lets say "magic wheels" but could be anything, maybe some sort of special doping programme that hasn't been leaked to other nations yet). Due to limitations on the number of atheletes they can enter in a given event this means that a select band of competitors are better than 'the rest'.

That said, the second paragraph I wrote does pretty much echo your point in that over the longer term I don't believe these factors have a big impact.

Even if it's the former, how do you judge the ability of people in a sport where there's no absolute metric (nearly all team sports)?

Possibly I've missed the angle you are coming from, but my take is you don't actually need to formally judge/assess the ability of people per se against any metric, the point is that at a given point in time some sports may have different 'spreads' in terms of the ability of rival opponents (whether they be teams or individuals). To use a football analogy, to finish in the top 2 of La Liga this season will be extremely hard for any teams other than Barca and Real Madrid. Whereas there are probably more realistic contenders for a top2 finish in the SPL. Maybe a crap analogy as there are more barriers in football but I think what people are trying to say is that the variation/spread in quality within the field in any sport is not completely random every time the event is held, different sports have different numbers of genuine contenders.