Surfing not even in Kelly Slater’s top five!
Only yesterday ESPN released their definitive list of “sports ranked by degree of difficulty” with surfing filling the lowly twenty-third position barely beating badminton and well behind tennis, volleyball and squash.
According to ESPN, the results were compiled by “our panel of experts, a group made up of sports scientists from the United States Olympic Committee, of academicians who study the science of muscles and movement, of a star two-sport athlete, and of journalists who spend their professional lives watching athletes succeed and fail.”
“Surfing doesn’t generally feel easy but, apparently, it is,” wrote BeachGrit’s Charlie Smith.
In a sharp turnaround, an exhaustive online poll had surfing facing off with soccer as the hardest sport of them all.
View this post on Instagram
Pubity Sport, which is a satellite of the Pubity Group, “biggest Gen Z publisher in the world” asked its two million followers, “What sports are the hardest to play?”
And Kelly Slater, the greatest athlete of them all, across all sports, genres and so on, dived into the comments, as is his wont, to divest anyone of the notion that surfing, or soccer, could possibly be that hard.
“I wouldn’t rate soccer but I don’t play,” writes Kelly Slater. “I wold say skating, free soloing, F1, MMA, gymnastics etc are all at the cutting edge of ability for humans.”
Which is pretty true.
Anyway, after the results were compiled, soccer came in as the runaway number one, hardest sport in the world, garnering seventy percent of the votes to surfing’s thirty.
Soccer fans were unusually quiet as surfers, and those surf-adjacent, defended the profound and delicate act of balancing on a surfboard and gliding magnificently shoreward, gods and goddesses in human form.
People can’t even balance on a bicycle and say surfing is not hard
Throw a football player on a big wave and see what happens
This is the worst thing anyone has ever done on the internet.
Etc.
View this post on Instagram