Top 5 toughest sports: During the World Darts Championship, Nathan Aspinall spoke out about the battle he has to fight to keep his dartitis at bay. He works with a hypnotherapist, talks to a sports psychologist, and maintains an active lifestyle that includes running. In short, he does everything he can to be in peak mental condition at the oche when it’s time to perform. He also claims that darts is mentally the toughest sport in the world! That’s quite a bold statement, since you can never fully know what other athletes are going through. Still, it’s a great quote that has sparked a lot of discussion in the sports world.
Top 5 toughest sports in the world
That’s how I was contacted by a Dutch radio station: Radio 1 Fact or Fiction to share my view on it. Do I agree with Aspinall? Are there sports that are mentally tougher, or is it simply a case of comparing apples to oranges? In this blog, you’ll read what my top 5 mentally toughest sports in the world are.
What is a sport, what isn't a sport
Before we can answer this question, we first need to determine what we do and do not consider to be a sport. What framework do we use? If we look at the Oxford English Dictionary, we find the following definition:
“An activity involving physical exertion and skill, especially one regulated by rules and engaged in competitively.”
Here, the emphasis seems to be mainly on physical exertion and much less on mental exertion. Darts is often said to require no physical effort and would therefore be dismissed from the outset. Aspinall would be wrong. Case closed.
But then what about curling? An Olympic winter sport, no less! One could also question how much physical exertion that really requires. Or shooting and archery—also Olympic sports.
But rather than puristically excluding so-called pseudo sports, I would prefer to broaden the definition and include more activities. I would gladly add mind sports and e-sports to it. They are not called sports for nothing! Although the physical component is largely absent, in my work as a sports psychologist I see many mind-sport athletes and e-sport players who clearly tick all the other boxes.
In my view, the emphasis on competition—which I find somewhat lacking in the dictionary—is also crucial. It is an important element of many, though not all, sports.
In short, there is no clear or truly all-encompassing definition of sport. Perhaps what matters most is whether something is perceived as a sport in the eye of the beholder. For our top 5 toughest sports, we will at least do our very best.
Top 5 toughest sports according to a sports psychologist
Below is the top 5 toughest sports in the world. This list is based on my experience as a sports psychologist and on what I have observed over the past years in how my clients experience their sport, as well as the intensity and persistence of the mental blocks they feel as a result.
Number 5: team sports
I would classify team sports as mentally less demanding than individual sports—not because they are “easier,” but because the mental load is distributed differently.
Shared responsibility
In a team sport, performance is shared.
You win together.
You lose together.
This dampens performance anxiety and fear of failure, because a mistake is rarely reflected back entirely on you. In an individual sport, the cognitive load is simple: if it goes wrong, it’s on me. And of course, if you’re a goalkeeper having a bad day and piling mistake upon mistake, the team may lose because of you—but it can also be compensated for by the rest of the team.
Teammates can function as an emotional buffer by:
Normalising tension (“everyone struggles with this”)
Providing immediate feedback and support
Putting mistakes into perspective during the match
Number 4: individual sports
At number 4, I place a large portion of all individual sports. For example golf, athletics, padel, gymnastics, tennis—but a sport like darts could also be included here.
There is no team to mask mistakes, no substitution to release tension, and no external structure that can temporarily take over responsibility. Every decision, every doubt, and every mistake is immediately on you. In these sports, you must regulate your emotions under constant pressure, reset yourself again and again, and continue to trust your process—while a single moment of doubt can completely shift the momentum.
Months or even years of preparation are, in some of these sports, reduced to a single attempt, one jump, or just a few seconds, with no room for recovery or correction. It is precisely this combination of total responsibility, public exposure, and an extremely small margin for error that makes these individual sports not only physically but also psychologically exceptionally demanding.
Darts is included here because, much like golf, it comes down to endlessly repeating the same movement. Every thought, every feeling, a millisecond of distraction can have major consequences for a throw, a score, a leg, a set, a match. Sorry, Nathan Aspinall—not the toughest sport in my view, but certainly close.
Number 3: (ultra) endurance
The difference between endurance and ultra-endurance lies in the absence of performance peaks and the gradual accumulation of load. When it comes to difficulty, we should therefore view endurance and ultra-endurance as a spectrum.
In endurance sports such as cycling, marathons, and Ironman events, there are still clear peak performances—pushing as hard as possible up a climb or squeezing out a sprint at the end of a stage. In ultras, it sometimes becomes purely about making sure you don’t stop, don’t quit, or don’t crash.
It is difficult to clearly distinguish between the two. At times, you simply can’t physically follow the pace of the peloton anymore and are forced to drop, but one could argue that as an ultra-racer you can almost always keep going—even if that means resting for a while on a rock in the middle of the night. So which is tougher?
The physical exhaustion is extreme, but the real difficulty lies in what happens mentally when fatigue, pain, hunger, and sleep deprivation combine. As the body becomes depleted, cognitive capacity declines: focus narrows, decision-making deteriorates, and negative thoughts gain more space.
There is no short effort to “push through”—you have to function for hours in a state where every system in your body is signaling you to stop. External stimuli are scarce, feedback is minimal, and you are entirely reliant on yourself and your ability to tolerate discomfort without the prospect of immediate reward.
In ultra-endurance sports, the question is not if it will become hard, but how you deal with the moment when you start wondering what you are actually doing out there. It is precisely this prolonged mental solitude, monotonous pain, and the absence of a clear endpoint that make these sports exceptionally draining.
Number 2: life threatening sports
Life-threatening sports such as free solo climbing, combat sports, extreme mountaineering, and big-wave surfing form a separate category within sport, because mistakes here do not lead to defeat, but to injury or death.
The mental burden does not lie in peak pressure or prolonged fatigue, but in the constant regulation of fear while still having to function. Fear must not disappear—it is necessary—but it also cannot dominate, because a fraction of doubt, freezing, or overconfidence can have immediately fatal consequences.
Decision-making takes place under extreme arousal, with minimal margins and without the possibility of correction. In addition, the psychological impact is existential: sport and life merge, and every choice touches on safety, identity, and the future. In these sports, mental control is not a performance aid, but a prerequisite for survival itself.
It is precisely this combination of constant threat, total responsibility, and irreversibility that makes life-threatening sports mentally unparalleled in their difficulty.
Number 1 on my top 5 toughest sports in the world: zero sum games
That brings us to number 1 in my top 5 toughest sports in the world.
This is a category of athletes that is overrepresented in my practice as a sports psychologist: athletes who compete in so-called zero-sum games.
A zero-sum game is a competitive situation in which the total outcome is always zero: whatever one person gains, the other loses by exactly the same amount. No new value is created and there is no shared success. Every win automatically implies a loss on the other side.
“If you perform better, someone else has to perform worse.”
Now you might think: isn’t this true for all individual sports? In a way, yes—but in some elite sports this dynamic is far more explicit than in others.
As a professional tennis player or professional golfer, you first have to make the cut before you see any prize money at all. In other words, you invest in flights, accommodation, equipment, and your career, but you still don’t know whether you’ll earn anything back at that specific tournament. The pressure of not recouping your investment can accumulate over weeks, months, or even years, creating immense performance pressure.
Many 1-vs-1 e-games fall into this category as well, as do chess players. However, the most prominent group I see in my practice consists of poker players. As a professional poker player, you often invest large sums in tournaments or cash games, with a high level of uncertainty about whether you’ll see that money back. In some formats, it’s entirely possible to be losing for weeks, months, or even an entire year before you overcome the variance.
What I observe in my practice is that the mental load on these players is so enormous that they regularly lose all sense of reason and start to tilt. The uncertainty of whether today you might see all of this month’s profits evaporate is a major reason why many professionals eventually quit in search of more certainty. It requires iron discipline and a level of mental resilience that only a few possess.
That is why zero-sum games take the number 1 spot in my top 5 toughest sports in the world.