These are the world’s toughest sports! Do your favorites make the cut?
What is this post about:
In 2018 ESPN decided to conduct and awesome study to determine which were the world’s toughest sports! To do so, they did some digging and came up with 10 top skills/categories determinants of a sport’s overall toughness, and pooled some experts on their views.
The result? An amazing list of 60 sports, ranked from the toughest to the least tough — spoiler alert, Boxing is at the top of the list! Although the idea was great, the delivery was a bit sloppy, so I decided to touch up on the original visualization and turn it into a dashboard you can actually interact with!
The dataset is available on Makeover Monday.
Keep reading for the link to the interactive dashboard!
Is this dataset accurate?
In no way should we take this toughness ranking as final. There are quite a few limitations to the dataset used — some of the biases are described below:
Collection biases:
There’s an obvious collection biases on this dataset. Not only it isn’t clear how the ESPN reporters got to the 10 top skills used in determining overall toughness, they also pooled a very small group consisting of eight voluntary experts. Undercoverage is definitely at place here and a larger sample would very likely have yielded a different result.
Processing biases:
The original values assigned to each skill category by the individual experts are not available in the dataset, only the averaged-out values, so it is possible that some missingness biases is at play here
Insight biases:
All skills here are treated as having the same weight in calculating total toughness. Assigning different weights to each of the skills could have a drastic impact on the present ranking. There’s an issue with cofounding variables here as well, the addition of a new skill measure here could also tip the scales considerably.
[Problem Statement] What does this visualization tell me?
According to the 10 top skills identified by ESPN, how do these 60 sports ranks from most to least toughness points, and how do they compare on each of these skills?
With the improved visualization, you can answer all of those questions! You can now highlight a specific sport or compare multiple sports using the 10 key skills selected by ESPN. Along with an updated version of the original table, now with a helpful heat map, you can also easily see how each sport ranks, their total toughness score AND plot your favorite sports in fun scatter plots!
Show me the Good Stuff!
Sure thing! Bellow are pictures of the original and updated visualizations — before: a simple table, now: a totally interactive dashboard! You can also follow these links to the Original and Updated visualization.
What was wrong with the original?
The issue here was not that it used a table to show the data, the updated dashboard has one too! But the original was rather bland, while now with a heat map and more interesting font sizes and coloring, it’s much easier to identify the top skills in each sport.
The new dashboard also lets you Select a Sport to Highlight! So you can clearly see where it stands on the Total Toughness scale, the color-coded table and on each of the scatter plots, while all other sports fade into the background but are still visible.
You can now also isolate a single sport or select as many as you like to have a better picture on how specific sports fare against others. Just click on the dropdown bellow “Select Multiple Sports for Comparison!”. How about selecting Tennis and Table Tennis? Tennis ranks at 7.75 in terms of agility, while Table Tennis only 5.88. Do you agree?
The #1 sport (or sports in case of a tie) in each of the 10 skill measures is spelled-out in gold on the top left-hand corner of each of the boxes, so there’s no doubt on who’s the toughest according to this panel of experts!
Finally, you can also scroll down on the Total Toughness Score chart, all the way from the strong dark red of #1 Boxing, to the sad short grey bar of… Fishing at #60 — ugh, I would have something to say about that if that was my favorite!
So, what do you think? Is the new visualization better than the original? Do you agree with the ESPN toughness ranking? How about you make your own pooling to see if you would get different results? I bet you would!
Get on with it!
