The world's most dangerous sporting event.

It's the world's most dangerous legally-sanctioned sporting event. Every time the event is run, on average, two competitors and an unknown number of spectators die. With an entourage the size of a small city, the Dakar Rally streaks for 16 days and 9000 kilometres across several countries and time zones at frightening speeds. One of the most significant events in the history of motorsport, it has direct lineage to the first auto race and all the famous city-to-city races which were banned between 50 and 100 years ago due to the carnage. So why is it still running?

The World's Most Dangerous Sport?

Several sports lay claim to being the most dangerous in the world. Rugby recently topped a newspaper opinion poll ahead of boxing, Formula One and hurling.

American bull riding is sold to the public on the basis of being the most dangerous sport in the world with five times more injuries than American football, six times more than wrestling, and 13 times more than ice hockey.

But fatalities are rare. There are sports where competitors have a much higher probability of dying. Sports like BASE Jumping, Free Diving, Cave Diving, Speed Skiing and Street Luging have fatalities, but participation is not that widespread and rock fishing claims more lives than all of them.

The Most Dangerous Sporting Events

Averaging deaths across the participation of a sport is one way of looking at how dangerous a sport is, but history has shown there are sometimes single sporting events with an extraordinary competitor mortality rate. In recent times, the most prominent have been when Mother Nature unleashes her fury on a fleet of yachts. In Australia it happened in 1998 during the running of one of yachting's historical icons, the Sydney-Hobart yacht race. As the weather descended, an even larger number of rescue workers had to face the storm to save the fleet in what became Australia's largest ever maritime rescue. Considering the conditions, it's a miracle more lives were not lost. Six boats sank or had to be abandoned, over 50 sailors were pulled from the sea by helicopters, and 70 of the 115 boats that started did not see the finish. The final death toll was six though there had only been two prior deaths in the entire 54 race history of the event. The public enquiries that followed ensured the race became much safer as a result.

Public enquiries always follow such disasters, particularly when the cost of the rescue was being born by the public and it was the opinion of many that rescue workers' lives were being needlessly put at risk by the running of the event. Similar massive scrutiny followed such a tragedy in the United Kingdom when the 1979 Fastnet yacht race was hit by severe weather and 17 died. The event is now, like the Sydney-to-Hobart, a model of safety.

Motor Racing

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