The world's most dangerous sporting event.

The sport with the most consistent record for producing fatalities over the last century is motor racing and unlike almost all other sporting contests, motor racing has also taken a substantial toll on spectators. It too came under tremendous scrutiny when a car ploughed into the spectator area at the 1955 Le Mans 24 hour race killing 80 people. The sport survived, prospered and Formula One is now the most watched spectator sport on the planet, thanks to the reach of television. Each time the sport has suffered deaths, it has responded appropriately by making things safer.

The world's most dangerous sporting event

The Dakar Rally though, seems different. We've scoured the statistics, and in terms of fatalities per event, we can't find any modern sporting event that remotely approaches the Dakar Rally for killing people. We're happy to entertain correspondence from interested lobby groups (we have received NO correspondence from anyone wishing to challenge this claim since this story was poosted in January 2005), but the Dakar Rally statistically appears to be the most dangerous legally sanctioned sporting event in the world.

On average, there has been more than one death each time the event has been run - the exact number of deaths is difficult to pinpoint because in addition to the competitors, there have been an indeterminate number of spectator deaths.

Reports vary wildly but we put the number at 48 competitor deaths in the race's 28-year history and many more spectator deaths.

This year, the Gods did not smile on the event. Another three died, being two contestants and one spectator, a small child who escaped from her mother's arms and ran across the road in front of one of the hundreds of support crew trucks.

Detractors of the race say the cost of the race in human terms has long been prohibitive, and it is time to stop the carnage. Simply running the event ensures that more lives will be lost. Without doubt the Dakar Rally will be the last of the great city-to-city races of motorsport history. One of the most ambitious motorsport events of history, the course usually runs in the vicinity of 10,000 kilometres.

Organising the event must have been a nightmare. The magnitude of this race with its support crews and infrastructure rivals that of the Formula One circus, except it moves in real time across countries and time zones at a frightening speed and does so for two weeks each time.

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