Why Do Rich People Love Endurance Sports?

Organized suffering for people who have never suffered. Lack of suffering is associated with shame and illegitimacy. Showing people that you have suffered is a way to shed guilt.

I've played sports my whole life, and there's nothing I dislike more than endurance sports. Doing anything repetitive for a long length of time is just incredibly boring to me, and I highly prefer learning and mastering a set of skills that can then be combined in various ways, usually in real-time, like one sees in basketball, taekwondo, racket sports, etc.

I have a running theory that many become interested in endurance sports as adults because they actually don't know how to play other sports. So in a way, these endurance sports are the so-called "easy" way in because they don't require the skill refinement that more skill-based sports require like basketball, martial arts, etc. So these endurance sports are actually the low-hanging fruit of sports or on-rails sports in a way. I'd love to see stats on how many of these sports are started as adults. I am not demeaning the endurance sports at all, but I would seriously guess from my observations that this is the case of getting involved in them. Endurance sports are also ones that one can stretch into later life easier.

And I think another thing is that once one starts in these endurance sports, it becomes an obsession of tinkering and "getting the gear" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3SFqV0hMyo), which can get quite expensive. You gotta make sure you got the right shoes, clothes, bike, bottles, earbuds, glasses, etc., and there's endless tinkering of workout and eating strategies. I feel it's just different than grabbing a glove to go play softball, having a basketball and shoes to play basketball, a racket for tennis or badminton, or just having a dobok for taekwondo or whatever else uniform for a martial art. Gear obsessions for ball sports or martial arts really only go so far. Endurance sports sort of favor tinkering of the body and gear because of the timelines in the sports and the idea, real or perceived, that every bit of gear matters. So participants in these sports become obsessed with this tinkering, which is obviously enabled by certain socioeconomic factors.

Being rich already enables you to be good at endurance sports. Time to burn and train is the limiting factor. They're also no directly PvP, which insulates the ego.

This is a really interesting take.

I know a number of very successful people who were not at all sporty in their youth but have taken up endurance sports as adults.

Playing team sports subjects you often to losing and it's also often pretty hard to improve objectively. Also if you haven't played a fair bit of sport in your youth it's probably hard to get good at them. Team sports are also hard in that training and games are on a schedule that may be hard to combine with work and family life.

With endurance sports you can work hard to improve your personal times.

Also many team sports are pretty bad from an injury point of view as you get older. Explosive speed and even the contact of football (soccer) or basketball can be an issue.

It'd be really interesting to see detailed stats about adult sport involvement vs income.

The top comment thread from the last time this was posted[1] pretty succinctly explains why the premise of the article is wrong.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19025386