It was Australia's early European settlers who viewed sport as a leisure activity. Some of the first examples of sport in this form date back to the early 1800's in the then colony of New South Wales, when cricket, horse racing, sailing, professional foot races, and rowing were popular sports.
Touch Football is one of the only sports that was invented in Australia. It's a sport that's been formally recognised for more than 50 years. The sport's Golden Jubilee was celebrated in 2018.
Wrestling, mankind's oldest and most basic form of recreational combat, traces its origins back to the dawn of civilization. Carvings and drawings estimated to be between 15,000 and 20,000 years old, found in caves in southern Europe, illustrate wrestlers in hold and leverage positions.
Major League Baseball is the highest level of play of baseball in the world and the oldest of the major American leagues.
Australian Rules Football is clearly the most popular spectator sport in Australia, though in terms of participation more men play golf, cricket and tennis. Rugby league is another popular sport, but not as a sport to play.
Viewership the NRL has 137 million viewers a season. The AFL has 126 million viewers a season. NRL is a better sport to watch on TV.
The Australian Sports Commission's official AusPlay survey has shown that soccer is once again the most popular sport to play in the country. The 'beautiful game' has 1,154,153 participants, followed by golf (742,231), Aussie Rules (699,940) and tennis (648,210).
Wrestling as a modern day sport is still widely popular, even though it has come to evolve and develop into many different types and categories. Not only is running the second oldest sports activity in the world, it is also the first Olympic sport to have a written record off its event, dating back to 776 BC.
#1: Boxing
Chosen by ESPN as the hardest sport in the world—and routinely landing on the top 10 lists of the toughest sports in the world by other prominent rankings—boxing is universally recognized as a crazy-hard sport. It requires a ton of physical fitness, agility, speed, cardiovascular fitness, and skill.
Breaking is the brand new sport debuting at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games.
Technically, the words football and soccer are both correct. They describe the same sport which was codified by the Football Association in 1863 and the words can be considered synonyms. The word 'soccer' is actually a British export, which was used for many years before the globalisation of football.
According to the sport's lore, in 1823 William Webb Ellis, a pupil at Rugby School, defied the conventions of the day (that the ball may only be kicked forward) to pick up the ball and run with it in a game, thus creating the distinct handling game of rugby football.
Australia is internationally renowned for cricket, and the Australian Men's Cricket Team has a higher percentage of successful matches than any other international team. However, although Australia is particularly good at cricket, Australians also love rugby, netball, swimming and surfing and more.
Aboriginal Australians sought out sports like athletics and swimming in part because they had aspects of traditional sports from their community. Traditional sports included boomerang throwing and running. Most Indigenous sports at the time of European arrival were for enjoyment.
Soccer, or better known to the rest of the world as football, is one of the oldest sports in history. Dating back to 206 B.C., there are accounts of Chinese soldiers playing Tsu'chu, “kicking the ball,” to supplement their training regiments during the Han Dynasty.
The oldest sport in USA is lacrosse. The Native US have been playing lacrosse for several millennia. Also, in ancient Polynesia, especially in ancient Hawaii, people had been surfing since at least the 12th century.
The game played under the Football Association's rules thus became known as association football. Inevitably, the names would be shortened. Linguistically creative students at the University of Oxford in the 1880s distinguished between the sports of “rugger” (rugby football) and “assoccer” (association football).
The Royal Game of Ur is the oldest playable boardgame in the world, originating around 4,600 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia. The game's rules were written on a cuneiform tablet by a Babylonian astronomer in 177 BC.
Australian sporting success is also aided by having favourable weather conditions that allows most sports people to train all-year round, along with many having reasonable income and spare-time to develop their individual sporting prowess, whether solely as an individual or supported by family.