If You Were a Professional Athlete, Which Sport Would You Dominate?

About This Quiz

The advent of the professional athlete really took off in the late 1800s. Before then, the ideal was the amateur athlete, amateur having its roots in the expression "to do something for the love of it." The Olympic games didn't start to allow any professionals to compete until the late 1980s, and only recently have the bodies that govern sports like boxing and wrestling allowed professionals into the Olympic games. When it became public that Lip Pike, the first professional baseball player, was being paid to train rather than have a job in the offseason, it was a scandal that haunted his career until other teams realized they had players who would be even better if they could spend all their time training.

Today, there are whole industries dedicated to the training and perfection of professional athletes, with specialized dietary and exercise regimes. There are even mental training programs using everything from pre-visualization and hypnosis to put professional athletes in the mindset needed to win or at least overcome their physical limitations in order to play hard.

Can you imagine your life if you had to give up the simple pleasures of food and drink, the activities you do in your spare time, to relax? How would you feel if the sport that gave you pleasure was suddenly how you put food on the table? Would you still love it? Take this quiz, and we'll tell you which sport you would dominate if you had to approach it as a professional.