Bear in mind when making comparisons between sports that there are limitations in the data sets involved. Rates of injury per participant should be treated as estimates and are for those aged 15 and over only.
Nine in 10 adults participate in sport or physical activity
According to the AusPlay survey, 19 million Australians aged 15 and over (90%) played sport or took part in physical activities in 2019–20.
In 2019–20:
- The most popular activities overall were recreational walking (9.5 million participants), fitness and gym (8.3 million), and running and athletics (3.6 million) (Figure 8)
- The most popular team sports were soccer (1.1 million participants), basketball (831,000) and netball (622,000) (Figure 9).
The survey classifies individual physical activity and organised team sport in the same way. A participant is someone who took part at least once in the previous 12 months.
Source: Clearinghouse for Sport, AusPlay.
Note: ‘Rugby’ includes both major codes.
Source: Clearinghouse for Sport, AusPlay.
For more detail, see data table A29 and Appendix.
Cycling has the highest number of hospitalisations
The sports with the most injury hospitalisations in 2019–20 were those that involved wheels, and various types of football. Cycling saw around 8,000 reported injury hospitalisations, followed by wheeled motorsports (3,700), roller sports (3,700) and soccer (3,300) (Figure 10).
Together, the 3 main specified types of football (Australian rules, rugby, and soccer) were attributed 8,700 hospitalisations. However, because generic terms are often used for any or all of the football codes, a relatively large number of injury hospitalisations are attributed to ‘other and unspecified football’ (2,100 cases in 2019–20).
There are some differences between males and females. For males, the number one cause of hospitalisation was cycling, whereas for females it was equestrian activities. You can display males and females separately in the following visualisation using the filter at the bottom right.