Sports injury in Australia

Bear in mind when making comparisons between sports that there are limitations in each of the data collections 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, about 19.2 million Australians aged 15 and over (89%) played sport or took part in physical activities in 2021–22 (ASC 2022).

In 2021–22:

• the most popular activity was recreational walking (10.1 million participants), followed by fitness and gym (8 million), and running and athletics (3.9 million) (Figure 5)
• the most popular team sports were soccer (1.3 million participants), basketball (996,000) and netball (659,000) (Figure 6).

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.

Figure 5: Ten most popular physical activities by estimated number of participants in Australia, 2021–22

Source: Australian Sports Commission, AusPlay.

Figure 6: Popular team sports by estimated number of participants in Australia, 2021–22

Note: ‘Rugby’ includes both major codes.
Source: Australian Sports Commission, AusPlay.

For more detail, see data table A28 and appendix.

Cycling has the highest number of hospitalisations

The sports responsible for the most injury hospitalisations in 2021–22 were those that involved wheels, and various types of football. Cycling saw around 8,600 reported injury hospitalisations, followed by Australian rules football (4,300), roller sports (4,100) and wheeled motor sports (3,800) (Figure 7).

Together, the 3 main specified types of football (Australian rules, rugby, and soccer) were attributed to 11,400 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’ (2,400 cases in 2021–22).

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 view males and females separately in the following graph by using the filter at the bottom right.

Figure 7:  Numbers of sports injury hospitalisations by activity, by sex, 2021–22

For more detail, see data table A13 and Appendix.

Wheeled motor sports had the highest rate of hospitalisation

When evaluating the risk of injury for a select group of sports in 2021–22, we compared the reported number of injuries against the estimated number of participants aged 15 and over. In 2021–22, Wheeled motor sports, rugby and Australian rules football had the highest injury hospitalisation rates per 100,000 participants (Figure 8).

Figure 8: Rate per 100,000 participants (aged 15 and over) of injury hospitalisation, for selected sports categories, 2021–22

For more detail, see data table A19.