Boxing was a bit obvious because someone is punching you.
A New Measure of Suspense
03 Nov 2014 Leave a comment
in economics of media and culture, health economics Tags: sport
Sporting suspense as measured by the number of heart attacks during world cup finals.
In our paper, Alex Frankel, Emir Kamenica and I argue that soccer is among the most suspenseful sports according to our theoretical measure. Now, via Matt Dickenson, comes an empirical validation of this finding using German cardiac arrest data:

The red line shows the spike in heart attacks on the dates of 2006 World Cup matches involving the German national team. Note that point 7 is the third place match against Portugal after Germany had been eliminated in their semi-final match against Italy (point 6.)
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