There are only three sports: mountain climbing, bull fighting, and motor racing. All the rest are merely games.

The saying draws a sharp boundary between “sports” and “games” by making danger—specifically the possibility of death or serious injury—the defining criterion. Mountain climbing, bullfighting, and motor racing are presented as contests where skill is inseparable from existential risk, so success carries a heightened moral or psychological weight. Everything else is demoted to “games,” implying rules and stakes that are ultimately artificial. Read critically, the line also exposes a romantic, even macho, valuation of peril as authenticity. Whether or not Hemingway coined it, the sentiment aligns with a modernist taste for extremity and with cultural debates about spectacle, courage, and what society chooses to honor as “real” achievement.