We may very well find it very difficult to come up with something that has no possibly offensive cultural baggage. Do you think soccer was one where someone made even an attempt to mitigate that baggage?
I could make an argument that using a sport which has massive popularity outside Western European culture is a sign that the interviewer was thinking about diversity.
Sports are good candidates for these challenges as they have reasonably complex rule, so it isn't necessarily that the interviewer was just selecting something they liked.