40 Fun Facts About Sport Psychology

Which 17-year-old forward did Brazil's team psychologist call infantile and unfit to play at the 1958 World Cup?

Pelé played anyway and set up a goal in Brazil's 2–0 win over the USSR. Coach Vicente Feola simply overruled the psychologist's advice.

Which Olympic athletes are often less satisfied with their result than the rivals who placed one step below them?

Silver medalists tend to dwell on the gold they narrowly missed, while third-place athletes think about how close they came to no medal at all. Psychologists call it counterfactual thinking.

At the 2004 Olympics, boxers and wrestlers randomly given which uniform color won more often than their opponents?

Red was consistently linked with a higher chance of winning across the Athens combat sports. In many animals the same color works as a signal of male quality.

Which athletes did Norman Triplett notice went faster beside a rival, inspiring the first sport psychology study?

Cyclists posted quicker times with a pacemaker or competitor than alone, Triplett saw. He tested the idea in 1898 by having children wind fishing reels side by side.

Which Apple TV+ comedy cast Sarah Niles as no-nonsense sports psychologist Dr. Sharon Fieldstone from season two?

Ted Lasso made Dr. Fieldstone the psychologist of fictional club AFC Richmond. Sarah Niles earned an Emmy nomination for the role.

Which gymnast withdrew from most Tokyo Olympic finals after a loss of air awareness that gymnasts call the twisties?

Simone Biles lost her sense of where her body was during twisting skills, which makes landings dangerous. She came back on the last day to take bronze on the balance beam.

Which food did famously superstitious baseball Hall of Famer Wade Boggs eat before every single game?

Chicken was only one of Wade Boggs's rituals. He also woke at the same time every day and ran his sprints at exactly 7:17 pm.

Which English medical student ran the first sub-four-minute mile at Oxford's Iffley Road track in 1954?

Roger Bannister clocked 3:59.4 behind two pacemakers. Once broken, the barrier fell again just 46 days later, to Australia's John Landy.

Which magazine's cover is said to jinx featured athletes, a pattern explained by regression toward the mean?

Sports Illustrated tends to picture athletes at a peak, so a dip afterwards is likely by chance. Its very first cover star, baseball's Eddie Mathews, injured his hand soon after.

Which long-observed sporting edge all but vanished in the 2020 NFL season, when the pandemic emptied the stands?

Home advantage disappeared as hosts finished 127–128–1, the first NFL season with no significant edge. Crowds are thought to sway both the players and the officials.

What name did golfer Tommy Armour popularize for the involuntary twitches that wreck a player's putting stroke?

The yips, by Armour's own account, were what pushed him out of tournament golf. Mayo Clinic researchers found that 33% to 48% of serious golfers have experienced them.

Which term did Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi give the absorbed mental state that athletes call being in the zone?

Flow got its name because people he interviewed in 1975 kept comparing the feeling to a current of water carrying them along.

Which basketball belief, that a shooter on a streak is likelier to score again, did a 1985 study call a fallacy?

The hot hand was dismissed by Thomas Gilovich, Amos Tversky and Robert Vallone, but later research has questioned whether the belief is a fallacy after all.

Which coach of the Bulls and Lakers was nicknamed the Zen Master for an approach shaped by Eastern philosophy?

Phil Jackson called Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance one of the major guiding forces in his life. His teams won eleven NBA titles.

In American football, what does a team do just before a rival's field goal attempt to ice the kicker?

Call a timeout and the kicker has to wait and think, or so the theory goes. One review of NFL pressure kicks found iced kickers made 72.0%, against 71.7% for the rest.

In which Canadian sport did Roger Barnsley find elite youth players were mostly born early in the calendar year?

Ice hockey youth leagues set eligibility by calendar year, so January babies are the oldest and most mature in each group. Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers made the finding famous.

Which animal does psychiatrist Steve Peters use to depict the emotional, irrational brain in a 2012 book?

A chimp stands for the impulsive brain in The Chimp Paradox, with a human for the logical part. Peters has worked with the England football team and snooker's Ronnie O'Sullivan.

In which sport is insulting an opponent known as sledging, a tactic Steve Waugh called mental disintegration?

Cricket picked up the word at Adelaide Oval in the mid-1960s, by Ian Chappell's account, though the banter itself is as old as the game.

Which tennis star left the 2021 French Open after being fined for skipping a press conference?

Naomi Osaka had said she would skip her media duties, and was fined $15,000 after her first win. She later said she had lived with depression since the 2018 US Open.

Which exercise euphoria, long credited to endorphins, do recent studies link more closely to endocannabinoids?

Runner's high may owe more to endocannabinoids because they can cross the blood-brain barrier, which endorphins cannot. Regular runners report it more often than occasional ones.

Which baseball slugger had his swing speed, breathing and reaction time measured by two researchers in 1921?

Babe Ruth's coordination, wrist speed and reflexes all tested well above the average person's. Sportswriter Hugh Fullerton reported the laboratory results to the public.

Which baseball team did owner Philip Wrigley hire psychologist Coleman Griffith to study in 1938?

Chicago Cubs manager Charlie Grimm wanted no part of it: he called Griffith a headshrinker and discouraged his players from cooperating.

Which Olympic official is credited with first using the term sport psychology, in 1900?

Pierre de Coubertin, the father of the modern Olympic Games, later published a whole book of essays on the subject, Essais de psychologie sportive.

Which golfer lost a three-shot lead on the final hole of the 1999 Open after wading barefoot into a stream?

Jean van de Velde needed only a double-bogey six to win, a collapse often cited as a case of choking under pressure. He made seven, then lost a three-way playoff to Paul Lawrie.

Which Czechoslovak midfielder gave his name to the softly chipped penalty down the middle after the Euro 1976 final?

Antonín Panenka's trick exploits the goalkeeper's urge to act: keepers dive left or right on over 90 percent of penalties, leaving the center open.

Which insects did Robert Zajonc time on a runway, finding they ran faster when others of their kind were present?

Cockroaches reached the end of a straight runway sooner with company, a result Zajonc used to argue that an audience speeds up simple tasks. A 2020 replication found no such effect.

Max Ringelmann found that people put in less effort in a group than alone by measuring them at which task?

Pulling a rope as a group, each man pulled less hard than he did alone. The drop in individual effort is now known as social loafing.

Five-time world champion Eric Bristow developed a mental block in the 1980s that stopped him letting go of what?

His darts would not leave his fingers properly, a condition players call dartitis. Bristow never recovered the level of performance he had before it struck.

Which Olympic sport's competitors can suffer target panic, once called gold panic after the color of the bullseye?

Archery has discussed target panic since at least the 1970s. Sufferers may lock up before they can line the arrow up, or release it before reaching full anchor.

The Yerkes–Dodson law linking arousal to performance came from a 1908 study of which so-called dancing animals?

Mice of a Japanese breed nicknamed the dancing mouse were the subjects. The law says performance rises with arousal only up to a point and then drops, tracing an inverted U.

Anders Ericsson's research behind the so-called 10,000-hour rule studied expert players of which instrument?

Violin students were his subjects, and 10,000 was only their average hours of deliberate practice by age 20, when they were still nowhere near masters.

Which word did Stephen Potter popularize in a 1947 book about winning games without actually cheating?

Gamesmanship entered the English language through Potter's humorous guide to psychological ploys, which he dashed off during a ten-day power cut.

In which city did German sports official Carl Diem found the first sport psychology laboratory in the early 1920s?

Berlin later gave Diem a far larger stage: he was chief organizer of the city's 1936 Olympic Games.

Which Stanford psychologist, also known for the Bobo doll experiment, originated the concept of self-efficacy?

Albert Bandura defined it as the belief in one's own ability to succeed at a task. Reviews of sport psychology research list self-efficacy among the influences that most help performance.

What name did researcher Joan Vickers give the steady final gaze expert basketball players hold before a free throw?

Quiet eye training has since spread beyond the court: Vickers's later research applied it to surgery as well as sport.

What did Robert Cialdini call sports fans' habit of wearing team colors and saying we after a victory?

Basking in reflected glory showed up after college football wins, when students wore more school apparel and described the result with the pronoun we more often than after a loss.

Which Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher's sudden loss of control after 1972 gave baseball's throwing block its name?

Steve Blass had thrown two complete-game wins in the 1971 World Series, yet in 1973 he walked 84 batters in under 89 innings. Baseball still calls the affliction by his name.

Which England captain, who won the 1981 Ashes after replacing Ian Botham, later became a psychoanalyst?

Mike Brearley was once described as having a degree in people, such was his man-management. He went on to serve as president of the British Psychoanalytical Society.

Which boxer, famed for psychological trash talk, released a full-length album of trash-talk poetry in 1963?

Muhammad Ali modeled his patter on the wrestler Gorgeous George, having seen how George's talking ability drew huge crowds to events.

Which UCLA basketball coach, winner of ten national titles, devised the Pyramid of Success for his players?

John Wooden, the Wizard of Westwood, collected those championships in a 12-year span, including a record seven in a row.