Sport Psychology
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6correct to beat the crowd
40 free Sport Psychology trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Sport is played with the body and decided, often enough, in the head. Sport psychology is the science of that second contest: why a crowd changes how fast we move, why a routine skill can desert a champion overnight, and why a lucky ritual feels impossible to skip. This quiz collects the best fun facts about sports psychologists and their work. You will meet the pioneers who ran the earliest experiments and laboratories, the studies every coach likes to quote, the mental blocks athletes dread, and the psychologists and coaches who shaped famous teams, on screen as well as off. It is written for curious fans, athletes, coaches and psychology students alike. No specialist knowledge is needed: every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will leave with a few stories worth retelling.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which 17-year-old forward did Brazil's team psychologist call infantile and unfit to play at the 1958 World Cup?
Pelé
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.
Q 02Which Olympic athletes are often less satisfied with their result than the rivals who placed one step below them?
Silver medalists
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.
Q 03At the 2004 Olympics, boxers and wrestlers randomly given which uniform color won more often than their opponents?
Red
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.
Q 04Which athletes did Norman Triplett notice went faster beside a rival, inspiring the first sport psychology study?
Cyclists
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.
Q 05Which Apple TV+ comedy cast Sarah Niles as no-nonsense sports psychologist Dr. Sharon Fieldstone from season two?
Ted Lasso
Ted Lasso made Dr. Fieldstone the psychologist of fictional club AFC Richmond. Sarah Niles earned an Emmy nomination for the role.
Q 06Which gymnast withdrew from most Tokyo Olympic finals after a loss of air awareness that gymnasts call the twisties?
Simone Biles
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.
Q 07Which food did famously superstitious baseball Hall of Famer Wade Boggs eat before every single game?
Chicken
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.
Q 08Which English medical student ran the first sub-four-minute mile at Oxford's Iffley Road track in 1954?
Roger Bannister
Roger Bannister clocked 3:59.4 behind two pacemakers. Once broken, the barrier fell again just 46 days later, to Australia's John Landy.
Q 09Which magazine's cover is said to jinx featured athletes, a pattern explained by regression toward the mean?
Sports Illustrated
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.
Q 10Which long-observed sporting edge all but vanished in the 2020 NFL season, when the pandemic emptied the stands?
Home advantage
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.
Q 11What name did golfer Tommy Armour popularize for the involuntary twitches that wreck a player's putting stroke?
The yips
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.
Q 12Which term did Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi give the absorbed mental state that athletes call being in the zone?
Flow
Flow got its name because people he interviewed in 1975 kept comparing the feeling to a current of water carrying them along.
Q 13Which basketball belief, that a shooter on a streak is likelier to score again, did a 1985 study call a fallacy?
The hot hand
Q 21Which baseball slugger had his swing speed, breathing and reaction time measured by two researchers in 1921?
Babe Ruth
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.
Q 22Which baseball team did owner Philip Wrigley hire psychologist Coleman Griffith to study in 1938?
Chicago Cubs
Chicago Cubs manager Charlie Grimm wanted no part of it: he called Griffith a headshrinker and discouraged his players from cooperating.
Q 23Which Olympic official is credited with first using the term sport psychology, in 1900?
Pierre de Coubertin
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.
Q 14Which coach of the Bulls and Lakers was nicknamed the Zen Master for an approach shaped by Eastern philosophy?
Phil Jackson
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.
Q 15In American football, what does a team do just before a rival's field goal attempt to ice the kicker?
Call a timeout
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.
Q 16In which Canadian sport did Roger Barnsley find elite youth players were mostly born early in the calendar year?
Ice hockey
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.
Q 17Which animal does psychiatrist Steve Peters use to depict the emotional, irrational brain in a 2012 book?
A chimp
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.
Q 18In which sport is insulting an opponent known as sledging, a tactic Steve Waugh called mental disintegration?
Cricket
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.
Q 19Which tennis star left the 2021 French Open after being fined for skipping a press conference?
Naomi Osaka
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.
Q 20Which exercise euphoria, long credited to endorphins, do recent studies link more closely to endocannabinoids?
Runner's high
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.
Pierre de Coubertin, the father of the modern Olympic Games, later published a whole book of essays on the subject, Essais de psychologie sportive.
Q 24Which golfer lost a three-shot lead on the final hole of the 1999 Open after wading barefoot into a stream?
Jean van de Velde
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.
Q 25Which Czechoslovak midfielder gave his name to the softly chipped penalty down the middle after the Euro 1976 final?
Antonín Panenka
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.
Q 26Which insects did Robert Zajonc time on a runway, finding they ran faster when others of their kind were present?
Cockroaches
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.
Q 27Max Ringelmann found that people put in less effort in a group than alone by measuring them at which task?
Pulling a rope
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.
Q 28Five-time world champion Eric Bristow developed a mental block in the 1980s that stopped him letting go of what?
His darts
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.
Q 29Which Olympic sport's competitors can suffer target panic, once called gold panic after the color of the bullseye?
Archery
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.
Q 30The Yerkes–Dodson law linking arousal to performance came from a 1908 study of which so-called dancing animals?
Mice
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.