Skip to main content

GB unvails Olympic kit: Might the wrong colours have been chosen?

Wearers of red team uniforms or kits have been shown to do better than those wearing other colours (Attrill et al, 2008). When sport means so much and outcome is often decided in millimetres or thousandths of a second, we should be doing all we can to help our athletes achieve. I think that the GB Olympic designers may have missed an opportunity here to include more red in the design (it is mainly blue). If it were more red, this may have helped give the GB wearers a boost psychologically that would be reflected in physical performance  - for instance, if the red increased confidence, (positive) aggression and sense that they are dominant, then they are likely to perform closer to their peak performance potential. In addition, there may be negative affects on opponents, facing our athletes wearing significant amounts of red, where they assume a less confident and more submissive position in the sporting contests. While these affects are likely to be small, when it comes to the Olympics, the margins between gold and silver, medal and non-medal, are small, but the difference in reward is huge.

Outside the Olympics, Tiger Woods for years has worn red on the last day of his tournaments, and we all know how dominant he was. Was this something he learned from research, from observation or from his own experience?

Dr Victor Thompson
www.sportspsychologist.com
(This comment was given to the Guardian newspapers on 22 March 2012)

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How will athletes react to the news that lifetime drug bans might be overturned by the BOA before the Olympics?

BBC website announces today: ‘Former Olympic triple jump champion Jonathan Edwards is happy the British Olympic Association's lifetime ban for drug cheats looks set to be overturned.’ http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/olympics/17818958   Without going into how we as spectators think or feel about this issue, I’m interested in the impact that this issue might have on other competitors – those competing in the sports that the previously banned athletes compete in. Athlete A:   With a strong sense of right and wrong, Athlete A gets further fired-up and motivated to show the drug cheats that they are better, that they can win clean, expecting their performance to do the talking. This news of allowing, or potentially allowing, the banned athletes back in, is motivating, helping them prepare and perform. Athlete B:   With a belief that the sports officials, system or the world lets them down, Athlete B becomes angry at the developments. They may either get fired-up...
Post a Comment
Read more

Suicide in football: Players and managers: Gary Speed & Robert Enke

Sports stars, footballers and managers are human too. What I mean by this is life still happens to them. Challenging life events or experiences still happen. So, just like the rest of us, they end up in challenging relationships, enter into marriages that break-up acrimoniously, have loved ones who get sick with nasty illness, cancer or mental health difficulties. They can experience accidents and get into car crashes like we all can. Just like the rest of us. What we see is them performing on the pitch or under the spotlight. What we don't see is their life outside those 90-minutes a week, when they are training, at home, with their family, at the hospital…. We see them composed, focused, coping, performing athlete. This is what we expect. We don't see the struggles, challenges, emotions, arguments, angst, doubts, fears. Who expects this from high paid stars doing what we dream about doing? Sports stars are able (mostly) to cope with competitive pressures and they can appl...
Post a Comment
Read more

The psychology of big climbs: What’s going on in the mind of Tour de France cyclists and what we can learn from this?

What do professional cyclists think when they approach a climb? This depends on how they perceive their climbing ability, the challenge of the upcoming climb, the importance of their performance on this climb and their current sense of fatigue. If they perceive that they have the skills to do well on the climb, based on the gradient and length of the climb and the relative abilities of others, then they will approach with confidence. If instead, they believe that they don’t have that great an ability, then they may have some anxiety, trepidation, and worry with thoughts along the lines of: “This is going to hurt.” “I’m not good at this.” “I’ll get dropped.” So, how would a good climber approach a climb?   A confident rider approaches feeling calmer, more ready for the challenge, perhaps even welcoming and relishing it. They see it as a good test or a good part of the course. They may be thinking along the lines of: “Yeah, here it comes. Bring it on. This is my terrain. ...
Post a Comment
Read more