Does “bad luck” play its toll in sports?
A lot of times, athletes claim they have been the victims of bad fate during play. When they miss a shot in football, or shoot free throws wide in basketball, they claim they missed it because of luck. It is a common human trait that helps us deal with failure; we tend to blame our destiny for our fiascos rather than our own actions. Is there any such thing as luck in sports or are things decided by pure chance? Athletes are not perfect, no one is. They cannot perform 100% of the time they go out in the field. They will inadvertently fail sometimes. Now is this failure down to the imperfection of mankind, or is it luck as so many athletes claim?
A story appeared in the paper recently about Alistair Brownlee, the British favourite triathlon at the 2012 London Olympics. During a race he was in the lead, when suddenly he blanked out but kept going through sheer willpower. The “unlucky” player ended up in tenth place from being in the lead. He did not remember what happened to him after the race finished, but says the last thing he could recall was being overtaken by the winner and his younger brother, the two men who went on to win the first and second place prizes at the race. The triathlon is an extremely difficult sport and only the fittest and mentally-strong athletes can compete in it. Alistair seemed like he was up to the task going into the race, but according to him the spell of bad luck ruined his chances. It just so happened that he got a stomach virus right before the event and it affected his performance. The stomach virus could have attacked the triathlete by pure and random chance. But sadly, it hit him just before the play.
Luck is sometimes defined as a random process where the outcome cannot be controlled. Many athletes attribute this random process to some mysterious element out there in the realm, beyond the understanding of mankind. Some people say, they are the victims of perpetual bad luck and then there are others who say they make their own luck. What they are talking about is someone not able to control a chain of events, while the other being capable of driving his circumstances according to his own will. Admittedly, a lot of teams get to enjoy continuous wins, but that is because one team is a lot weaker than the other. In an evenly-matched contest where anyone can win, chances play a big part.
In matches between equally skilled teams, one team might find that on a particular day its passes just do not seem to reach the intended target. Their passing percentage suddenly drops, and so they have less scoring chances as a result of it. This is referred to as minor changes in chance of scoring successfully. If something small occurs that stops a team from doing what it normally does, that team suddenly finds itself losing the game at hand. This has nothing to do with luck or anything mysterious, some days something small goes wrong and that leads to a match being lost. This is also the reason why sometimes the underdog team will find itself beating a much stronger team; it is because of pure random chance that it happened; the stronger team just had something small going wrong and that gave the upper-hand to the weaker team.
If athletes and sports teams continue to think about luck as a determining factor in their performance, a lot of them will psychologically start relying on the phenomenon of fate, rather than focusing on their performances. So called “bad luck” will then become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If instead the athlete or team concentrates on practising more and improving their game, they might see a marked difference. In order to make a complete transformation, they will have to start dismissing times when nothing went their way as pure chance and nothing more. That will probably see them forget the defeats and concentrate on the wins more.
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