Choking in Sport

1011 Words5 Pages
Choking in sport is one of the worst and most humiliating feeling an athlete can have. When the pressure is at its highest, the sporting environment can create situations of high anxiety and pressure which can affect players of all level of competition, including the most elite of athletes. Pete Sampras one of the most decorated tennis players of all time and the holder of most singles grand slam championships states “We all choke … no matter who you are, you always feel the pressure in the heat of the moment.” In the sporting context pressure can be seen as a situation with perceived importance (Beilock & Gray, 2007), the added pressure of an audience and unrealistic performance expectations (Wang, 2002). These added pressures on athletes cause the phenomenon of choking, as Baumeister (1984), a social psychologist puts it, choking during a sports situation is “performance decrements under pressure circumstances”, Beilock & Gray (2007) defines choking as “performing worse than expected in situations with a high degree of perceived importance”. Previous literature has enhanced our knowledge in the field of choking under pressure in sports, however due to the numerous number of definitions and explanations of choking in sport, there has not been one theory to gain universal agreement. What is at agreement through many researches is that choking is fundamentally a problem of attention (Wang, 2002). Furthermore there has been contrasting views about how attention specifically affects choking. Wallace (2005) argues that an athlete’s motivation to avoid failure may predict choking under pressure. Roberts (2007) similarly links choking with motivation theories, avoidance motivation typically refers to behaviour directed by negatively valanced events, whereas approach motivation refers to behaviour directed by positively valanced events. The approach motivation is

More about Choking in Sport

Open Document