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Sport

16 September 2023

4 min read

Why are sportspeople so superstitious?

Routine and rhythm help performance, but sporting superstition begs a question, writes Jonny Reid. Who do we really think is in control?

Jonny Reid

Jonny Reid leads the communications team at Christians in Sport.

A rugby ball sails towards a player in a striped jersey from the foot of a kicker who has a leg and an arm extended out.

England v. Argentina, RWC 2023.

RFU.

Guinness’ Rugby World Cup advert commands supporters: “Don’t Jinx It!” The advertiser explained:

“All of Ireland will be supporting the team with every fibre, but our campaign urges fans to remember that their actions are as important as the team on the pitch, they need to play their part too, don’t jinx it.”

Superstitions on the pitch are just as prominent as those off it. England legend Jonny Wilkinson always wore the same t-shirt under his match shirt as a lucky charm, the Welsh side used to ritually vomit before games and for decades club side Bath played without a number 13.

So why is it that sport is so fill of superstition?

A longing for control

We feel like we’re in control until a sudden injury or a major pandemic arrives and we realise that we may be less in control than we’d like.

Indian sports psychologist Ashis Nandy thinks this may be why cricketers are so superstitious. In a game full of failure, which has a high degree of luck, it is inevitable that players will turn to superstition to help regain a sense of control:

'No wonder cricketers lean on superstition as a crutch. They cannot accept the awful truth - that the game is governed by erratic umpiring decisions, random tosses and unpredictable seam movement - so they invent a coping strategy to persuade themselves they are in control.'

We want to be in control but we know we’re not.

Whether it’s a snapped Achilles tendon at a random training session, a contract not renewed at the end of a season or point deductions due to mismanagement by owners - sport is littered with examples which remind us we’re not in charge.

It’s worth saying that routine is different to superstition. US soccer psychologist Tim Perrin argues that routines are integral for the elite sportsperson. “Performance is about routines—they take us into performance, and superstitions are very much a part of that,” Perrin said. “They are a way we can very habitually, automatically, and unconsciously take ourselves into performance mode.”

Repetition and routine are a key part of sport. Not only do they improve our skill levels (think of the 10,000 hour theory) but they also help ease the mental pressures faced by athletes. As Perin explains, the emotional demands and strains of sport can be lessened by routines that “allow certain things (to be done) on a mechanistic, repetitive nature” and can thus be “put on autopilot.”

This is the reason for Jonny Wilkinson’s famous pre-kick routine or the even more extreme Dan Biggar’s version which has become known as the ‘Biggarena.’ His idiosyncratic routine once proved an Internet sensation.

When does routine tip into superstition? It’s when it becomes irrational and when a change to that routine leads to distinct mental torment or a level of discomfort.

Superstition, as we observe it, in the stands or the pub or on the pitch provokes questions for all of us: Is there a way I can be in control? Or am I actually under control from a higher power?

Who is in control?

When things don’t happen as we’d like, it’s easy to feel pretty disillusioned. But do our superstitious tendencies point towards something bigger?

Among Christians there is the belief that we humans are created in the image of God and that he gave us the weighty responsibility to live in the world and also to shape it. While we have responsibility for how we live, we only have penultimate agency. Ultimate power over events lies in hands bigger than ours.

The trouble is we chafe at our limited role in all this.

Dan Strange, in his book Making Faith Magnetic says:

“deep down we know we’re not divine and that we need something greater than us in which to find meaning and legitimacy. So we still invest in other things that can give us a sense of ultimate meaning and purpose.”

This could be our partner or family. It could quite easily be our sporting career. We load them with an unbearable weight of responsibility, that none of these substitutes for God can handle because they too are penultimate not ultimate.

In the book of John, Jesus calls himself “the good shepherd” - the one who guides the flock of sheep, whether they are aware of it or not.

The world is not controlled by luck or energy or even random chance, it is in the hands of a loving God, a loving shepherd who leads his sometimes reluctant flock to where they need to go.

In the stories of Jesus we see someone who exercises an extraordinary control over the world - over nature (walking on water), over disease (healing blind people) and over evil powers (exorcising the .disturbed) He shows us a world which isn’t just defined by fate or by an angry impersonal Deity but one in which there is a sense that we are both in control and under control.

Far from living in a world of randomness and luck, maybe after all we live in a world where a good God works through the details of our lives and is with us in the ups and the downs, in the injury, de-selection, contract confusion, dip in form and in the cup wins, record breaking, peak-performing moments of our sporting careers.

Routine and rhythm can help sporting performance but superstition ultimately leads us to ask a question. Who do we really think is in control?

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Paganism

Sport

28 July 2024

8 min read

Paris 2024 and Christianity’s opening ceremony

A subversive Olympic opening relies on Christianity’s own beginnings.

Tim May

Tim is an associate vicar of King’s Cross Church (KXC), a London-based Anglican church.

A painting of the Last supper showing Christ and the disciples at a table.

da Vinci's Last Supper.

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, held on the River Seine, has unsurprisingly caused controversy. Such moments, where one nation through pageantry and spectacle performs itself to all others, never fail to draw comment. The 2024 ceremony has drawn various detractors, not least those claiming the ceremony was an “attack on Christianity.”

You might remember the masterful opening to the London 2012 games. Director Danny Boyle’s theatrical spectacle told a symbolic story of nationhood. By depicting the bucolic, the industrial, and the NHS, he considered the UK in both dark moments and at its brightest. With a great exhibition of British humour, James Bond appeared to parachute out of a helicopter with HRH Queen Elizabeth II, while Mr Bean entertained the whole wordlessly through sardonic single-finger piano playing.

Widely held to be a creative triumph, Boyle was preceded by the Beijing Olympics where its opening ceremony, CGI fireworks put to one side, wowed the world with unprecedented size and scale, reminding us that we live in an era of Chinese power.

Tokyo 2021, delayed by a year due to the Covid-19 pandemic, involved 1,800 drones filling the skies – a faultless demonstration of a technological age where Japanese engineering has been indispensable.

The sporting side of things was easily forgotten as we witnessed an emphatically kitsch depiction of French history and culture.

In 2024 Paris, the weather was perhaps the greatest focus of attention, which suited the British commentary perfectly. We Brits surely are the world experts in making light-entrainment out of describing rain. Soggy athletes sailed the Seine on a variety of uninspiring looking barges. Sanguine but soaked, the athletes dutifully waved and smiled; adorned not in gold, silver or bronze but flimsy ill-fitting plastic ponchos.

Overshadowing this athletes’ parade were the creations of theatre director Thomas Jolly, mastermind of the whole ceremony. Boldly deciding to choose the city as a stage, rather than make use of the conventional choice of a stadium, the sporting side of things was easily forgotten as we witnessed an emphatically kitsch depiction of French history and culture.

Although the weather somewhat thwarted proceedings, it was the content of the performance that drew criticism.

Far-right politicians decried Jolly’s offering as a violation of French nationhood. Conservative pundits focused their criticism on Jolly’s elevation of LGBTQIA+ culture.

Christian commentators have, with various degrees of rancour, condemned a strange scene where Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting of the Last Supper was subverted by a pastiche of ostentatiously queer characters. At the centre of which was not Jesus Christ but a robust-looking figure resembling Lady Liberty.

Elon Musk spoke up in protest too, posting that it was ‘extremely disrespectful to Christians.’ Full-throttled cries of blasphemy resound, and probably for good reason. What we witnessed was Christ being usurped and replaced by the insurgency of self-expression and the currently sacred idea of diversity and inclusion.

Ahead of the ceremony, Jolly told British Vogue about the heart behind his creation: “there is room for everyone in Paris. Maybe it’s a little chaotic, it’s true, but that allows everyone to find a place for themselves.” The opening ceremony will be a success, Jolly says, “if everyone feels represented in it.”

I guess this isn’t the case for the thirty per cent of the world who would identify as Christian. That’s because every family and flavour of Christianity would recognise that Holy Communion, the central act of Christian Worship for 2000 years, the institution of which is depicted in da Vinci painting, was being publicly and globally vandalised.

When Christianity becomes moral wallpaper to an entire civilisation and its culture, it unsurprisingly becomes a target for satire.

How can we make sense of this moment? Is there anything more for the Christian to contribute other than indignation or outrage?

Whenever something like this occurs it reminds me of the central role Christianity has played in Western culture. The intelligibility of the ceremony’s controversial scene rests on the idea that da Vinci’s painting is a globally recognised symbol. Otherwise, we would have just been watching a really strange dinner party with no food. But with Da Vinci’s famous painting in our mind the subversive power of Jolly’s scene hits hard.

The view, popularised by the historian Tom Holland among others, would go as far as to suggest that Christianity’s effect on Western culture is so pervasive that even moments of protest and subversion, as we saw in the Paris ceremony, are cultural phenomena inherited from the Protestant Reformation. Regardless of how far you agree with Holland’s thesis, Jolly's subversion only makes sense because of the dominant role Christianity has played in shaping the western imagination, and that is a position of latent power that should cause pause for reflection.

I’ve read half a dozen articles from a certain sort of right-wing journalist who parrot thoughts like, “they wouldn’t do that with the Quran”. That might be right, but it fundamentally misses the point. Blasphemy, let’s say, in Iran, would certainly not involve the Last Supper.

The scene made sense only because of Christianity’s now diminishing position of power but it's a position of power, nonetheless. When you align Jesus Christ with the status quo, with the corridors of power, when Christianity becomes moral wallpaper to an entire civilisation and its culture, it unsurprisingly becomes a target for satire. Especially for anyone or any group that feels persecuted or marginalised. I’m not for a moment defending what Jolly did but trying to understand why it happened.

The last supper, the meal Jesus shared with his friends the night before his crucifixion, was the opening ceremony of Christianity.

The kind of cultural power Christianity has had in the West comes at the cost of clarity because Christianity was itself originally a counterculture. Crucifixion, a supreme act of imperial domination, became the foundation of Christian thought and ultimately its greatest symbol. The original Christian movement was seen itself to be blasphemous for contradictory reasons by both the Jewish and Roman religious leaders of the time.

The fundamental difference between Christianity and merely holding conservative values that should not be transgressed, is God. It was genuine belief in Jesus Christ as the long-awaited messiah of the Jewish people and the Saviour of the whole world - a belief that led his first bedraggled and bewildered disciples to live in such radical and counter-cultural ways that many were killed by the Roman Empire.

It is right for his followers today to speak up and say how wrong it is when the special and sacred things he did for them are yet again trampled on in public, but it's also worth remembering that’s how the story started - with Jesus’ body brutalised and broken. That somehow, in moments like this, we miss the power of Jesus when we simply defend him on grounds of “decency” and “respect.” Instead, if we return to the original events themselves, Jolly’s depiction, in its mockery and subversion, actually reveals the power of The Last Supper.

Da Vinci’s painting was not intended for a gallery but was originally painted on the wall of a fairly obscure monastery, transported to a gallery years later to become primarily art, it is more a foundational aid to the faithful to remember the original events Da Vinci is depicting.

The last supper, the meal Jesus shared with his friends the night before his crucifixion, was the opening ceremony of Christianity. Every time a Christian takes Holy Communion - the central act of Christian worship for over 2,000 years - they remember the opening ceremony where:

“Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, “Take and eat; this is my body.” Then he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins”

The most peculiar part of the opening ceremony of Christianity - more peculiar than any sight we saw last night - is the presence of Judas. The biblical accounts describe Jesus’ knowledge of Judas’ intentions to betray him to the Romans, and yet Judas is still welcome to the table. If there’s space for Judas, then there is space for all of us. The opening ceremony Christianity cannot be remembered without the presence of Judas the betrayer, and Peter the coward or Thomas the doubter. The great irony and the big mystery of the Christian Faith is that you can’t out-sin grace. You can mock it and subvert it, but Christ died for the ungodly.

Last night’s scene doesn’t come close to the original events. Not only was Jesus betrayed by his friends, he was then tortured, humiliated and executed publicly in just about the most excruciating way humans have devised. That was blasphemy of another level, but it was also victory because God was choosing to love inclusively beyond any human metric.

Tom Holland may be right that no part of western culture has escaped Christian influence, but I want more than a little downstream influence.

This means that there’s nothing more inclusive than the opening ceremony of Christianity and yet, at the same time, nothing more exclusive. It is not us who provide the food but God. In Jolly’s performance, the Last Supper scene was concluded by the French actor Philippe Katerine, emerging painted head to toe in blue. Whilst this bearded smurf caused baffled sniggers across the planet, Katherine was apparently representing Dionysius, The Greek god associated with wild drunken parties. The food on offer by Jolly is wild desire and self-expression. In Christianity the food is God himself, his body and his blood. God’s love is given not simply expressed, even to those who will betray him.

Moments like this will become harder for Christians to navigate. It feels like just as a wave of secular liberalism wants to finally vanquish the power position Christianity has painted for centuries, a new conservative vanguard of resistance is rising to protect or enrol it for its own means. From the mouth of Modi or in Trump’s tirades, a new religiously armed populism is raging. Tom Holland may be right that no part of western culture has escaped Christian influence, but I want more than a little downstream influence.

Take us back to the opening ceremony, to the foundation of Christian faith. Take us to the waterfall, where the torrent flows straight down from the mountain, and save us from the slow-moving sludge of the wide river downstream. Take me back to the opening ceremony of Christianity. To the table where God welcomes a Judas like me, to the meal where the master became a servant and washed his followers' feet. Take me back to eat food I could never afford and wine I could not create.