What does it take to be dominant in the world of sports? Well, the short answer seems to be money and steroids, but of course other factors exist (HGH, being scheduled against the Knicks, etc). But you just try telling that to those teams of researchers who occasionally pop up attempting to correlate wins and losses with uniform color.
One such study was conducted during the 2004 Olympics, with a focus on the judo competition, essentially concluding that athletes wearing blue robes had a sporting advantage over their counterparts decked out in white. Blue, the logic goes, is bolder and meaner looking than white, thus somehow psyching out all the lily-clad pansy boys. Blue, apparently, is the new red.
Of course there are a million zillion ways of debunking the aforementioned Olympic study. And really, we don’t even need empiricism to do so, just simple common sense: even if you dressed up a young Mike Tyson or any of the Gracie clan in pink boleros and extra medium fishnets there’d still be a pitiable trail of broken and dispatched contenders. I’m mean, case in point, amirite?
So, naturally a couple researchers got together to sort out the raging blue/white judo robe controversy once and for all. They found a number of conveniently ignored variables from the first study, though one was particularly glaring: the top 11 percent of judo athletes in the 2004 Olympics were all given blue uniforms. There’s not much else to say after that, except everything else pretty much falls to pieces from there. Especially when you consider a recent turn of events.
However, the selection of uniform hue has long been a favorite stratagem for psychologically minded coaches and owners. When Steve Spurrier took over the University of Florida football team one of his first moves was to make over the struggling program’s image by changing the unlucky orange jerseys to blue; in 1997 the lowly Tampa Bay Buccaneers, for years one of the most pathetic franchises in sports, ditched their laughable “creamsicle” unis for a more decorous red and pewter and an eventual Super Bowl win. Not that orange is a competitive death knell: Adidas recently determined that the bright orange jersey worn by brick wall-like Real Madrid goalkeeper Iker Casillas has the effect of making him appear larger and more intimidating (what the specifics of this “survey” are I cannot say).
Now if white seems to be on the bottom of the color potency totem pole, what can we say about pink? When not used to shame and jinx, it’s been sported by a host of top-flight soccer clubs as well as two of the greatest champions of our time. You listening, Belichick?
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