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Saturday 7 November 2020
Thursday 5 November 2020
Under pressure: why athletes choke
What makes an elite sports star suddenly unable to do the very thing they have been practising for years? And is there anything they can do about it?
by A Mark Williams and Tim Wigmore in The Guardian
Scott Boswell stood at the start of his bowling run-up, immersed in his own very public hell. It was the final of the Cheltenham and Gloucester Trophy in 2001, which should have been the highlight of his cricket career. Instead, he found himself unable to do what he had been doing his entire life.
“I became so anxious I froze. I couldn’t let go. It was a nightmare,” Boswell recalled. “How can I not be able to run up and bowl – something that I’ve done for so many years without even thinking about it? How can that happen? What’s going on in my brain to stop me doing that, and to make me feel physically sick and anxious and that I can’t do something that I’ve just done so naturally?”
Boswell was a fast bowler for Leicestershire. After a man of the match performance in the semi-final, he had earned the right to play in the final at a sold-out Lord’s cricket ground, the home of cricket. It was the dream of every county cricketer.
But Boswell had lost his form in the three weeks since the semi-final, and his place in the final had become less secure. At 10pm the night before the final, Leicestershire’s coach said he wanted to see him. He asked Boswell “whether I was up for it, and whether I could manage. So there was a seed put in my head before I actually played.” He was finally told he was playing 45 minutes before the game. Somerset, Leicestershire’s opponents, won the toss and chose to bat on a sunny day. Boswell, as one of the opening bowlers, bowled the second over.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Scott Boswell after bowling his sixth wide in the 2001 C&G Trophy final against Somerset. Photograph: Naden Rebecca Naden/PA
“The first couple of balls, I felt OK,” he recalled. But on his last ball of the over, Boswell bowled an easy-to-hit short ball that was hit for four runs. “It just didn’t come out of the hands right … It just became a little bit stuck.” It signalled trouble ahead. The next over began with a huge wide. “I thought: ‘Oh, Jesus Christ. I’ve never bowled it that wide before – what’s happened there?’ And that was it. I then bowled another wide, the crowd started to make a bit of noise, I’m thinking: ‘Crikey.’ It went down the leg side, so I’ve got one on the offside, one on the leg side, I’ve overcompensated and I’m thinking: ‘Wow.’”
An over in cricket comprises six balls – that is, six balls that are not considered a no-ball or wide. There are normally only a handful of no-balls in an innings. But Boswell’s second over in the final lasted 14 balls, as he repeatedly sprayed the ball too wide of the crease on either side. A YouTube video of the over, entitled The worst over ever? has been watched more than 1.5m times.
For Boswell, it felt like the over would “absolutely never end”.
Failure to manage anxiety and cope with the demands at a crucial moment can lead to a catastrophic drop in performance, known as choking. As the pressure in a match rises, so can an athlete’s anxiety.
Anxiety is a reaction to pressure or stress. It tends to arise during performances that trigger the fear of losing, or fear of damage to your standing. The symptoms of anxiety are psychological – worry and fear – and physiological – including sweaty palms and an increased heart rate. Anxiety uses up attention and working memory, hindering performance.
Athletes find themselves thinking about processes that normally come automatically. This was Boswell’s experience. The simple act of bowling a ball, on which his career had been built, suddenly seemed alien. “When your conscious mind doesn’t trust your subconscious mind, you’ve got an issue,” he explained. “When you’re in the flow and you’re not thinking about it, you just bowl and you just trust your skills.” Of that day at Lord’s, Boswell said: “I just didn’t trust myself. I didn’t trust my action and I didn’t trust my skill set, and then when it was put under high pressure, it failed.”
When athletes are anxious, they overthink, and focus attention on the technical execution of the skill – those aspects of the movement that have generally become automated. It has been called “paralysis by analysis”: the mental effort actually inhibits performance. This explains why Boswell, a 26-year-old in his seventh season as a professional cricketer, suddenly found himself unable to bowl straight.
As his second over became more farcical – six of his first eight balls were wides – Boswell recalled the crowd getting “louder and louder”. To try to make the ordeal stop, Boswell rushed, taking less and less time before each ball. “I just remember trying to race through my over to get it completed as quickly as I could. Unfortunately, I sped things up when pressure got to me, rather than trying to slow it down and take a step back, do the breathing, have a little smile – ‘It’s only a game of cricket, off you go.’”
Boswell blames no one but himself, but it might have helped if his teammates had gone up to him and had a chat to help him calm down during his over. At Lord’s, the real problem was that Boswell’s method – bowling and self-calming – was not durable enough under pressure. “I probably didn’t have a process if something ever happened. It was just absolute panic.” Boswell only ever played one more game in professional cricket, bowling one terrible over – including two wides – before being dropped from the lineup.
Elite athletes are like the rest of us: they get anxious and it hampers their performance. In the last 30 seconds of tight basketball games, WNBA and NBA players are 5.8% and 3.1% respectively less likely to score from a free throw – an uncontested shot awarded to players who have been fouled – than at other moments in the game. When players take free throws in home matches, they are more likely to miss when the crowd is bigger.
The very best athletes manage to channel the anxiety they feel positively, especially if they have high self-confidence. Athletes with low confidence view anxiety as detrimental to performance, but those with high confidence tend to perceive anxiety as a sign of being ready for the challenge ahead. This makes them less likely to choke under pressure.
The best athletes are also more adept at brushing off disappointments during competition. The champion golfer Annika Sörenstam jokes that she never hit a bad shot in her life: “I don’t remember them.” Lesser players could be consumed by their mistakes, but Sörenstam would clinically dissect what happened, then get on with the business of trying to recover her position.
“You’ve just got to learn how to dissociate – make a quick analysis, boom. Forget about it, move on, don’t carry it with you, learn from your mistakes. We all hit bad shots. It’s just – how do you regain composure?”
by A Mark Williams and Tim Wigmore in The Guardian
Scott Boswell stood at the start of his bowling run-up, immersed in his own very public hell. It was the final of the Cheltenham and Gloucester Trophy in 2001, which should have been the highlight of his cricket career. Instead, he found himself unable to do what he had been doing his entire life.
“I became so anxious I froze. I couldn’t let go. It was a nightmare,” Boswell recalled. “How can I not be able to run up and bowl – something that I’ve done for so many years without even thinking about it? How can that happen? What’s going on in my brain to stop me doing that, and to make me feel physically sick and anxious and that I can’t do something that I’ve just done so naturally?”
Boswell was a fast bowler for Leicestershire. After a man of the match performance in the semi-final, he had earned the right to play in the final at a sold-out Lord’s cricket ground, the home of cricket. It was the dream of every county cricketer.
But Boswell had lost his form in the three weeks since the semi-final, and his place in the final had become less secure. At 10pm the night before the final, Leicestershire’s coach said he wanted to see him. He asked Boswell “whether I was up for it, and whether I could manage. So there was a seed put in my head before I actually played.” He was finally told he was playing 45 minutes before the game. Somerset, Leicestershire’s opponents, won the toss and chose to bat on a sunny day. Boswell, as one of the opening bowlers, bowled the second over.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Scott Boswell after bowling his sixth wide in the 2001 C&G Trophy final against Somerset. Photograph: Naden Rebecca Naden/PA
“The first couple of balls, I felt OK,” he recalled. But on his last ball of the over, Boswell bowled an easy-to-hit short ball that was hit for four runs. “It just didn’t come out of the hands right … It just became a little bit stuck.” It signalled trouble ahead. The next over began with a huge wide. “I thought: ‘Oh, Jesus Christ. I’ve never bowled it that wide before – what’s happened there?’ And that was it. I then bowled another wide, the crowd started to make a bit of noise, I’m thinking: ‘Crikey.’ It went down the leg side, so I’ve got one on the offside, one on the leg side, I’ve overcompensated and I’m thinking: ‘Wow.’”
An over in cricket comprises six balls – that is, six balls that are not considered a no-ball or wide. There are normally only a handful of no-balls in an innings. But Boswell’s second over in the final lasted 14 balls, as he repeatedly sprayed the ball too wide of the crease on either side. A YouTube video of the over, entitled The worst over ever? has been watched more than 1.5m times.
For Boswell, it felt like the over would “absolutely never end”.
Failure to manage anxiety and cope with the demands at a crucial moment can lead to a catastrophic drop in performance, known as choking. As the pressure in a match rises, so can an athlete’s anxiety.
Anxiety is a reaction to pressure or stress. It tends to arise during performances that trigger the fear of losing, or fear of damage to your standing. The symptoms of anxiety are psychological – worry and fear – and physiological – including sweaty palms and an increased heart rate. Anxiety uses up attention and working memory, hindering performance.
Athletes find themselves thinking about processes that normally come automatically. This was Boswell’s experience. The simple act of bowling a ball, on which his career had been built, suddenly seemed alien. “When your conscious mind doesn’t trust your subconscious mind, you’ve got an issue,” he explained. “When you’re in the flow and you’re not thinking about it, you just bowl and you just trust your skills.” Of that day at Lord’s, Boswell said: “I just didn’t trust myself. I didn’t trust my action and I didn’t trust my skill set, and then when it was put under high pressure, it failed.”
When athletes are anxious, they overthink, and focus attention on the technical execution of the skill – those aspects of the movement that have generally become automated. It has been called “paralysis by analysis”: the mental effort actually inhibits performance. This explains why Boswell, a 26-year-old in his seventh season as a professional cricketer, suddenly found himself unable to bowl straight.
As his second over became more farcical – six of his first eight balls were wides – Boswell recalled the crowd getting “louder and louder”. To try to make the ordeal stop, Boswell rushed, taking less and less time before each ball. “I just remember trying to race through my over to get it completed as quickly as I could. Unfortunately, I sped things up when pressure got to me, rather than trying to slow it down and take a step back, do the breathing, have a little smile – ‘It’s only a game of cricket, off you go.’”
Boswell blames no one but himself, but it might have helped if his teammates had gone up to him and had a chat to help him calm down during his over. At Lord’s, the real problem was that Boswell’s method – bowling and self-calming – was not durable enough under pressure. “I probably didn’t have a process if something ever happened. It was just absolute panic.” Boswell only ever played one more game in professional cricket, bowling one terrible over – including two wides – before being dropped from the lineup.
Elite athletes are like the rest of us: they get anxious and it hampers their performance. In the last 30 seconds of tight basketball games, WNBA and NBA players are 5.8% and 3.1% respectively less likely to score from a free throw – an uncontested shot awarded to players who have been fouled – than at other moments in the game. When players take free throws in home matches, they are more likely to miss when the crowd is bigger.
The very best athletes manage to channel the anxiety they feel positively, especially if they have high self-confidence. Athletes with low confidence view anxiety as detrimental to performance, but those with high confidence tend to perceive anxiety as a sign of being ready for the challenge ahead. This makes them less likely to choke under pressure.
The best athletes are also more adept at brushing off disappointments during competition. The champion golfer Annika Sörenstam jokes that she never hit a bad shot in her life: “I don’t remember them.” Lesser players could be consumed by their mistakes, but Sörenstam would clinically dissect what happened, then get on with the business of trying to recover her position.
“You’ve just got to learn how to dissociate – make a quick analysis, boom. Forget about it, move on, don’t carry it with you, learn from your mistakes. We all hit bad shots. It’s just – how do you regain composure?”
Annika Sörenstam during the 2000 Evian Masters in France. Photograph: Andrew Redington/Allsport
Those with the greatest mental strength have been shown to be the best at adapting to negative feedback and using it to improve their performance. “You’ve got to learn how to throw bad shots out and stand over the next shot and say: ‘OK this is the most important shot,’” Sörenstam said. “I always call it ‘the now shot’. The shot you’re hitting now is the most important. Ten minutes ago is irrelevant, and who knows what’s going to happen in another 10 minutes.
“You have to have a positive mind, you have to stand there and be tension-free. If you stand there and are worried about everything, it’s hard to swing. When I play my best, it’s free-flowing and relaxed, no tension – just focus and have a target, but you’re relaxed and your muscles can perform. There’s nothing worse than when you try to do something and it’s all tension and pressure and you can’t breathe properly.”
The best golfers make greater use of positive self-talk, goal-setting and relaxation skills, reporting less worry and less negative thinking. Personality characteristics such as hardiness and even narcissism can further insulate the best athletes from the ravages of anxiety.
“Of course I felt pressure,” Sörenstam, now retired, recalled. “But it was a fun pressure – I wanted to see if I could handle it, just staying true to myself and believing in myself coming down the stretch.”
For Sörenstam, keeping that belief over 18 holes meant sticking to her routine – the 24 seconds she liked to take for each shot – as far as possible, fighting her impulse to speed up. Under pressure, golfers approach shots differently, reducing the range of movement for the head of the golf club and applying greater force to the ball. They rush. In baseball, pitchers who flounder under pressure seem to rush their foot movements and speed up the way they flex their elbows.
Athletes weighed down by anxiety also use their eyes less efficiently. When table tennis players are anxious, they spend longer fixating on the ball and less time on their opponent, which may reduce their ability to pick up cues and anticipate what will happen next. When tennis players are anxious, they become less effective at picking up contextual information such as the sequencing of shots in the rally and the probability of their opponent playing certain types of shots. Other anxiety-induced responses include hypervigilance – the “deer in the headlights” phenomenon – a narrowed field of view or tunnel vision, or paying attention to irrelevant sights. In each of these cases, anxious athletes are likely to miss critical information.
When they rush, athletes tend to make worse decisions. Maintaining routines under pressure can help prevent such errors. “That’s the key – whether it’s the first green or the 18th green on a Sunday at the US Open or a Pro Am, I just stick to the same routine,” Sörenstam said. “By doing that, you can deal with the pressure. People think: ‘People are watching, this putt means this.’ Or ‘This is a tough hole’, or ‘It’s an easy hole and I really should make it.’ All these things around you have an effect on how you feel and how you perform. But if you can get less of it into your bubble, that makes it a lot easier.”
It was the semi-final of the 1999 Cricket World Cup. One of the most extraordinary games of all time was reaching an excruciatingly tense conclusion. South Africa needed 214 to beat Australia and reach their first final. If the two teams got exactly the same number of runs – which was unprecedented in World Cup history – Australia would qualify, by virtue of having finished higher in the pool stage.
The last over began with South Africa, down to their final batting pair, needing nine runs to win. Facing the bowler was Lance Klusener, who was in the midst of a stunning run of form. In the first two balls of the final over, Klusener crunched both deliveries for four.
South Africa needed one run from four balls – with Klusener still facing the ball. At the other end, Allan Donald, South Africa’s No 11 – a brilliant fast bowler, but the team’s worst batsman – didn’t need to face a ball. He just needed to run to the other end to get the single run South Africa needed. In South Africa’s changing room, one player had a bottle of champagne at hand, ready to pop.
Those with the greatest mental strength have been shown to be the best at adapting to negative feedback and using it to improve their performance. “You’ve got to learn how to throw bad shots out and stand over the next shot and say: ‘OK this is the most important shot,’” Sörenstam said. “I always call it ‘the now shot’. The shot you’re hitting now is the most important. Ten minutes ago is irrelevant, and who knows what’s going to happen in another 10 minutes.
“You have to have a positive mind, you have to stand there and be tension-free. If you stand there and are worried about everything, it’s hard to swing. When I play my best, it’s free-flowing and relaxed, no tension – just focus and have a target, but you’re relaxed and your muscles can perform. There’s nothing worse than when you try to do something and it’s all tension and pressure and you can’t breathe properly.”
The best golfers make greater use of positive self-talk, goal-setting and relaxation skills, reporting less worry and less negative thinking. Personality characteristics such as hardiness and even narcissism can further insulate the best athletes from the ravages of anxiety.
“Of course I felt pressure,” Sörenstam, now retired, recalled. “But it was a fun pressure – I wanted to see if I could handle it, just staying true to myself and believing in myself coming down the stretch.”
For Sörenstam, keeping that belief over 18 holes meant sticking to her routine – the 24 seconds she liked to take for each shot – as far as possible, fighting her impulse to speed up. Under pressure, golfers approach shots differently, reducing the range of movement for the head of the golf club and applying greater force to the ball. They rush. In baseball, pitchers who flounder under pressure seem to rush their foot movements and speed up the way they flex their elbows.
Athletes weighed down by anxiety also use their eyes less efficiently. When table tennis players are anxious, they spend longer fixating on the ball and less time on their opponent, which may reduce their ability to pick up cues and anticipate what will happen next. When tennis players are anxious, they become less effective at picking up contextual information such as the sequencing of shots in the rally and the probability of their opponent playing certain types of shots. Other anxiety-induced responses include hypervigilance – the “deer in the headlights” phenomenon – a narrowed field of view or tunnel vision, or paying attention to irrelevant sights. In each of these cases, anxious athletes are likely to miss critical information.
When they rush, athletes tend to make worse decisions. Maintaining routines under pressure can help prevent such errors. “That’s the key – whether it’s the first green or the 18th green on a Sunday at the US Open or a Pro Am, I just stick to the same routine,” Sörenstam said. “By doing that, you can deal with the pressure. People think: ‘People are watching, this putt means this.’ Or ‘This is a tough hole’, or ‘It’s an easy hole and I really should make it.’ All these things around you have an effect on how you feel and how you perform. But if you can get less of it into your bubble, that makes it a lot easier.”
It was the semi-final of the 1999 Cricket World Cup. One of the most extraordinary games of all time was reaching an excruciatingly tense conclusion. South Africa needed 214 to beat Australia and reach their first final. If the two teams got exactly the same number of runs – which was unprecedented in World Cup history – Australia would qualify, by virtue of having finished higher in the pool stage.
The last over began with South Africa, down to their final batting pair, needing nine runs to win. Facing the bowler was Lance Klusener, who was in the midst of a stunning run of form. In the first two balls of the final over, Klusener crunched both deliveries for four.
South Africa needed one run from four balls – with Klusener still facing the ball. At the other end, Allan Donald, South Africa’s No 11 – a brilliant fast bowler, but the team’s worst batsman – didn’t need to face a ball. He just needed to run to the other end to get the single run South Africa needed. In South Africa’s changing room, one player had a bottle of champagne at hand, ready to pop.
South Africa’s Allan Donald (in green, right) seconds after being run out against Australia in the Cricket World Cup semi-final in 1999. Photograph: Ross Kinnaird/Allsport
This was “nearly job done”, Klusener recalled. “I said to Al that the first thing we would like to do is hit the ball for six, shake hands and walk off, but at the same time, if we can scramble a single run somewhere, that also needs to be an option for us. ‘One good ball and the game is over.’”
After a protracted wait, the bowler delivered his third ball. Klusener hit the ball straight towards a fielder. There was no time for the batsmen to run, yet Donald set off down the pitch. Klusener quickly sent him back, and Donald had to dive across the crease to get home. He was only saved because the Australian fielder’s throw missed its target.
Donald later described the moment in his autobiography. “Sprawled on the floor, heart pounding, I thought: ‘Thank God, we’ve got away with it. We’ll be OK now.’” Before the next ball, Donald told Klusener: “Pick your spot, and hit it out of the park.”
Klusener started to run as soon as he hit the ball.
The ball before, Donald had run when he shouldn’t. This time, he didn’t run at all, remaining motionless as Klusener hurtled towards him. By the time Klusener hared past him, all Donald had managed to do was drop his bat and look around forlornly. His legs wouldn’t move. “I looked up at Lance, saw him rushing to my end, and so I started to run,” Donald wrote. “My legs felt like jelly, as if I wasn’t making any headway at all down to the other end. I tried to get my legs moving properly. It was a dreamlike sequence, almost in slow motion.”
Donald was paralysed by anxiety – a classic symptom of choking. When he finally started to run, he was out by yards. South Africa were out of the competition.
Since 1999, South Africa’s World Cup eliminations have straddled the full spectrum of sporting farce. In 2003, when they hosted the World Cup, South Africa were eliminated after misreading the required score to win and being knocked out after a tie. In 2011, they were cruising to victory in the quarter-final before a self-inflicted collapse against New Zealand. Four years later, South Africa missed several catches or run-outs before losing an epic semi-final, once again against New Zealand.
The South Africa men’s team have played in 19 global tournaments – the World Cup, the Champions Trophy and the Twenty20 World Cup – since that fateful day in 1999. Although consistently one of the leading cricket nations in this time, South Africa haven’t reached a final. They have reached eight semi-finals – and lost every single one.
This litany of failures invites the question: when Donald was run out, was he paving the way for a whole era of South African World Cup failure? Did that run out not merely scupper South Africa’s golden chance in 1999, but burden future generations of players?Get the Guardian’s award-winning long reads sent direct to you every Saturday morning
“Stereotype threat” is the idea that when a negative image becomes associated with a group, it takes on a life of its own, and the outcome and behaviours are more likely to be repeated. In a classic study on this subject from 1999, scientists asked men and women to take an arithmetic test. Some students were told that men and women performed equally well on the test; the others were told that men performed better. When the scientists told the women that women performed just as well as men, they subsequently performed as well as the men on the test. When women were told that women tended to perform worse, they performed worse than men on the test. Being made aware of the stereotype seemed to affect whether participants would adhere to it or not.
Stereotype threat can permeate sport, too. It can affect “any situation where you have the possibility or worry that people might judge you based on your inclusion in a certain group – that could be race, that could be gender, that could be the team you play on,” said Sian Beilock, the cognitive scientist and author of Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To.
In sport and life, past failure can make future failure more likely. Since 1999, South African cricketers have lugged stereotype threat around with them, like an unwanted piece of oversized baggage, from one major tournament to the next. South Africa’s head coach between 2011 and 2013, Gary Kirsten, called the legacy of previous failures “a dark mist that hangs over South African cricket in knockout events”.
As every England football fan scarred by penalty shootouts could attest, failure seems to beget more failure. Every choke, real or perceived, creates more of a burden the next time the team is in the same position, making the hurdle even more overwhelming.
Gareth Southgate spent 22 years looking back at his part in England’s defeat by Germany in a penalty shootout at Euro 96, trying to work out what had gone wrong. His conclusion was that he had rushed. Before he took his sudden-death penalty against Germany, “All I wanted was the ball: put it on the spot, get it over and done with,” he later wrote. Rushing penalties under pressure damages the chances of scoring: a study found that when players started their run-up less than one second after the referee blew the whistle, the success rate was a paltry 58%. As England manager in 2018, Southgate encouraged the players to take more time from the spot, and led England to their first-ever World Cup penalty shootout win.
Some athletes are gifted with psychological advantages from birth, but these are not immutable. Interventions designed to increase mental toughness can improve athletes’ performances. The more players practise, the more automated aspects of their movements become, helping athletes to manage anxiety and heighten focus. Maintaining pre-performance routines, as Sörenstam did, makes players more robust under pressure. Coaching designed to help players think independently, rather than being told what to do, helps develop implicit rather than explicit knowledge, and gives players the best chance of avoiding choking.
“If you’re more explicit in how you acquire skills, you’re potentially more likely to break down under pressure,” observed Phil Kenyon, a leading putting coach who has worked with golf major championship winners including Rory McIlroy, Justin Rose and Henrik Stenson. “I try and encourage implicit learning, giving them a better chance of being able to handle things under pressure.”
It is often said that nothing in training can exactly replicate the pressures of the biggest moments in matches. But even if that is true, more pressurised training can help athletes cope with pressure on the field.
Whether preparing for public speaking or a big sports match, “one of the really important things is to practise under the kind of conditions in which you’re going to perform,” Beilock said. “There’s often a lack of attention given to practising in high-pressure situations. We know if you can do that you have the likelihood of being inoculated from choking.
“We know that students get better at taking tests when they take real-time practice tests – it’s all about closing that gap between how you practise and how you perform.” There is, she said, no reason why the same principle would not apply to elite athletes.
At the 2012 Ryder Cup – the biennial men’s golf competition between Europe and the US – in Medinah, Europe trailed the US 10–4. Ian Poulter and his partner, Rory McIlroy, were behind in their matches. So were the other European pair, Sergio Garcia and Luke Donald. Europe was on course to go 12–4 down at the end of the second day.
This was “nearly job done”, Klusener recalled. “I said to Al that the first thing we would like to do is hit the ball for six, shake hands and walk off, but at the same time, if we can scramble a single run somewhere, that also needs to be an option for us. ‘One good ball and the game is over.’”
After a protracted wait, the bowler delivered his third ball. Klusener hit the ball straight towards a fielder. There was no time for the batsmen to run, yet Donald set off down the pitch. Klusener quickly sent him back, and Donald had to dive across the crease to get home. He was only saved because the Australian fielder’s throw missed its target.
Donald later described the moment in his autobiography. “Sprawled on the floor, heart pounding, I thought: ‘Thank God, we’ve got away with it. We’ll be OK now.’” Before the next ball, Donald told Klusener: “Pick your spot, and hit it out of the park.”
Klusener started to run as soon as he hit the ball.
The ball before, Donald had run when he shouldn’t. This time, he didn’t run at all, remaining motionless as Klusener hurtled towards him. By the time Klusener hared past him, all Donald had managed to do was drop his bat and look around forlornly. His legs wouldn’t move. “I looked up at Lance, saw him rushing to my end, and so I started to run,” Donald wrote. “My legs felt like jelly, as if I wasn’t making any headway at all down to the other end. I tried to get my legs moving properly. It was a dreamlike sequence, almost in slow motion.”
Donald was paralysed by anxiety – a classic symptom of choking. When he finally started to run, he was out by yards. South Africa were out of the competition.
Since 1999, South Africa’s World Cup eliminations have straddled the full spectrum of sporting farce. In 2003, when they hosted the World Cup, South Africa were eliminated after misreading the required score to win and being knocked out after a tie. In 2011, they were cruising to victory in the quarter-final before a self-inflicted collapse against New Zealand. Four years later, South Africa missed several catches or run-outs before losing an epic semi-final, once again against New Zealand.
The South Africa men’s team have played in 19 global tournaments – the World Cup, the Champions Trophy and the Twenty20 World Cup – since that fateful day in 1999. Although consistently one of the leading cricket nations in this time, South Africa haven’t reached a final. They have reached eight semi-finals – and lost every single one.
This litany of failures invites the question: when Donald was run out, was he paving the way for a whole era of South African World Cup failure? Did that run out not merely scupper South Africa’s golden chance in 1999, but burden future generations of players?Get the Guardian’s award-winning long reads sent direct to you every Saturday morning
“Stereotype threat” is the idea that when a negative image becomes associated with a group, it takes on a life of its own, and the outcome and behaviours are more likely to be repeated. In a classic study on this subject from 1999, scientists asked men and women to take an arithmetic test. Some students were told that men and women performed equally well on the test; the others were told that men performed better. When the scientists told the women that women performed just as well as men, they subsequently performed as well as the men on the test. When women were told that women tended to perform worse, they performed worse than men on the test. Being made aware of the stereotype seemed to affect whether participants would adhere to it or not.
Stereotype threat can permeate sport, too. It can affect “any situation where you have the possibility or worry that people might judge you based on your inclusion in a certain group – that could be race, that could be gender, that could be the team you play on,” said Sian Beilock, the cognitive scientist and author of Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To.
In sport and life, past failure can make future failure more likely. Since 1999, South African cricketers have lugged stereotype threat around with them, like an unwanted piece of oversized baggage, from one major tournament to the next. South Africa’s head coach between 2011 and 2013, Gary Kirsten, called the legacy of previous failures “a dark mist that hangs over South African cricket in knockout events”.
As every England football fan scarred by penalty shootouts could attest, failure seems to beget more failure. Every choke, real or perceived, creates more of a burden the next time the team is in the same position, making the hurdle even more overwhelming.
Gareth Southgate spent 22 years looking back at his part in England’s defeat by Germany in a penalty shootout at Euro 96, trying to work out what had gone wrong. His conclusion was that he had rushed. Before he took his sudden-death penalty against Germany, “All I wanted was the ball: put it on the spot, get it over and done with,” he later wrote. Rushing penalties under pressure damages the chances of scoring: a study found that when players started their run-up less than one second after the referee blew the whistle, the success rate was a paltry 58%. As England manager in 2018, Southgate encouraged the players to take more time from the spot, and led England to their first-ever World Cup penalty shootout win.
Some athletes are gifted with psychological advantages from birth, but these are not immutable. Interventions designed to increase mental toughness can improve athletes’ performances. The more players practise, the more automated aspects of their movements become, helping athletes to manage anxiety and heighten focus. Maintaining pre-performance routines, as Sörenstam did, makes players more robust under pressure. Coaching designed to help players think independently, rather than being told what to do, helps develop implicit rather than explicit knowledge, and gives players the best chance of avoiding choking.
“If you’re more explicit in how you acquire skills, you’re potentially more likely to break down under pressure,” observed Phil Kenyon, a leading putting coach who has worked with golf major championship winners including Rory McIlroy, Justin Rose and Henrik Stenson. “I try and encourage implicit learning, giving them a better chance of being able to handle things under pressure.”
It is often said that nothing in training can exactly replicate the pressures of the biggest moments in matches. But even if that is true, more pressurised training can help athletes cope with pressure on the field.
Whether preparing for public speaking or a big sports match, “one of the really important things is to practise under the kind of conditions in which you’re going to perform,” Beilock said. “There’s often a lack of attention given to practising in high-pressure situations. We know if you can do that you have the likelihood of being inoculated from choking.
“We know that students get better at taking tests when they take real-time practice tests – it’s all about closing that gap between how you practise and how you perform.” There is, she said, no reason why the same principle would not apply to elite athletes.
At the 2012 Ryder Cup – the biennial men’s golf competition between Europe and the US – in Medinah, Europe trailed the US 10–4. Ian Poulter and his partner, Rory McIlroy, were behind in their matches. So were the other European pair, Sergio Garcia and Luke Donald. Europe was on course to go 12–4 down at the end of the second day.
LeBron James of the Los Angeles Lakers scoring a free throw earlier this year. NBA players are about 3% less likely to score at this moment than at other points in the game. Photograph: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
“As bad as it felt, you knew that there’s still a glimmer of a chance – there’s still two matches on the course,” Poulter remembered. “You have to think in the back of your mind that you’ve got an opportunity to turn those two matches around … that is all a process of telling yourself that there’s a chance. There’s a process of pride that kicks in that doesn’t allow you to be beaten in that match.”
Poulter was not used to Ryder Cup failure. In 2010, he earned the nickname The Postman – because he always delivered points. After 12 holes, Poulter and McIlroy were two shots down: “It was looking miserable.” And yet the very desperation of the situation – in the match and the Ryder Cup alike – drove Poulter on.
Poulter and McIlroy had to attack relentlessly. After McIlroy birdied the 13th hole (ie came in one shot under par) to cut the deficit to one hole, Poulter – with his eyes bulging – reeled off five consecutive birdies, in one of the most extraordinary individual passages of play in Ryder Cup history.
“Finding yourself in that frame of mind is something which doesn’t happen very often,” Poulter said. “And when you take yourself to that place, you’re able to deliver and turn matches around and execute shots one after another. I don’t know whether we’d have played any different if we’d have been three up in the match. The fact of the matter was, we had to be aggressive. We had to win that match. It was extremely simple. We had to birdie every hole.
“Great things happen in those moments. There were a lot of good shots executed all within a period of six holes, and it [produced] a level of motivation for the team. There was a big wave of momentum.”
As dusk fell over Medinah, Poulter secured a one-shot victory with a remarkable 15ft putt on the 18th hole, celebrated by a roar of delight and a scream of “Come on”.
A few hours earlier, Europe feared they had lost the Ryder Cup. Now, Europe could “go to sleep on a high after winning the last two matches,” Poulter recalled, and the team felt “energised to go out to have an opportunity to win”.
The team also sensed a change in their opponents’ mood, he said: “They were extremely jovial and joyous on Saturday when they were 10–4 up. And momentum started to change – all of a sudden the pressure gets loaded off us and gets put back on them.”
Early in his match on Sunday, Poulter struggled, going two shots down after four holes. Yet Poulter still “knew I’d win my point”, he said later. “It’s a weird feeling when you’re in the zone and all that mayhem is going on around you, and you find that you are entirely focused on the shot. All this adrenaline was flowing and I was thinking to myself: ‘There’s no way I’m losing this.’”
What Poulter described is called a “clutch state”. Clutch states occur when athletes under pressure are able to summon up whatever is necessary to succeed, to perform well, and perhaps change the outcome of the game. Flow states are when a harmonious state exists between intense focus and absorption in the event, to the exclusion of irrelevant emotions and thoughts, creating a sense that everything is coming together or clicking into place. Athletes with high mental toughness are more likely to experience flow and clutch states than those less mentally tough.
“Anything that helps you focus on why you should succeed, rather than why you should fail, can be powerful,” Beilock explained. In the end, Tiger Woods missed a straightforward putt and Europe won the Ryder Cup outright.
Scott Boswell now works as a well-regarded cricket coach for a club and school. His methods lean upon his own experiences of choking – and how to give players the capacity to hold up in the most pressurised moments. His coaching sessions aim to put players “under the same sort of scenarios that they’re going to have when it comes to a match,” he said.
Boswell wants to prevent others going through what he did. “My mental and physical side just basically crumbled in front of God knows how many people watching live on television … I’ve only watched it once – and then not all the way through. But I watched about five or six balls and just thought: ‘That’s a car crash.’”
He does not believe there is anything inevitable about choking – and that everyone can practise in a way that makes them less likely to choke. “Could I have dealt with that differently? Could I have had methods to slow myself down? I think I could.”
“As bad as it felt, you knew that there’s still a glimmer of a chance – there’s still two matches on the course,” Poulter remembered. “You have to think in the back of your mind that you’ve got an opportunity to turn those two matches around … that is all a process of telling yourself that there’s a chance. There’s a process of pride that kicks in that doesn’t allow you to be beaten in that match.”
Poulter was not used to Ryder Cup failure. In 2010, he earned the nickname The Postman – because he always delivered points. After 12 holes, Poulter and McIlroy were two shots down: “It was looking miserable.” And yet the very desperation of the situation – in the match and the Ryder Cup alike – drove Poulter on.
Poulter and McIlroy had to attack relentlessly. After McIlroy birdied the 13th hole (ie came in one shot under par) to cut the deficit to one hole, Poulter – with his eyes bulging – reeled off five consecutive birdies, in one of the most extraordinary individual passages of play in Ryder Cup history.
“Finding yourself in that frame of mind is something which doesn’t happen very often,” Poulter said. “And when you take yourself to that place, you’re able to deliver and turn matches around and execute shots one after another. I don’t know whether we’d have played any different if we’d have been three up in the match. The fact of the matter was, we had to be aggressive. We had to win that match. It was extremely simple. We had to birdie every hole.
“Great things happen in those moments. There were a lot of good shots executed all within a period of six holes, and it [produced] a level of motivation for the team. There was a big wave of momentum.”
As dusk fell over Medinah, Poulter secured a one-shot victory with a remarkable 15ft putt on the 18th hole, celebrated by a roar of delight and a scream of “Come on”.
A few hours earlier, Europe feared they had lost the Ryder Cup. Now, Europe could “go to sleep on a high after winning the last two matches,” Poulter recalled, and the team felt “energised to go out to have an opportunity to win”.
The team also sensed a change in their opponents’ mood, he said: “They were extremely jovial and joyous on Saturday when they were 10–4 up. And momentum started to change – all of a sudden the pressure gets loaded off us and gets put back on them.”
Early in his match on Sunday, Poulter struggled, going two shots down after four holes. Yet Poulter still “knew I’d win my point”, he said later. “It’s a weird feeling when you’re in the zone and all that mayhem is going on around you, and you find that you are entirely focused on the shot. All this adrenaline was flowing and I was thinking to myself: ‘There’s no way I’m losing this.’”
What Poulter described is called a “clutch state”. Clutch states occur when athletes under pressure are able to summon up whatever is necessary to succeed, to perform well, and perhaps change the outcome of the game. Flow states are when a harmonious state exists between intense focus and absorption in the event, to the exclusion of irrelevant emotions and thoughts, creating a sense that everything is coming together or clicking into place. Athletes with high mental toughness are more likely to experience flow and clutch states than those less mentally tough.
“Anything that helps you focus on why you should succeed, rather than why you should fail, can be powerful,” Beilock explained. In the end, Tiger Woods missed a straightforward putt and Europe won the Ryder Cup outright.
Scott Boswell now works as a well-regarded cricket coach for a club and school. His methods lean upon his own experiences of choking – and how to give players the capacity to hold up in the most pressurised moments. His coaching sessions aim to put players “under the same sort of scenarios that they’re going to have when it comes to a match,” he said.
Boswell wants to prevent others going through what he did. “My mental and physical side just basically crumbled in front of God knows how many people watching live on television … I’ve only watched it once – and then not all the way through. But I watched about five or six balls and just thought: ‘That’s a car crash.’”
He does not believe there is anything inevitable about choking – and that everyone can practise in a way that makes them less likely to choke. “Could I have dealt with that differently? Could I have had methods to slow myself down? I think I could.”
Why the US is a model of how not to be a democracy
Yogendra Yadav in The Print
Democrats all over the world wait anxiously for the much-deserved departure of Donald Trump. It could be a long wait and could well extend to another four years. At the time of this article being published, the vote count appears to be leaning towards Trump. Yet, those who care for democracy, must be grateful to Trump for something. He has singlehandedly demolished one of the biggest myths of our time: the myth of the greatness of American democracy, the idea that the US was as an exemplar of democracy, a model for others to emulate. This may be a painful realisation for many. In the last instance, this is good news for Democrats.
Now, Trump should not get all the credit for demolishing the American model. He simply ensured that the whole world woke up to some of the most poorly kept secrets of American politics. Above all, he left no room to doubt that, like everywhere else, some of the top leaders in this great democracy were intellectually and morally challenged. That someone like him could bully his way to the White House and, perhaps, retain it for another term reveals something very disturbing about the American public. His mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic blurred the imaginary distinction between the first and the third world. His appointment to the Supreme Court, just before the elections, threw light on what a scandal apex judicial appointments in the US are. His not-so-hidden support for White supremacists in the face of the #BlackLivesMatter movement exposed the underbelly of racial divisions in the US. Finally, the global attention he brought to the presidential election 2020 has served to expose the shoddy electoral system in the US. Clearly, the US could learn a thing or two from India on how to conduct elections and carry out a quick and clean count of votes.
In sum: Thanks to Donald Trump, the world learnt that the US is just one of the democracies in the world. It has its strengths and its weaknesses. It needs to learn from other democracies before it preaches the same to the rest of the world. No matter who emerges victor, the process and the outcome of the current election is bound to reinforce this lesson.
Not a model
I learnt this lesson much earlier, thanks to my friend-cum-co-author-cum-teacher, the late Alfred Stepan. A great scholar of comparative politics, Professor Stepan (and the late Juan J. Linz) could talk about intricacies of authoritarian regimes in South America, the Catalan issue in Spain or the Russian minority in Ukraine with as much ease as he would discuss the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka or the Burmese transition to democracy. He was passionate about India (an M.F. Husain in his drawing room reminded everyone of his India connect) and curious to understand every single detail of Indian politics. (He travelled to Mizoram to understand how the state returned to normalcy after 1987). I learnt a lot from him and Professor Linz while co-writing a book, Crafting State-Nations.
Towards the end of his life, Professor Stepan started reflecting on his own country, the United States, by placing it in a comparative perspective. He was no Left-wing critic of American capitalism. He was quintessentially American and passionately liberal-democrat. His conclusion, much before Trump was anywhere on the scene, was unambiguous: if the world is to democratise, the US is not a model to emulate.
I was an easy convert to this view, as I have always suspected moral claims from the global North. But I have found this a tough lesson to take across in a world obsessed with the US of A. Trump made my job easier. Today may be the right day to mention four key reasons why the US is not a model for a democracy. The first two are related to institutional design and the other two are about the nature of politics.
Flawed systems
The first is the famed but deeply flawed “presidential” system of the US. It is well known that the US-style presidential system institutes regular conflict between the legislature and the executive, leading to routine deadlocks. Alfred Stepan theorised it differently: the real problem with the presidential system of government is that it makes power indivisible and coalition making that much more difficult. This comes in the way of the power-sharing so necessary for the accommodation of diversities. Also, the American system leads to several veto points. Stepan demonstrated brilliantly that the greater the number of veto points in a political system, the higher the inequality in that society. He never failed to remind us that among the long-standing democracies, the US was the most unequal country. That is why any attempts to replicate the US-style presidential model, whether in South America or in the ex-USSR countries, has mostly been a disaster.
The second element of the US model is its unique federalism. In the US, every power is assumed to be with the state, unless specifically given to the centre. You can see this even in how they conduct national elections. Each state has its own rules of who can vote, under what procedure, when and how. Not just that, each state has its own timetable of when they would count results, whether votes received after today would be accepted and what would be the deadline for completing the count. The states zealously guard these rights in a society that is otherwise increasingly homogeneous. This was held out to a “pure” model of federalism. Stepan reminded us that this was by no means a model, that it was a feature of a certain kind of “coming together” federalisms and need not be replicated by countries where various units were already together before they adopted federalism.
The US is a textbook example of what political scientists call “symmetrical” federalism. Every federal unit has exactly the same powers. Every state, tiny or gigantic, has two seats in the US Senate. And the Senate is more powerful than the House of Representatives that reflects the population strengths of various states. Stepan pointed out that accommodation of deep diversities requires special situations to be recognised and given special treatment. Therefore, “asymmetrical” federalism of the kind we have in Canada and India is more suited for living with deep diversities. Here, too, the US is not a good model.
Trump adds to the list
Trump has added two more reasons to the list of why the US is not a model for democracies. One, Trump’s presidency has exposed how hollow the American two-party system is. Both the major parties are devoid of ideological orientation or organisational depth. Far from providing a choice, the two-party system is a model of choicelessness. Even if Biden were to win this election, he would be a paler copy of Trump, minus the vitriolic. Two, the last four years have proven how fickle, gullible and manipulable the American public opinion is. Alex de Tocqueville had noticed it more than two hundred years ago. Trump proved that the onset of mass media and social media has made it worse. Whether he wins or not, he has shown that you can get away with lies, hatred and bigotry. Worse, he has shown that you can do so in the face of the most powerful media in the world that repeatedly called him out. Clearly, free speech offers little assurance that truth shall prevail. The US is not the first place in the world to offer this sombre lesson. India is among the long list of countries to offer similar lessons.
The world awaits a new theory of democracy. Meanwhile, we can begin by celebrating the demolition of the US-led model of democracy. Not just because the dismantling of any hegemon brings vicarious pleasure. But because this realisation sets us on the right path. There is no model of democracy. There is no golden route to the finished product called democracy.
Democracy is a treacherous journey where you clear the path as you go along. This is as true of Donald Trump’s America as it is of Narendra Modi’s India.
Democrats all over the world wait anxiously for the much-deserved departure of Donald Trump. It could be a long wait and could well extend to another four years. At the time of this article being published, the vote count appears to be leaning towards Trump. Yet, those who care for democracy, must be grateful to Trump for something. He has singlehandedly demolished one of the biggest myths of our time: the myth of the greatness of American democracy, the idea that the US was as an exemplar of democracy, a model for others to emulate. This may be a painful realisation for many. In the last instance, this is good news for Democrats.
Now, Trump should not get all the credit for demolishing the American model. He simply ensured that the whole world woke up to some of the most poorly kept secrets of American politics. Above all, he left no room to doubt that, like everywhere else, some of the top leaders in this great democracy were intellectually and morally challenged. That someone like him could bully his way to the White House and, perhaps, retain it for another term reveals something very disturbing about the American public. His mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic blurred the imaginary distinction between the first and the third world. His appointment to the Supreme Court, just before the elections, threw light on what a scandal apex judicial appointments in the US are. His not-so-hidden support for White supremacists in the face of the #BlackLivesMatter movement exposed the underbelly of racial divisions in the US. Finally, the global attention he brought to the presidential election 2020 has served to expose the shoddy electoral system in the US. Clearly, the US could learn a thing or two from India on how to conduct elections and carry out a quick and clean count of votes.
In sum: Thanks to Donald Trump, the world learnt that the US is just one of the democracies in the world. It has its strengths and its weaknesses. It needs to learn from other democracies before it preaches the same to the rest of the world. No matter who emerges victor, the process and the outcome of the current election is bound to reinforce this lesson.
Not a model
I learnt this lesson much earlier, thanks to my friend-cum-co-author-cum-teacher, the late Alfred Stepan. A great scholar of comparative politics, Professor Stepan (and the late Juan J. Linz) could talk about intricacies of authoritarian regimes in South America, the Catalan issue in Spain or the Russian minority in Ukraine with as much ease as he would discuss the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka or the Burmese transition to democracy. He was passionate about India (an M.F. Husain in his drawing room reminded everyone of his India connect) and curious to understand every single detail of Indian politics. (He travelled to Mizoram to understand how the state returned to normalcy after 1987). I learnt a lot from him and Professor Linz while co-writing a book, Crafting State-Nations.
Towards the end of his life, Professor Stepan started reflecting on his own country, the United States, by placing it in a comparative perspective. He was no Left-wing critic of American capitalism. He was quintessentially American and passionately liberal-democrat. His conclusion, much before Trump was anywhere on the scene, was unambiguous: if the world is to democratise, the US is not a model to emulate.
I was an easy convert to this view, as I have always suspected moral claims from the global North. But I have found this a tough lesson to take across in a world obsessed with the US of A. Trump made my job easier. Today may be the right day to mention four key reasons why the US is not a model for a democracy. The first two are related to institutional design and the other two are about the nature of politics.
Flawed systems
The first is the famed but deeply flawed “presidential” system of the US. It is well known that the US-style presidential system institutes regular conflict between the legislature and the executive, leading to routine deadlocks. Alfred Stepan theorised it differently: the real problem with the presidential system of government is that it makes power indivisible and coalition making that much more difficult. This comes in the way of the power-sharing so necessary for the accommodation of diversities. Also, the American system leads to several veto points. Stepan demonstrated brilliantly that the greater the number of veto points in a political system, the higher the inequality in that society. He never failed to remind us that among the long-standing democracies, the US was the most unequal country. That is why any attempts to replicate the US-style presidential model, whether in South America or in the ex-USSR countries, has mostly been a disaster.
The second element of the US model is its unique federalism. In the US, every power is assumed to be with the state, unless specifically given to the centre. You can see this even in how they conduct national elections. Each state has its own rules of who can vote, under what procedure, when and how. Not just that, each state has its own timetable of when they would count results, whether votes received after today would be accepted and what would be the deadline for completing the count. The states zealously guard these rights in a society that is otherwise increasingly homogeneous. This was held out to a “pure” model of federalism. Stepan reminded us that this was by no means a model, that it was a feature of a certain kind of “coming together” federalisms and need not be replicated by countries where various units were already together before they adopted federalism.
The US is a textbook example of what political scientists call “symmetrical” federalism. Every federal unit has exactly the same powers. Every state, tiny or gigantic, has two seats in the US Senate. And the Senate is more powerful than the House of Representatives that reflects the population strengths of various states. Stepan pointed out that accommodation of deep diversities requires special situations to be recognised and given special treatment. Therefore, “asymmetrical” federalism of the kind we have in Canada and India is more suited for living with deep diversities. Here, too, the US is not a good model.
Trump adds to the list
Trump has added two more reasons to the list of why the US is not a model for democracies. One, Trump’s presidency has exposed how hollow the American two-party system is. Both the major parties are devoid of ideological orientation or organisational depth. Far from providing a choice, the two-party system is a model of choicelessness. Even if Biden were to win this election, he would be a paler copy of Trump, minus the vitriolic. Two, the last four years have proven how fickle, gullible and manipulable the American public opinion is. Alex de Tocqueville had noticed it more than two hundred years ago. Trump proved that the onset of mass media and social media has made it worse. Whether he wins or not, he has shown that you can get away with lies, hatred and bigotry. Worse, he has shown that you can do so in the face of the most powerful media in the world that repeatedly called him out. Clearly, free speech offers little assurance that truth shall prevail. The US is not the first place in the world to offer this sombre lesson. India is among the long list of countries to offer similar lessons.
The world awaits a new theory of democracy. Meanwhile, we can begin by celebrating the demolition of the US-led model of democracy. Not just because the dismantling of any hegemon brings vicarious pleasure. But because this realisation sets us on the right path. There is no model of democracy. There is no golden route to the finished product called democracy.
Democracy is a treacherous journey where you clear the path as you go along. This is as true of Donald Trump’s America as it is of Narendra Modi’s India.
Tuesday 3 November 2020
Sunday 1 November 2020
Global crisis due to political Islam
French President Emmanuel Macron merely dared to say Islam is in crisis, and got himself into big trouble.
Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan asked him to get his head examined. Pakistan’s Imran Khan wrote a two-page sermon to fellow Muslim nations calling for a re-education of the West about Islam.
No such restraint for Malaysia’s 95-year-old Mahathir Mohamad. He got so furious as to nearly justify mass killings of the French for what they might have done to Muslims in the past, besides indeed condemning the decadent, ‘Christian only in name’ West where women often walk around with no more than a “little string (that) covers the most secret place”. Protests broke out in Pakistan, Bangladesh and India.
But, did Macron speak the truth or not? The reaction of these prominent leaders from powerful and populous Muslim countries points to a crisis. If tens of crores of Muslims across the world feel that they are victims of mass Islamophobia, it is a sense of siege and crisis. Unlike a sacred scripture, however, there can be many versions of what this truth is. Here is this humble editorialist’s effort.
Let me break it down in five broad points:
1) All religions are political. At this point, though, Islam is the most politicised. You can surely hark back to the centuries of the Christian Crusades, but that was some time back. Doesn’t matter if that imagery is often invoked by leaders of al-Qaeda, ISIS and sometimes also the odd angry Islamic nation.
Islam is also the second largest faith in the world, with nearly 200 crore adherents, just behind Christians by about 20 per cent. Like Christians, Muslims also live across the world. But unlike Christians, in the countries where they have a majority, very few have democracy. That’s a checkable fact. Important to note, about 60 per cent of all Muslims are in Asia and four of their largest populations in the world live under different degrees of democracy, between India, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
Stretching this argument further, in countries where Muslims have a majority, secularism is generally a bad word, or a Western concept. But in democratic nations where Muslims are a minority, they persistently put the republic’s secular commitment to test. France, Britain, the US, Belgium, Germany are all good examples. There is a reason I do not include India here. Because, unlike Europe to which they migrated lately, in India Muslims were equal and voluntary partners in forming this new republic.
2) There is an unresolved tension among Muslim populations and nations between nationalism and pan-nationalism. This arises from the concept of Ummah — that all Muslims of the world are one supra-national entity. Check this out from Imran Khan’s two-page discourse to his fellow Ummah leaders. We have seen this expressed in the subcontinent sometimes. In the Khilafat Movement of 1919-24, protesting against Kemal Ataturk’s winding up of the Ottoman Caliphate and founding of the Turkish Republic, to Salman Rushdie to the now-fading support for Palestine. And now France.
There are some interesting consequences here. While the notion is pan-Islamism, many more wars are fought between Muslims and Muslim states than with others. The Iran-Iraq war was the longest, a large number of Islamic states joined the coalition against Saddam under the US, and, closer home, in the Af-Pak region, Muslims only kill Muslims and not all of them in Friday bombings at Shia mosques.
The last time we saw a truly pan-Islamic alliance fight against a common, non-Muslim enemy was the 6-Day War in 1967 against Israel. There was a bit of it again in the Yom Kippur War in 1973. But then Egypt and Jordan signed up for peace. Iran is left mostly alone to fight Israel from a distance, Syria has self-destructed. In none of Pakistan’s wars against India has any Islamic nation come to its aid. Barring Jordan transferring some F-104 Starfighters in 1971.
3) Which brings us to a brutal irony. If pan-Islamism, the Ummah spirit, has worked on the ground, it is with multi-national terror groups. Al-Qaeda and ISIS are truly pan-Islamic organisations, which mostly target settled Islamic states. ISIS actually says that if you believe that all Muslims are part of the same Ummah, then they must also have a Caliphate subsuming international boundaries and enforcing the common Shariat.
Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, keep counting. This should also make us reflect on why is it that so few Muslims from the subcontinent, home to one-third of all the world’s Muslims, are seen in al Qaeda or ISIS. The argument I put forward in this debate is, in our nations, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, nationalism trumps pan-Islamism. Muslims in these countries have a flag and a cricket team to support, a leader to love or hate. And if they hate him, to vote him out or protest in any preferred manner. Why should they prefer some mythical Caliphate?
4) The fourth is a crippling contradiction. There are sharp national boundaries dividing Muslim populations and wealth. A bulk of the populations, in Asia and Africa, lives in poor economies. Whereas the world’s wealthiest nations, the Gulf Arabs, have relatively minuscule populations. They won’t distribute their wealth equally to the rest in the spirit of pan-Islamism.
They are happy to find a compact with the West, and now also with India and Israel. Because for them, everything, their political power, royal privileges, global stature depends on that one thing pan-Islamism challenges: Status quo. Nobody has an answer to this GDP-population mismatch. And the rise of a power like ISIS only further fortifies these walls.
5) And last, because of a democratic deficit, in most Islamic countries you cannot even protest, express your resentment against your regime. You might feel sickened that your royalty is sold to the American Satan, but you can do nothing about it. Not shout a slogan, wave a placard, write a blog, a letter to the editor, even a tweet. This could land you in a jail forever, or get you beheaded. So, you go and do it where you can.
That is why, in 2003, I wrote a ‘National Interest’ headlined Globalisation of Revenge. Because you cannot do any of this in your country, you do it in Europe, America. You cannot even whisper a word in anger in your brutally-controlled national security state, so you go to another. Where you can freely live, train to be airline pilots, and then slam those planes into the twin towers. Where even Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has the right to a somewhat fair trial. You can’t fight your masters, so why not punish the master’s masters? Isn’t this globalisation of revenge?
In conclusion, let’s return to the killing of Samuel Paty in France. The killer was Abdoullakh Anzorov, an 18-year-old from a Chechen refugee family. Chechnya is a tiny Russian republic in the North Caucasus with just over a million people, 95% of them Muslim. Russians subdued their separatist rebellion after two brutal wars. But, by the time ‘normalcy’ came, half of that little population was living in refugee camps. Many sought a better life in Western democracies, like this teenaged assassin’s family.
Let’s reconstruct the jigsaw. When Chechnya fought a jihad against the Russians, many Muslim ‘fighters’ from across the world, including many veterans of Afghanistan, joined them. Because this was all they had learnt to do yet, fight a jihad against the Russians. Pan-Islamism led to death, destruction and mass destitution of Chechens. Tens of thousands escaped to liberal democracies for safety, a better life and peace. Now they also want compliance with their own social and religious values there. To decide what your cartoonists can draw and teachers can teach. Reflect on this and then debate if the five points we detailed earlier make sense or not.
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