sport is facilitated by the profusion of ranking and rating systems available to
researchers—a fact which enables investigators to define and measure “success” in this
field with some degree of objectivity. The same point holds true for chess which may
explain why it is so popular among problem-solving researchers in cognitive psychology.
Third, expert athletes are admired not only for their speed, economy of movement, and
timing but also because they appear to transcend the limits of what is humanly possible.
For example, the Spanish rider Miguel Indurain, who won five successive Tour de France
cycling titles between 1991 and 1995, is famous for having a resting heart rate of only 28
beats per minute (Shontz, 1999). To put this figure in perspective, the average resting
heart rate is about 70 beats per minute (bpm)—whereas that of an experienced endurance
athlete is between 35 and 40 bpm. Other extraordinary sporting champions include Tiger
Woods, who won four consecutive major golf championships in the 2000–2001 season
and Carl Lewis, who won four Olympic long-jump titles in succession between 1984 and
- The existence of such outstanding competitors suggests that the horizons of human
physical achievements are expanding. This impression is supported by historical analyses
of sporting records. To illustrate, top amateur swimmers and marathon runners at present
can routinely beat the records set by Olympic gold-medallists in the early 1900s—even
though the times recorded by the latter athletes were regarded in that era as being close to
the impermeable boundaries of human performance (Ericsson, 2001a).
Interestingly, analysis of the horizons of human performance in sport can help
cognitive scientists to understand how the mind achieves some of its remarkable feats.
For example, how do skilled athletes such as Andre Agassi (who is widely regarded as
the player with the best return of serve in the world today) manage to hit winning returns
off tennis balls that travel towards him at about 120 miles per hour—faster than the eye
can see? Ostensibly, this feat should be theoretically impossible because there is about a
200 millisecond time-lag between noticing a stimulus and responding to it. To explain
this delay, it takes about 100 milliseconds for a nerve impulse to travel from the eye to
the brain and about another 100 milliseconds for a motor message to be sent from the
brain back to the muscles. Remarkably, therefore, expert athletes in fast-ball, reactive
sports like tennis, hurling (a type of aerial hockey that is played in Ireland and regarded
as being one of the fastest games in the world) and cricket manage to overcome the
severe time-constraints imposed by this “hard-wired” delay in the human information-
processing system. In short, they effortlessly achieve the impossible feat of responding to
fast-flying balls before they have any conscious knowledge of them! But this feat may
not be as paradoxical as it seems. After all, some neuroscientists claim that our conscious
awareness of any neural event is delayed by several hundred milliseconds although we do
not normally notice this time-lag because we refer this awareness back in time—so that
we convince ourselves that we were aware of the stimulus from its onset (Gazzaniga, Ivry
and Mangun, 2002).
In any case, the conclusion that fast reactions in sport lie in the unconscious mind of
the athlete has at least one surprising implication. Specifically, it suggests that contrary to
coaching wisdom, top players in fast-ball sports do not actually watch the ball in flight.
Instead, they use early signals or “advance cues” from their opponents’ body position
and/or limb movements to anticipate the type of delivery, trajectory and likely destination
of the speeding ball (Radford, 2000). Perhaps not surprisingly, this capacity to
extrapolate accurately from the information yielded by advance cues appears to be a
What lies beneath the surface? Investigating expertise in sport 157