Posted on 05/19/2005 2:48:20 AM PDT by Pharmboy
Wearing red increases the chance of victory in sports, say British researchers who clearly do not follow the Cincinnati Reds.
"Across a range of sports, we find that wearing red is consistently associated with a higher probability of winning," Dr. Russell Hill and Dr. Robert Barton, researchers in evolutionary anthropology at the University of Durham, wrote in a paper that appears today in the journal Nature.
The research began a year ago with a hunch based on observations in the animal kingdom, where red coloration is often associated with male dominance, Dr. Barton said in an interview. Zebra finches fitted with red leg bands tend to become dominant, while those given blue bands are more submissive. In humans, anger reddens the face, which may send signals of fierceness.
The two researchers studied results of the 2004 Summer Olympics to eliminate the possibility of a home team advantage, and found that contestants in tae kwan do, boxing and wrestling were issued red or blue protective gear at random. "It's almost as if somebody had designed an experiment for us," Dr. Barton said.
Dr. Hill said the evidence of a beneficial effect had emerged, with combatants wearing red winning 6 out of 10 bouts in especially close matches. "Even we were surprised at how consistently the results have been coming out across the range of sports we have looked at," he said.
They have taken a preliminary look at soccer as well, and found that in the Euro 2004 international soccer tournament, the five teams that wore predominantly red shirts did better.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
They played possum football - played dead at home and got killed on the road.
When they switched to this color:
They became a three ring champion.
The Raiders, KC, Denver and San Diego have given the most bang for the buck on any given Sunday when they play each other.
?????
I never understood the use of the color red for the conservative states. We typically associate red with communism, as in "Red Chinese" or the 60's slogan better "red than dead." The Dems are the socialists in the US, so I wonder if the media intentionally tried to remove the "red" stigma associated with the libs in their presentation of the 2000 election results.
There's a gazillion threads on it here on FR. The gist of it is that the incumbent party was usually blue, so in 2000, President Bush got tagged with red. In all the media debate during the 2000 Florida silliness, the red vs. blue got entrenched.
I distinctly remember looking at Reagan's landslide in 1984 where the whole country was blue except for Minnesota and D.C.
It leads you to wonder just how badly the Reds would be performing over the years without this in their favor. Tsk tsk tsk.
I've read that 40% of Cardinals (Redbirds) die each year. Don't remember any other details.
The last time I watched a local channel's sport's coverage the Red's uniforms didn't look so red to me anymore anyway. I think they are mostly black and white with touches of red. But then, I'm just a girl. What do I know?
As far as I can recall, the teams I've supported have always had "red". All too often, they lost.
I haven't looked into details of this study, but if it is true, then there ought to be an easy proof:
Check W/L percentages of the many teams who have red&white colors during their head-to-head competitions. Most sports have the home team wearing predominantly white. If the visitors, wearing the "red" uniforms, have a better than average W/L than other visiting teams, perhaps I'll agree color has effect.
I wonder if that goes for horse racing too. But do I bet on the horses wearing red or do i wear something red to the track? Those red hat ladies must be making out like crazy then when they go to the track.
YUP!!
LOL!!
( :-D
That map has to include the dead ones too. There ain't that many people in the US.
Red was a winner last November.
Red is a recipe for sporting success
Supplementary information (downloaded from Nature)
Methods Data for four combat sports (boxing, taekwondo, greco-roman wrestling and freestyle wrestling) where contestants wore either a red or blue outfit (or body protectors in taekwondo) in each bout at the Athens 2004 Olympics were taken from the official Olympics website (http://www.athens2004.com). Data were recorded on the colour of each participants outfit, the winner of the bout, the method of victory and the points scored by each competitor (see Tables for individual sports). Bouts won by walkover were excluded. The data for the pool matches in the wrestling competitions were also subsequently excluded on two grounds. Firstly, if the winner (or loser) of the group was decided before the final bout was fought then the motivation and commitment of one (or both) contestants is inevitably compromised leading to artificial asymmetries in the fight. Secondly, since for every pool of three each competitor wears red and blue once, and since the majority of pools were decided by a single individual winning both bouts, the competition design actually controls for any potential colour advantage. In order to identify where the effects of colour were most evident, bouts were recoded into different classes of contest asymmetry on the basis of the difference in points scored by each competitor. For each sport, every contest was categorized on the basis of the quartile of the final points difference in the bout, where the first quartile of points difference represents symmetrical contests between competitors of similar ability and the fourth quartile represents contests between competitors with large asymmetries in ability. Contests stopped early (such as by knockout) were scored as highly asymmetric contests and coded in the fourth quartile.
2000 it was in line with tradition.
2004 is was part of the MSM "words mean nothing, let's just go for an emotional grasping at straws" campaign.
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