Assess The Role Of Distractors In Sports

One major external factor that every athlete has to deal with is distractors. Distractions are inevitable, especially for Olympians because coaches, teammates, fans, the media, and others constantly surround them. How an athlete handles distractors is an internal factor and can have a big impact on performance. A study (Pensgaard, 2008) was done regarding one athlete in particular at the 2006 Olympic games who experienced a major distractor and therefore looked at how he handled it and what factors could’ve made him perform better or worse. This athlete, called “Rob” in the study was from Norway which has a history of performing well in winter Olympic games, and in fact had the most gold medals of any country in Salt Lake City at the 2002 Olympic …show more content…
Obviously, this was a big distractor for Rob, as he would have to try and focus on the other events he had coming up, and try to put this whole thing behind him. One way he did this was to have a long talk with a Norwegian sport psychologist who was able to help him see that there was little he could do about the coach’s behavior and so instead of dwelling on that advised him to have an optimistic attitude that he could still perform well and attain a positive outcome. Ultimately, Rob did not win a medal as he had hoped, but was nonetheless satisfied with his performance in the events after the incident, and indicated in an evaluation after the games that it was absolutely vital to have a third party (the sport psychologist) there to talk to and help him deal with the distraction. The general consensus from those that filled out the same survey Rob did was that more comprehensive sport psychology support was needed. So, simply by having a sport psychologist around to talk to and help him stay calm and have a positive mindset, Rob was able to keep his head up and perform at a satisfactory