Sport is rational. Sort of.
The training plans, nutritional science, biomechanics, and analytics… All of it points toward a modern, data-driven world where performance is optimised, and outcomes are explained.
And then an Italian high-jumper shaves only half his beard, and the whole edifice collapses.
The truth is that elite sport has always lived alongside superstition. The higher the stakes, the more desperately the human mind reaches for control.
And when the rational toolkit runs out, when the training is done, the tactics are set, and all that remains is the unknowable gap between trying your best and winning, athletes reach for something else entirely.
What follows is a tour through some of the most extraordinary, baffling, and occasionally unsanitary rituals in the history of sport.
Jason Giambi: Gold and Glorious
In 2008, Jason Giambi was mired in a batting slump with the New York Yankees. Something had to give. What gave, apparently, was his dignity.
Giambi began wearing a gold thong under his uniform. Not as a fashion statement. Not as a dare. As a genuine, considered strategy for breaking out of his slump.
It worked. Or at least, his form improved. And in the logic of superstition, correlation is causation.
What followed was somehow even better. Teammates Derek Jeter and Johnny Damon reportedly tried the trick themselves, and vouched for its effectiveness.
Whether they sourced their own or borrowed Giambi's is a question best left unasked. Some mysteries are more valuable left unsolved.
The Yankees won the World Series the following year. Nobody is claiming the thong was responsible. Nobody is ruling it out, either.
Gianmarco Tamberi: Half a Beard
The Italian high jumper Gianmarco Tamberi is one of the most flamboyant personalities in athletics. He is also, by any reasonable measure, half-shaved.
Tamberi famously sports a beard on only one side of his face. This is not an oversight. This is a statement.
The look began as a commitment device during a period of injury and recovery. It was a visual reminder of unfinished business, a promise to himself about what he still intended to achieve.
He won Olympic gold at Tokyo 2020 in one of the most joyous moments of those Games, sharing the high jump title with Qatar's Mutaz Essa Barshim in a scene of genuine sporting beauty.
The half-beard remained. It has become his identity as much as his jumping. Whether it started as superstition and became branding, or remains a genuine ritual, is probably a distinction only Tamberi himself can answer.
Either way, the man jumps over very high bars with half a beard. The results speak for themselves.
Wade Boggs: A Man and His Chicken
A five-time batting champion, a Hall of Famer, a man of extraordinary discipline and consistency, Wade Boggs was one of the finest batters in baseball history.
He also ate chicken before every single game he played.
Every game. For his entire career. Chicken. Always chicken. The ritual was so well established that teammates called him "Chicken Man." He accumulated so many chicken recipes over the years that he eventually published a cookbook. Wade Boggs turned a superstition into a literary achievement.
But the chicken was only the beginning. Boggs also took batting practice at exactly 5:17 p.m.
Not 5:15, not 5:20, but 5:17. He ran sprints at exactly 7:17 p.m. He drew the Hebrew word "Chai" (meaning life) in the dirt before every at-bat. And he arrived at the ballpark at the same time for every home game.
The chicken was the headline. The man himself was the entire newspaper.
Serena Williams: Never Change a Winning Sock
Serena Williams is the greatest tennis player of her generation and arguably of all time. Twenty-three Grand Slam singles titles. A career built on ferocious preparation, physical dominance, and mental fortitude.
Also: she won't change her socks during a tournament if things are going well.
Williams has spoken openly about her superstitions, which include wearing the same pair of socks throughout a winning run, always using the same shower sandals, and tying her shoelaces in a specific way before matches.
If something goes wrong, she has occasionally attributed it to a break in the routine. Different sandals. Wrong socks.
For a player whose career has been defined by control and precision, it is oddly humanising. Even at the top of the sport, the brain reaches for ritual. Even the greatest player in the world finds comfort in a pair of unwashed lucky socks.
Jorge Garbajosa: The Teammate Ritual
Spanish basketball player Jorge Garbajosa, who played in the NBA with the Toronto Raptors, was known for his elaborate pre-game rituals involving specific interactions with teammates.
Particular handshakes, particular sequences, particular physical gestures had to be performed in the correct order before he felt ready to play.
Get the sequence wrong, and something felt off. Get it right, and the equilibrium was restored. In the NBA, where the mental edge between players of similar ability can decide games, Garbajosa was not alone in treating the pre-game ritual as sacred.
It may look eccentric from the outside. Inside the competitive bubble, it makes perfect sense.
Kyrie Irving: Burning Sage and Dribbling Rituals
Kyrie Irving is one of the most gifted ball-handlers in the history of basketball. He is also one of its most committed ritualists.
Irving has been known to burn sage in the locker room before games, in a practice rooted in various spiritual traditions and intended to cleanse the energy of a space.
He performs an elaborate series of dribbling and ball-handling rituals during warm-ups that serve not just as physical preparation but as mental calibration.
Irving has spoken publicly about his spirituality and its role in his preparation. For him, the rituals are not superstition in the dismissive sense. They are a framework for focus. A way of entering the game in the right state of mind.
Whether you believe in the mechanics or not, the results are difficult to argue with.
Turk Wendell: The Full Maniac
It feels reductive to describe Turk Wendell's superstitions as a list. They deserve to be understood as a worldview.
The former New York Mets reliever leaped over the baselines every single time he walked to the mound. He chewed black licorice while pitching and brushed his teeth between innings.
He wore a necklace made from the teeth and claws of wild animals he had personally hunted and killed. He refused to begin his warm-up pitches until the outfielders were in position and looking at him directly.
Off the field, things got no simpler. When negotiating his contract with the Mets in 2000, Wendell requested a salary of exactly $9,999,999.99, in honour of his uniform number, 99. The team agreed.
Wendell was, by most measures, a perfectly effective Major League reliever. He was also, by every measure, operating on a frequency that most other humans cannot access.
He belongs in a category of one.
Juan Manuel Márquez & Lyoto Machida: The Urine Enthusiasts
And so we arrive at the section of this list that perhaps did not need to exist, and yet here we are.
MMA fighter Lyoto Machida drinks his own urine every morning. He believes it has medicinal properties. This is not supported by the available medical evidence, but Machida has spoken about it openly and without apparent embarrassment.
In boxing, Juan Manuel Márquez was shown on HBO's documentary series doing the same thing: drinking his own urine before training, citing the protein and vitamin content.
The human body produces urine specifically because it no longer wants what urine contains. This is, in the most literal sense, the point of urine. The body has processed what it needed and is disposing of the rest.
Both athletes performed at the very highest levels of their respective sports. Both are decorated fighters with impressive records. It is possible their urine consumption was coincidental to their success. It is possible that we will never know.
What we do know is that Márquez reportedly discontinued the habit before his final bout with Manny Pacquiao, performed better than he had against Floyd Mayweather, and produced what many consider the knockout of the decade.
Make of that what you will.
The Logic of the Irrational
What connects a golden thong, a pile of chicken bones, and a pair of unwashed socks?
It isn't stupidity. These are some of the most disciplined, high-performing humans who have ever lived. Wade Boggs didn't win five batting titles because of the chicken. Serena Williams didn't win twenty-three Grand Slams because of the socks.
What superstition provides isn't ability. It provides certainty. A ritual performed correctly is a box ticked, a variable controlled, a signal to the brain that everything that can be done has been done.
In sport, where the gap between winning and losing is often invisible to the naked eye, the brain needs anchors. It needs to feel ready.
And if "ready" means eating poultry at a specific time or wearing unconventional undergarments, then that is what ready looks like.
The rituals are irrational. The need for them is entirely human.
And sometimes, they work. Or at least, nothing goes wrong. Which, in the end, is all anyone is really asking for.