the test and were ribbing him in the familiar manner of team rivalry.
First one pad, then another, lit up. Each time, Douglas jabbed his finger towards the pad, his eyes scanning the screen for the next target. After a minute, the task ended and Douglas’s teammates (I was one of them: at thirteen years of age, I was at my first senior training camp) gave him a round of applause. Douglas grinned as the researcher left the room to collate the results. After five minutes, the researcher returned. He announced that Douglas’s reactions were the slowest in the entire England team: he was slower than the juniors and the cadets – slower even than the team manager.
I remember the intake of breath to this day. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Douglas was universally considered to have the fastest reactions in world table tennis, a reputation he continues to command more than ten years after his retirement. His style was based on standing with his stomach a couple of inches from the edge of the table, allowing the ball to ricochet from his bat using lightning reflexes that astounded audiences around the world. He was so sharp that even the leading Chinese players – who had a reputation for extreme speed – were forced to retreat when they came up against him. But here was a scientist telling us that he had the most sluggish reactions in the whole of the England team.
It is not surprising that, after the initial shock, the researcher was laughed out of the room. He was told that the machine must be faulty or that he was measuring the wrong data. Later, the England team manager informed the science staff at Brighton that their services would no longer be required. Sports science was a new discipline back then, and the England manager had shown unusual innovation in seeing if his team could benefit from its insights, but this experiment seemed to prove that it had little to teach table tennis.
What nobody considered – not even the unfortunate researcher – was that Douglas really did have the slowest reactions in the team, and that his speed on a table tennis court was the consequence of something entirely different. But what?
I am standing in a room at Liverpool John Moores University. In front of me is a screen containing a life-size projection of a tennis player standing at the other end of a virtual court. An eyetracking system is trained on my eyes, and my feet are placed on sensors. The whole thing has been put together by Mark Williams, professor of motor behaviour at Liverpool John Moores and arguably the world’s leading expert on perceptual expertise in sport.
Mark hits the play button and I watch as my ‘opponent’ tosses the ball to serve and arches his back. I am concentrating hard and watching intently, but I have already demonstrated why I was unable to return the serve of Stich.
‘You were looking in the wrong place,’ says Mark. ‘Top tennis players look at the trunk and hips of their opponents on return in order to pick up the visual clues governing where they are going to serve. If I were to stop the picture in advance of the ball being hit, they would still have a pretty good idea about where it was going to go. You were looking variously at his racket and arm, which give very little information about the future path of the ball. You could have had the fastest reactions in history, and you still would not have made contact with the ball.’
I ask Mark to replay the tape and adjust my focus to look at the places rich in information, but it makes me even more sluggish. Mark laughs. ‘It is not as simple as just knowing about where to look; it is also about grasping the meaning of what you are looking at. It is about looking at the subtle patterns of movement and postural clues and extracting information. Top tennis players make a small number of visual fixations and “chunk” the key information.’
Think back to the master chess players. You’ll remember that when they looked at a board, they saw words: that is to say, they were able to chunk the position of the pieces as a consequence of their long experience of trying to find the best moves in chess games. Now we can see that the very same thing is happening in tennis.
When Roger Federer returns a service, he is not demonstrating sharper reactions than you and I; what he is showing is that he can extract more information from the service action of his opponent and other visual clues, enabling him to move into position earlier and more efficiently than the rest of us, which, in turn, allows him to make the return – in his case, a forehand cross-court winner rather than a queen to checkmate.
This revolutionary analysis extends across the sporting domain, from badminton to baseball and from fencing to football. Top performers are not born with sharper instincts (in the same way that chess masters do not possess superior memories); instead, they possess enhanced awareness and anticipation. In cricket, for example, a first-class batsman has already figured out whether to play off the back foot or front foot more than 100 milliseconds before a bowler has even released the ball.
As Janet Starkes, professor emeritus of kinesiology at McMaster University in Canada has put it, ‘The exploitation of advance information results in the time paradox where skilled performers seem to have all the time in the world. Recognition of familiar scenarios and the chunking of perceptual information into meaningful wholes and patterns speeds up processes.’
The key thing to note is that these cannot possibly be innate skills: Federer did not come into this mortal world with knowledge of where to look or how to efficiently extract information on a service return any more than SF was born with special memory skills (he wasn’t: that is precisely why he was selected by Ericsson) or chess players have innate board-game memory skills (remember that their advantage is eliminated when the pieces are randomly placed).
No, Federer’s advantage has been gathered from experience: more precisely, it has been gained from a painstaking process of encoding the meaning of subtle patterns of movement drawn from more than ten thousand hours of practice and competition. He is able to see the patterns in his opponent’s movements in the same way that chess players are able to discern the patterns in the arrangement of pieces on a chessboard. It is his regular practice that has given him this expertise, not his genes.
You might suppose that Federer’s speed is transferable to all sports and games (rather as one is inclined to assume that SF’s memory skill is transferable), but you would be wrong. I played a match of real tennis – an ancient form of tennis played indoors with sloping roofs called penthouses, a hard ball, and entirely different techniques – with Federer at Hampton Court Palace in the summer of 2005 (part of a promotional day for his watch sponsor). I found that, for all his grace and elegance, Federer could scarcely make contact with the ball when it was played at any serious speed (neither, for that matter, could I).
Some of the onlookers were surprised by this, but this is precisely what is predicted by the new science of expertise. Speed in sport is not based on innate reaction speed, but derived from highly specific practice. I have regularly played table tennis with world-renowned footballers, tennis players, golfers, boxers, badminton players, rowers, squash players, and track and field athletes, and discovered that they are all dramatically slower in their table-tennis-specific response times than even elderly players who have had the benefit of regular practice.
Recently I went to the Birmingham home of Desmond Douglas, the Speedy Gonzales of English table tennis, to try to figure out how someone with such unimpressive innate reactions could have become the fastest man in the history of one of the world’s fastest sports. Douglas welcomed me through the door with a friendly grin: he is now in his fifties, but remains as lean and fit as when he was terrorizing players around the world with speed that seemed to defy logic.
Douglas offered the suggestion that he has a ‘great eye for the ball’, which is the way quick reactions are often ‘explained’ in high-level sport. The problem is that researchers have never been able to find any connection between sporting ability and the special powers of vision supposedly boasted by top performers. In 2000 the visual function of elite and non-elite footballers was tested using standardized measures of visual acuity, stereoscopic
