Can wearing blue help speedskaters go faster?
PYEONGCHANG, South Korea – Colors matter at the Winter Games, though the predominant focus is on three in particular: gold, silver and bronze.
And seconds matter in speedskating, a sport where the gap between gold and off the medal stand entirely can at times be decided only with the assistance of finish-line cameras running at 3,000 frames per second.
These two themes — color and performance — have intersected at the Pyeongchang Games. At the speedskating oval, Norway has exchanged its traditional red uniforms for an untraditional blue, a sartorial decision based on a seemingly nonsensical rationale: Of all the colors across the spectrum, blue is the fastest.
“We had not chosen blue if it had not given us a favorable difference,” Håvard Myklebust, a researcher for the Norwegian Skating Federation, said in an interview on the TV channel NRK in December. “It fits the speed profile for the air resistance of the fabric.”
To say the color of the uniforms would have an impact on the final result seems as realistic as claiming the color of a bat would influence a baseball player’s average, or that a new shade of shorts would have bearing on a basketball player’s free-throw percentage. Yet there is some scientific research at Norway’s disposal.
A study comparing the cognitive performance between the colors red and blue conducted in 2009 by researchers at the University of British Columbia found the blue group performing better on quizzes involving imagination and creativity. That could conceivably come in handy in speedskating, as skaters quickly evaluate and make split-second decisions based on location and an opponent’s own performance.
On the other hand, the same study found the red group excelling in tests requiring accuracy and attention to detail — two prime factors behind speedskating success, where the best skaters are defined by an ability to reach and then maintain a perfectly repetitive pace. And a 2004 study in the journal Na
ture, conducted at Durham University in England, cut straight to the chase: When it comes to the Olympic Games, red beats blue.
“Across a range of sports, we find that wearing red is consistently associated with a higher probability of winning,” researchers concluded.
If any, the impact may be far more psychological than physical. With results separated by fractions of a second, even the unproven idea that your suit is faster could give Norwegian skaters a sort of mental edge typically reserved for Netherlands, the sport’s dominant figure.
It’s not as if Norway needed the help. The country has now claimed 81 Olympic medals on the oval, second-most among all nations behind the Dutch, after Sverre Lunde Pederson captured bronze in the men’s 5,000 meters, held here Sunday.
There is a spotty recent track record of pre-Games uniform tinkering. Just four years ago in Sochi, USA Speedskating debuted the Mach 39, a setup manufactured by teams from Under Armour and Lockheed Martin, that looked great off the track yet featured an outrageous design flaw: The Mach 39 included venting meant to keep skaters cool, but it created drag. The U.S. ended without a single medalist for the first time since the 1984 Sarajevo Games.