Audience Matters

The pandemic has provided a rare opportunity to investigate the effects of an audience on athletic performance outside a traditional laboratory setting. A recent study out of Germany on 117 athletes, comprising of both sprinters and mass start biathletes, found noteworthy differences between the response of men and women to the presence or lack of an audience. Running times and shooting accuracy were compared between back-to-back World Cup seasons (2018/2019 and 2020) with and without audiences, respectively (Heinrich et al., 2021).

 Results revealed gender differences between the stamina and the complex motor task of accurate shooting. Men ran faster and had worse shooting performances with an audience and women demonstrated the opposite effects. Research such as this highlight the need to consider gender when generalizing purported benefits or undesirable effects of competing with and without spectators depending on the specific task at hand.