Why Do Athletes Choke Under Pressure?

Jana Novotná was one of the best tennis players in the world. At the 1993 Wimbledon final, she led Steffi Graf 4-1 in the deciding set. She was five games from winning the most prestigious tournament in tennis.

She lost seven games in a row.

During the trophy ceremony, she sobbed on the shoulder of the Duchess of Kent.

Novotná went on to win Wimbledon five years later, in 1998. She was better in 1993. She choked.

What happened in those seven games is not a mystery of will or courage or nerves. It has a precise mechanism in cognitive psychology, and once you understand it, you’ll understand why it tends to happen to the best athletes — not the worst ones.

How Expert Skill Is Stored

When you first learn to drive, you think about every action: where to put your hands, how much pressure on the brake, how far to turn the wheel. Conscious attention manages every step. It’s exhausting and slow.

After months of practice, driving becomes automatic. Your hands turn the wheel without deliberate instruction. You brake at the right moment without calculating the pressure. You can hold a conversation, listen to the radio, and navigate — because driving has moved from explicit memory (declarative, conscious, effortful) into implicit procedural memory (automatic, non-verbal, unconscious).

The brain structures involved shift accordingly. Explicit learning involves the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus — conscious, deliberate processing. With practice, the basal ganglia and cerebellum take over — the motor programs are compiled into efficient automatic routines that run without needing the prefrontal cortex’s attention.

This is expertise. It’s what allows an elite tennis player to return a 130 mph serve, a gymnast to execute a floor routine, a surgeon to perform a complex procedure — the skills run automatically, faster and more precisely than conscious attention could ever manage.

The Problem With Pressure

High-stakes situations activate the prefrontal cortex. Cortisol and norepinephrine flood the system. Attention sharpens. You become acutely aware of what you’re doing.

For a novice, this sometimes helps — they’re not thinking enough anyway, and added attention to their (still explicit) technique can improve performance.

For an expert, it’s catastrophic.

Reinvestment theory (proposed by psychologist Richard Masters in 1992) describes the mechanism: under pressure, experts begin to consciously monitor and control skills that normally run automatically. They “reinvest” explicit, declarative attention into movements that had been delegated to implicit, procedural systems.

The prefrontal cortex tries to take over from the basal ganglia.

This doesn’t work. The automatic systems run motor programs at speeds and levels of integration that conscious attention can’t match. When consciousness tries to supervise them, it doesn’t just fail to help — it actively disrupts the automatic execution. Like trying to run a compiled program by manually entering machine code.

Novotná, leading in the third set, winning, near the finish line — her prefrontal cortex woke up. She started thinking about serving. She started monitoring her groundstrokes. She started tracking exactly what she was doing. And the proceduralized skill that had carried her to that point began to fragment.

The Expertise Paradox

This creates a paradox: expertise makes you more vulnerable to choking, not less.

A novice can’t choke in this way because their skill isn’t yet automatic — they’re already using explicit, conscious attention to execute it. There’s nothing to disrupt.

An expert has built up years of compiled, automatic skill. They have more to lose when consciousness interferes, and higher stakes create exactly the conditions that make interference likely.

Research by cognitive psychologist Sian Beilock and colleagues at the University of Chicago has demonstrated this repeatedly. In one experiment, expert golfers putted significantly worse under high pressure conditions. Novice golfers showed no such decline, and in some conditions improved slightly. The difference was entirely in how expertise responds to attentional load.

In another study, Beilock’s team had participants solve math problems under pressure. Students who had automatized the procedures (genuine mathematical fluency) performed worse when asked to explain their reasoning step-by-step — because verbal, explicit attention disrupted the implicit procedures. Students who were still learning explicitly performed better with step-by-step prompting.

The skill that makes you good is the skill that makes you vulnerable.

The Yips

The most extreme form of choking is the yips — a breakdown of fine motor skills in high-stakes situations that has affected golfers, cricketers, darts players, and surgeons.

A golfer who can putt perfectly in practice suddenly cannot execute a short putt in competition. A cricket bowler loses their ability to release the ball cleanly. The movements feel controlled from the outside but there’s something like a seizure happening internally in the motor programming.

The yips are thought to involve a particularly severe form of reinvestment — the prefrontal cortex attempting to take over movements that have become so automated they essentially resist conscious direction. The conflict between the explicit system trying to control and the implicit system resisting that control produces the characteristic jerkiness and freezing.

Some cases of yips appear to also involve focal dystonia — a neurological condition where the motor cortex sends conflicting signals, suggesting the problem sometimes has neurological as well as psychological components.

What Actually Helps

Since the mechanism is explicit attention disrupting implicit skill, solutions target the attention system:

Pre-performance routines — fixed sequences of actions before a shot, serve, or performance. They narrow attention to process and prevent the wandering, evaluative thought that triggers reinvestment. Tennis players bouncing the ball the same number of times. Basketball players at the free throw line going through the same hand placement. The routine focuses the prefrontal cortex on something benign, keeping it occupied while the implicit system executes.

Process focus over outcome focus — thinking about the mechanics of the movement rather than the result. “Keep my elbow in and follow through” rather than “I need to make this shot or we lose.” Outcome focus activates evaluation, which activates the prefrontal cortex.

Paralysis by analysis — the irony is that thinking harder about technique is precisely what causes the failure. “Just let it happen” is neurologically accurate advice, even if it sounds like nothing.

Distraction — counterintuitively, engaging in an unrelated secondary task (counting backwards, listening to a phrase) can protect automatic performance by keeping the prefrontal cortex occupied with something else. Beilock’s team demonstrated that basketball players made free throws more accurately under pressure when simultaneously completing a cognitive task, because the task prevented reinvestment.

Novotná won Wimbledon in 1998, five years after her collapse. She had presumably learned, at some level, not to think.

The skill was always there. It was always good enough. What had to be managed wasn’t the tennis — it was the mind trying to supervise the tennis.

That’s the whole problem. The body knows what to do. The mind, under pressure, forgets to stay out of the way.