Three years later at the Masters, Greg Norman starts the final round with a six-shot lead, shoots 78, and loses to Nick Faldo by five.
These aren't beginners. They are among the best in the world, failing at exactly the thing they've practised for decades. That is what makes choking strange, and it's what the research explains.
Choking is a skill problem, not a character flaw
"Choking" means performing worse than your normal level because the stakes feel high. Psychologists have two main explanations, and both are about attention.
1. The worry takes up the space. Pressure fills your head with thoughts about consequences: what if I miss, what will people think. Those thoughts use working memory, the limited mental scratchpad you need for tasks that require active thinking, like mental arithmetic or a test question. This is why pressure often hurts people on exams.
2. You start watching yourself. For a skill you've practised to the point of automatic, the opposite happens. Under pressure you start paying close attention to how you do it: wrist angle, follow-through, the exact rhythm of the serve. But expert skills are stored in a form that runs best without step-by-step supervision. Supervising them breaks them, the way thinking about each step can make you stumble on a staircase.
The classic evidence for the second explanation comes from psychologists Sian Beilock and Thomas Carr in 2001. They found that experienced golfers had poor recall for the details of individual putts (the skill had become automatic), and that pressure hurt their putting. A math-like task that still needed step-by-step thinking didn't show the same choking. And in one key experiment, golfers who had practised under conditions designed to make them self-conscious stopped choking, while golfers who'd practised with a distracting second task still choked.
Experts don't choke because they forget their skill. They choke because they start supervising it.
What pressure looks like from the outside
Football (soccer) penalty shootouts are a natural laboratory: same distance, same goalkeeper problem, enormous stakes. Norwegian sport psychologist Geir Jordet has spent years studying them on video. In one 2009 study of shootouts at World Cups, European Championships and the Champions League, his team measured how long players waited after the referee's whistle before starting their run-up.
The players who rushed, starting in under a fifth of a second, scored just under 57% of the time. Those who took more than a second scored just over 80%. The study was retrospective and some groups were small, so the exact figures are uncertain. But the pattern fits what psychologists call avoidance: under stress, people hurry to get the unbearable moment over with, and hurrying costs them.
What actually helps
The useful part of this research is that it points to specific fixes.
Practise with pressure in it. Beilock and Carr's self-conscious golfers are the model. If performing in front of people is what breaks your skill, rehearse in front of people: get filmed, have a friend watch, put a small stake on the outcome. You are teaching yourself that being watched is normal.
Point your attention outward. Studies of motor skills consistently find that focusing on the effect of a movement (where the ball should land, the target, the path of the club) works better than focusing on the body parts doing it. A 2021 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin (Chua and colleagues) found this "external focus" advantage across dozens of studies, both for performing and for learning. Some researchers argue publication bias inflates the size of that effect, so treat it as a reliable direction rather than a precise number. Under pressure, a single external cue ("smooth to the target") is better than a checklist of body positions.
Re-label the nerves. In a 2010 study, psychologist Jeremy Jamieson told some students preparing for the GRE graduate-school exam that a racing heart and sweaty palms can actually help performance. Those students scored higher on the practice math section, and later on the real exam, than students who weren't told. Later studies have had more mixed results, so this is a modest tool, not a cure. But "this is my body getting ready" is a better story than "I'm falling apart," and it's free.
Write the worry down. For thinking tasks, getting the worry out of working memory helps. In a 2011 study in Science, Gerardo Ramirez and Sian Beilock had students spend 10 minutes before an important exam writing about their feelings about it. The writing improved scores, especially for students who were habitually anxious about tests. Other researchers questioned whether it suits everyone, especially people who aren't anxious to begin with.
Take your time on purpose. Jordet's penalty data suggests the simplest fix of all: don't rush the moment. A deliberate, consistent routine (a breath, a look at the target, then go) gives you a reason to slow down that isn't fear.
A caution about the word
Not every miss in a big moment is a choke. Even great players miss shots they usually make; a missed free throw in a final is often just the ordinary miss rate showing up on camera. "Choking" is the label we reach for after the fact, because a story feels better than randomness. The useful question is narrower: does your performance reliably drop under pressure? If so, the fixes above are worth practising. If not, the miss was probably just a miss.
And it's worth knowing how Novotná's story ends. She reached the final again in 1997 and lost. In 1998 she won Wimbledon.
The takeaway
Choking is performing below your normal level because the stakes feel high, and it usually happens through attention: worry crowds out working memory on thinking tasks, and self-monitoring breaks automatic skills in experts. The fixes follow from that: practise while being watched, focus on the target rather than your body, re-label the adrenaline as readiness, write worries down before a test, and slow down with a fixed routine instead of rushing to escape the moment.
Try this: pick one skill you care about doing well under pressure, a presentation, a serve, a recital piece, and rehearse it once this week in front of someone or on camera, with one outward cue in mind ("land it on the back line," "speak to the last row"). Notice what happens to the nerves the second time.
Sources & Further Reading
Sources
- Beilock S. L. & Carr T. H., "On the fragility of skilled performance: What governs choking under pressure?" Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 130 (2001).
- Jordet G., Hartman E. & Sigmundstad E., Psychology of Sport and Exercise 10 (2009): 621–627, on whistle-to-run-up times in penalty shootouts; summarized by the British Psychological Society's Research Digest.
- Chua L.-K. et al., "Superiority of external attentional focus for motor performance and learning: Systematic reviews and meta-analyses," Psychological Bulletin (2021).
- Jamieson J. P. et al., "Turning the knots in your stomach into bows: Reappraising arousal improves performance on the GRE," Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 46 (2010).
- Ramirez G. & Beilock S. L., "Writing about testing worries boosts exam performance in the classroom," Science 331 (2011).
- Match details: Wimbledon 1993 women's final (Graf d. Novotná 7–6, 1–6, 6–4); 1996 Masters (Faldo 276, Norman 281). Novotná won Wimbledon in 1998.
Go deeper
- 📘 Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To — Sian Beilock (the researcher's own readable account)
- 📘 Bounce — Matthew Syed (a former Olympic table-tennis player on talent, practice and performing under pressure)
- 🌐 BPS Research Digest: "Football players who rush penalty kicks are less likely to score"