News Bytes of the Week–In Judo, Blue Is Not Best [News]
News Bytes of the Week–In Judo, Blue Is Not Best [News]
Blue duds win judo matches? Maybe notResearchers scored a takedown this week on a 2005 study that found an inexplicable advantage for judo players in blue outfits squaring off against contenders wearing white in the 2004 Olympics. The finding implied that maybe the blue was more intimidating or made blows harder to see coming. Skeptical, evolutionary biologists from Scotland and the Netherlands took a closer look at the Olympic matchups and noticed that because of the way the tournament was structured, higher-seeded grapplers wore blue more often than white (they alternated outfits, or judogi, between matches), and blue-clad contestants were more likely to have had extra rest between matches as well as more matches to that point than their white-garbed opponents. When the researchers controlled for these effects in the Olympic matches, the advantage of donning a blue judogi disappeared. (Proceedings of the Royal Society B) [More]