Betsy McCaughey

(Betsy McCaughey – column)

The collapse of young Ilia Malinin, the U.S. figure skater known as the Quad God, on Olympic ice last Friday is the moment in this year’s games most watchers will remember. Few of us can imagine performing the feats of these athletes, but we can all relate to blowing a high-stakes moment. It’s part of the human experience.

Why does it happen? Scientists studying three rhesus lab monkeys (named Earl, Nelson and Ford) have the beginning of an answer. And the research offers comfort to Malinin and the rest of us, indicating we shouldn’t be too harsh on ourselves. Blowing it, bombing at just the moment you need to be your best, is built into our brains. All primates do it.

Malinin, at 21, came into the Olympics a sensation, undefeated over the last two and a half years and universally expected to win the gold in men’s figure skating.

But on Friday, the ice seemed to turn to water, as he fell repeatedly, skipped the quads that he was programmed to do, and made a mess of the entire performance. He held his face in his hands in disbelief and anguish as he exited the ice.

“The pressure of the Olympics really gets to you,” he said as he tried to answer the same question from reporters over and over again: What happened?

A team of neuroscientists at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh have discovered that when the prize gets too big, like Olympic gold, the brain becomes overly cautious, slowing down the neuron activity that prepares the body for motor movements the body usually does smoothly and without hesitation.

The neuroscientists implanted a tiny, electrode-covered chip into the brain of each monkey, enabling them to watch what happened inside the monkey’s brain as they increased the reward offered for correctly performing a task.

Each monkey was tasked with moving a cursor across a computer screen to reach a target. But when the reward got too big, the monkey choked. Its brain function slowed, and the monkey became overly cautious and missed the target.

Earl consistently hit his target until the reward hit jackpot proportions, then he missed it 11 out of 11 tries.

“The monkeys are choking by being overcautious,” explains Aaron Batista of the University of Pittsburgh. Paying too close attention to movements makes them slower.

“You see it across the board, you see it in sports, in all kinds of different sports and outside sports as well,” says co-researcher Steven Chase of Carnegie Mellon.

The Pittsburgh team’s research is groundbreaking because it identifies the specific changes that occur in the brain when the stakes get bigger.

Most people who play sports competitively know what it’s like to choke. And some famous athletes are remembered for the feats they failed to accomplish, like when Jean van de Velde had a three-stroke lead in the 1999 Open Championship and made a triple bogey to lose the tournament.

The key is to come back.

Malinin needs to know what the science tells us: The brain is actually programmed to choke. It is part of our human condition.

Malinin is good enough to win Olympic gold. And most people predict he will. He’ll be 25 in four years, when the Winter Olympics is held in Nice, France. Meanwhile, he is still the reigning world champion, and more than that, he is widely considered the most innovative and daring figure skater of his generation.

And he is a noble young man. Even in defeat, as he exited the ice and walked out of the arena, he leaned over to his Kazakhstani competitor, who unexpectedly would win the gold, and said, “You deserve it.”