What people say
Never wash a winning kit; same route, same order, same socks.Performance · 750 searches a month
Sports superstitions
Never wash a winning kit; same route, same order, same socks.
When it actually starts
How old is this one
First recorded
20th century, with professional sport
That makes it
about 76 years old
Rank by age
39 oldest of 40 dated here
Category
Performance
Searched
750 a month
Unwashed shirts, fixed routines, lucky numbers. These are the newest superstitions in this set and the best studied, because athletes perform them openly and researchers can watch.
Why it stuck. High skill plus high randomness is the exact condition that produces ritual — a baseball batter fails 70% of the time at the top level, and ritual fills the gap between effort and outcome.
What is going on
Rituals measurably improve performance by lowering anxiety, so the effect is real while the mechanism is nothing to do with luck.Where it applies. Universal in professional sport.
Other performance superstitions
Recorded around the same time
Sports superstitions is the 39th oldest of the 40 dated superstitions here. Of those, 6 are younger than a century and 5 predate the common era.
First-recorded dates are the earliest documented appearance in written sources, not the earliest possible origin — an unrecorded practice can be older. How the dating works and where it is uncertain →