OLYMPICS: For athletes seeking a performance enhancer, two British anthropologists recommend an entirely legal stimulant: red strips.
An analysis of four events at the 2004 Olympic Games showed that competitors wearing red were more likely to emerge victorious, the researchers reported in journal Nature yesterday.
"We were pretty bowled over when we looked at the data," says Robert Barton, who wrote the paper with Russell Hill, his colleague at the University of Durham.
Barton and Hill specialise in studying the role of colour in non-human primate societies.
Red is the colour of male dominance in several other species, they say.
For example, in Mandrill monkeys, a male who takes over a group quickly develops red markings which make his authority known to all.
But little is known about the role of red in the human social order.
The anthropologists wanted to test whether red could influence competition between humans.
Barton and Hill saw the 2004 summer Olympic Games in Athens as the perfect opportunity.
In four sports - boxing, tae kwon do, Greco-Roman wrestling and freestyle wrestling - competitors were randomly assigned red or blue uniforms. All the competitors were male.
In each sport, athletes in red won more often. Overall, the red- clad competitor won 54.9 per cent of the time, or 242 out of 441 total match-ups, according to the study.
To make sure other factors were not at work, the researchers examined matches in all 29 weight classes and in all 21 rounds of competition, from the opening contests to the finals.
In 19 weight classes and 16 rounds, there were more red winners, they found.
Barton says that wearing a red strip can't tip a contest when one athlete is clearly stronger or more skilled - "if you're hopeless, wearing red isn't going to make you a winner".
But the analysis suggested red did have the power to sway an even match.
To check their analysis, they looked at the closest matches - those with the lowest margin of victory.
These assumed that these were matches between equal competitors. In these cases, red won at an even higher rate, more than 60 per cent.
Barton and Hill also looked to see if red had the same role in a team sport. In the Euro 2004 soccer tournament, five teams wore two uniforms - one red and one non-red - over the course of the competition. In red, each team scored more goals, they reported.
Is it time for sports to ban red to make competitions fair? "That has to be up to the regulators," Mr Barton says.
He is still mystified about his findings. He surmised that similar to what occurs in the animal world, perhaps red intimidates competitors, or maybe it gives strength to the wearer, he says .
Manfred Milinski, a zoologist at the Max Planck Institute of Limnology in Ploen, Germany, says it makes perfect sense that red is power.
"If it had been any other colour, I would have been surprised," he said.
Milinski studies a fish species, the red stickleback. It is green for most of the year, but then males turn red during the mating season.
In experiments on finches, scientists have been able to manipulate the pecking order by marking some birds with red.
The biology of red is poorly understood in humans, but Barton said there is no reason its effect should be limited to sports. "There is a possibility this is operating in other social and political spheres," he says .
Red, of course, has long been associated with power and aggression. "It's not a colour for the meek, let's be honest," says Allan Hoffenblum, a long-time Republican political consultant in Los Angeles.
He often advises political candidates to wear red ties. Red shows up well on television and, he says, conveys a sense of authority.