Left-handers are a minority. If you go out and look for one, you’ll find that they represent around 10% of the population, but that percentage is just a reference that blurs the differences between countries and genders. In some sports disciplines where they are not a minority or are definitely above the 10% reference, that’s something the Olympic Games have just reminded us of.

The phenomenon of left-handed people being “overrepresented” in professional sports is so intriguing that scientists have been studying it for years.

From the Olympics and left-handed athletes. This information was revealed a few days ago by American journalist David Epstein, author of the articles ‘Range’ or ‘Sports Gene’. In newsletter In a recent report devoted specifically to Olympic statistics, Epstein claims that “half the women” participating in the clay pigeon shooting finals were left-handed, a rate well above the 8% or 10% that generally perform better left-handed than right-handed.

“Massive over-representation”Epstein goes further, recalling that there are sports where it is not unusual for left-handers to have a statistically much higher weight than their counterparts, and even to outweigh right-handers. “Fencing has featured three left-handers on the podium in many cases, and has historically been overrepresented at the highest levels.”

What does the data say? As evidence, Epstein cites a chart from the 1981 Fencing World Cup, which shows that 25% of women and 62.5% of men who reached the final stage were left-handed. In the quarterfinals, the percentages were even higher.

There are also data to consider from the Paris Olympic Games. In its report on the men’s team foil final held at the Grand Palais, the Olympic organization lists four Japanese athletes and four other Italian athletes as gold medalists. The first of these was left-handed (Matasuyama Kyosuke); the second (Filippo Macchi). In both cases, 25% is twice the proportion of left-handers in the population.

Accident? The strange relationship between left-handedness and sports has fascinated experts for decades. In 1996, a group of scientists published an article in the journal Proceedings: Biological Sciences in which they investigated the prevalence of under-qualified athletes in certain disciplines. To be more precise, they focused on men and on “interactive” sports with “combat elements” that can account for 50% in some categories.

They are not the only ones studying this phenomenon. A decade ago, two Turkish scientists published another study with a title that gave a clear clue to its content: ‘Why are left-handed players overrepresented in some sports?’ Its authors calculated that, at least in certain sports, they represent between 13 and 25%, well above their footprint in the population as a whole (8-12%).

One idea that emerged from their research is that the “over-representation” of left-handed athletes is centered on interactive sports like tennis, baseball, cricket, fencing or volleyball. They failed to detect this when no such interaction occurs in gymnastics or archery, to name a few examples.

So what is the reason? This was the question asked many years ago by Dr. Florian Loffing of the University of Oldenburg (Germany), who came to the interesting conclusion of why left-handed people reach higher quotas than their counterparts as a simple statistical result. The question of “interactive sports”.

“The data suggests that the stricter the time constraints in a sport, the higher the proportion of left-handed players,” Loffing explained in an article published in the journal Biology Letters. “We may therefore not be able to develop strategies that best suit them.”

Loffing devoted himself to studying the best badminton, squash, tennis, table tennis, cricket and baseball players between 2009 and 2014, and despite significant fluctuations across disciplines, he found striking results. In baseball, for example, almost a third of the best pitchers were left-handed, compared with 8.7% of men in squash. Among women, more than 19% of table tennis champions were left-handed, but only 8% in badminton.

It’s a matter of “tempo” and pressure. Loffing didn’t stop there. For his work, he also devoted himself to analyzing the “tempo” of each sport, focusing on aspects such as how much time elapses between the ball being thrown and the bat being hit, or the time it takes from the moment an opponent hits the ball with his racket.

So he discovered that the pressure was greater in baseball, cricket and table tennis, where left-handers were more prominent. The key, he notes GuardianTime pressure, short and narrow margins and how complex it is for an athlete to predict his left-handed opponent in this context.

Dr Scott Hardie from Abertay University explains: “Another way of looking at this is that it’s not a question of quirk, but of how left-handers can cope with the rapid flow of information and reactions.”

Looking for explanations. So for Loffing, the key will be the time constraints that will allow lefties to shine. When this happens in sports like baseball, table tennis or cricket, a left-handed athlete is 2.6 times more likely to succeed. But that’s not the only explanation for the “over-representation” of lefties in some sports.

Other researchers have considered possibilities such as connections between the brain’s hemispheres or the fact that right-handed players, because they are less common in everyday life, may provide a competitive advantage over right-handed opponents. The reason: athletes are used to competing with right-handed players. Other studies have pointed to differences in competition, at least in fencing.

Skills that are weak for a left-handed personIn another equally relevant report focusing on volleyball, Loffing notes: “The high ball speeds and short distances between competitors require athletes in interactive sports to accurately predict their opponents’ intentions in order to respond appropriately.” Although thought to be crucial for successful performance, this ability appears to be impaired when athletes are paired with a left-handed opponent, likely because athletes’ perceptual familiarity with rarely encountered left-handed movements is diminished.”

Image | Nathanael Desmeules (Unsplash)

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