What Wimbledon's finalists can teach the rest of us about staying calm under pressure

Last weekend on Centre Court, Jannik Sinner defended his Wimbledon title against Alexander Zverev in a near four-hour, four-set battle. Sinner lost the opening set in a tiebreak, won the second in another one, and then held his nerve to close out the match 6-7(7), 7-6(2), 6-3, 6-4. On Saturday, Linda Nosková took her first Grand Slam title in an all-Czech final against Karolína Muchová.

Elite tennis is one of the purest laboratories of performance under pressure that we have. The margins are small, the crowd is close, and there is nowhere to hide. What the two champions demonstrated, and what the research supports, is that composure is a skill, not a trait. And it is trainable.

The quiet eye

The single most studied technique is the "quiet eye", first described by kinesiologist Joan Vickers (1996). It is the final, sustained visual fixation on a target immediately before executing a skilled movement, whether that is a golf putt, a basketball free throw or a first serve. A meta-analysis pooling 27 studies and 38 effect sizes found a large advantage in quiet eye duration for experts over novices, and a moderate advantage for successful attempts over unsuccessful ones within the same person. Training interventions produced very large improvements in gaze behaviour and large improvements in subsequent performance (Lebeau et al., 2016). The mechanism appears simple. A prolonged, deliberate gaze reduces cognitive noise and protects motor execution from self-consciousness.

Pressure has a measurable cost

Pressure itself has been carefully studied in tennis. An analysis published in the Journal of Economic Psychology examined 8,280 individual games from the four Grand Slam tournaments of 2010. Men consistently underperformed at the most critical points, while women's results were mixed, and any drop in women's performance was around half the size of men's (Cohen-Zada et al., 2017). The take-home is that pressure has systematic effects on execution even at the elite level, and knowing when those pressure points fall is half the battle.

Being watched is the bigger problem

Feeling observed also matters. A new experimental study in Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications tested two types of pressure on a demanding multitasking exercise. Outcome pressure (caring about the result) had little effect. In exploratory analyses, monitoring pressure (being observed and evaluated) produced a measurable drop in performance, without changing where participants looked (Pennanen & Oksama, 2026). It is an early finding from a small sample of 30 participants, so it needs replication, but it points in a consistent direction: self-consciousness may be the more disruptive force.

Why it matters

Very few of us serve for a Grand Slam. But most working parents, clinicians, leaders and negotiators face daily versions of the same problem: a moment where the stakes rise, attention narrows and performance either holds up or breaks. The evidence comes from sport and the laboratory, but the principles are worth borrowing.

Practical takeaways

1. Borrow the "quiet eye" principle. Before a difficult conversation, presentation or high-stakes decision, take three to five seconds of steady, focused attention on a single visual point. The sporting evidence suggests this settles attention and reduces cognitive interference.
2. Reappraise, do not suppress. Naming the feeling ("this is my body preparing me to perform") outperforms trying to push it down. The physiological arousal of anxiety and excitement is remarkably similar, and relabelling it improves performance (Brooks, 2014).
3. Reduce the monitoring load where you can. If observation is unavoidable, focus outward on the task rather than inward on how you appear.
4. Rehearse the response, not just the outcome. Elite performers routinely pre-plan how they will handle setbacks, not just how they will succeed.

Sinner did not win on Sunday because he was more talented than Zverev. He won because he had a repeatable process for the moments that counted. The psychology of pressure suggests the rest of us can build one too.

References:

Brooks, A. W. (2014). Get excited: Reappraising pre-performance anxiety as excitement. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(3), 1144-1158. 

Cohen-Zada, D., Krumer, A., Rosenboim, M., & Shapir, O. M. (2017). Choking under pressure and gender: Evidence from professional tennis. Journal of Economic Psychology, 61, 176-190. 

Lebeau, J.-C., Liu, S., Sáenz-Moncaleano, C., Sanduvete-Chaves, S., Chacón-Moscoso, S., Becker, B. J., & Tenenbaum, G. (2016). Quiet eye and performance in sport: A meta-analysis. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 38(5), 441-457. 

Pennanen, N., & Oksama, L. (2026). Pressure in the spotlight: Effects of monitoring pressure and outcome pressure on time-sharing performance. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 11, Article 8. 

Vickers, J. N. (1996). Visual control when aiming at a far target. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 22(2), 342-354.