On the 3rd of July 1993, Jana Novotna stood two points from the Wimbledon title.
She had spent the previous fortnight dismantling Gabriela Sabatini and Martina Navratilova. A former world number one in doubles, her serve-and-volley game was built for this surface. In the final's third set against Steffi Graf, she had taken a 4–1 lead. She was serving. The score was 40–30. Win this point and it is 5–1. Two service holds from history.
She served a double fault.
Graf won the next five games and the match. At the trophy ceremony, Novotna wept on the shoulder of the Duchess of Kent, and the image went around the world. The word that attached itself to the story was the one it always is: nerves.
That word is almost certainly wrong.
SHE STOPPED PLAYING. SHE STARTED WATCHING.
Novotna didn't falter because she lacked mental toughness. The research suggests she faltered for the opposite reason: she had too much experience. Too much procedural mastery, too much automated competence. Under sufficient pressure, she became conscious of it.
The academic term is explicit monitoring. Psychologist Rich Masters first described it in 1992; Sian Beilock extended the research through the 2000s. Expert skill is stored in procedural memory. You stop thinking about it. You just do it. That is the point of practice: not to make performance more deliberate, but to make deliberation unnecessary.
Pressure reactivates conscious attention. The internal monitor re-engages. You begin thinking about the mechanics of the serve at the precise moment those mechanics are supposed to be running on their own. You are not a worse player. You are, briefly, a different kind of player: a skilled one trying to manage movements that work precisely because they are unmanaged.
The most striking finding is where the vulnerability sits. Novices asked to focus on their technique are largely unaffected. The explicit monitoring effect is acute in the expert and largely absent in the beginner. High expertise creates a specific fragility that lower skill levels do not have
BRILLIANT BUT BRITTLE
The narrative settled quickly after 1993. Novotna was gifted but got too tight. She lacked the killer instinct. The final gave the world one of sport's most recognisable images: a great player, face against the Duchess's shoulder, inconsolable.
In 1998, she won Wimbledon. The Duchess presented the trophy again. Their second embrace is almost never discussed with the same intensity as the first, because triumph is a simpler story than collapse.
THE WRONG FIX FOR THE RIGHT PROBLEM
Organisations face this failure mode regularly and almost always misdiagnose it. A senior person fails in a high-stakes presentation, a critical negotiation, a board meeting they prepared for extensively. The standard response is more oversight, more simulated pressure, more conscious attention brought to bear.
That intervention treats the problem as a skill deficit. Explicit monitoring theory says it may be doing the opposite of what is needed. Adding conscious attention to an automated skill does not sharpen it. It interferes with it.
The question worth asking is not why they crumbled under pressure. It is what the pressure did to the way they were thinking.
In 1998, on that same court, Novotna won. Nobody asked her afterwards what had changed. The honest answer was probably nothing. She was the same player she had been in 1993. She was just, that day, a little less aware of herself.
TRY IT YOURSELF
🚩 Think of a skill you've automated and the last time it deserted you under pressure. Ask:
🎯 Was there an audience? Awareness of yourself performing is the mechanism, not a skill gap.
🔬 Did you prepare by focusing more deliberately on the mechanics? That may have made it worse.
🪞 Did it leave you more confident, or more self-conscious? Only one of those helps.
The best version of you has forgotten it is performing.
FURTHER READING
📚 The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey (Random House, 1974) Written two decades before Masters confirmed it in a lab, Gallwey's framework of Self 1 (the conscious, judging mind) interfering with Self 2 (the automatic, performing body) is the practitioner's account of exactly what happened to Novotna at 40–30.
📰 "The Science of Choking Under Pressure" by Alyson Meister & Maude Lavanchy, Harvard Business Review (April 2022) The article deliberately leaves the organisational implications for the reader to complete; this piece applies explicit monitoring theory directly to boardrooms, negotiations, and presentations.
🎙️ "The Science of Performing Under Pressure with Sian Beilock" — Re:Thinking with Adam Grant, TED Audio Collective (March 2023) Beilock walks through her research programme in conversation with Grant, covering not just why experts choke but what interventions actually work — and why the intuitive ones tend to make things worse.
🦉 If this piece resonated, you might also like Playing Not to Lose — on how a different kind of pressure mechanism, reference-dependence, nearly cost Rory McIlroy the Masters he was leading by six shots.
SOME FINAL WISE WORDS
"How can you think and hit at the same time?"
— Yogi Berra, New York Yankees
Until next time
The world's best business lessons, told through the stories of sport.
