Do Athletes Lack Vitamins or Concentration?

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 22694, 20 July 1948, Page 2

Do Athletes Lack Vitamins or Concentration?

LONDON (By Air Mail). Excuses are being made for England’s heavy test match defeat on the now well-worn grounds that British athletes are short of vitamins.

Most people are now prepared to think this plea considerably overdone but not so Dr. Nevil Leyton, a former Cambridge lawn tennis player and now a dietetic specialist, who says that Britain’s defeats in sport can be put down to two different causes, food and psychological factors and, he says, the two are very closely connected. Dr. Leyton avers that there is not the slightest doubt in his mind that food plays a part in these defeats saying that the will to win and a general feeling of well-being cannot be maintained in the same way on a severely rationed diet as they can when a man gets all his trainer allows. Inferior Complex Blamed

The doctor would hardly have said that had he seen the English football team in Turin not only beat the Italians but beat them handsomely through the will to win and superior fitness.

He says that the English cricketers started with an inferiority complex after their defeats at the hands of the Australians and West Indians which “does nothing to help them overcome an inferiority already latent through lack of meats and fats”. Dr. Leyton finally says “that Britons still have playing ability cannot be doubted but without proper feeding they suffer from the handicap of having to concentrate far more intensely than their wellfed competitors”. Most critics are of the opinion that the chief trouble with British sportsmen and sportswomen is that they lack concentration, especially at vital stages of games. It is noticeable in all sports if one really analyses reasons for defeat that the winner has succeeded because he has concentrated harder on the task in hand. Lack of Concentration

What was the reason for England s poor cricket show in the first innings at Nottingham on a sound wicket as the bowler, Jim Laker, showed it to be? Surely sheer lack of real concentration.

One might even be forgiven for saying that Denis Compton, hero of England’s second innings, failed to get his double century due to lack of concentration, for had he been concentrating he would never have tried the impossible shot which resulted in his falling on his wicket. Tire ball would have gone harmlessly by had be left it alone.

Before the war when British athletes had all the food they required it was even then apparent that in the matter of concentration they were generally inferior to United States athletes as well as those of other nations, even though they often won despite it.