Making her major debut at Wimbledon Emma Raducanu retired from that tournament due to breathing difficulties.
She entered Wimbledon, in June 2021, as a wild card and was ranked outside the top 300. she however reached the fourth round in her first major tournament. Just recently she stunned the world by beating fellow teenager Leylah Fernandez to become the first qualifier to win a major title. She is now described as “the talent of the Century” and has been billed a “£1billion athlete“.
Toronto born Raducanu moved to London when she was 2, and has been playing tennis since she was 5. Of Romanian-Chinese descent, she credits her parents with teaching her to be a disciplined athlete. At 18, she has accomplished the unthought of, by winning the U.S. Open title. Raducanu’s performance created a number of firsts and even won her praise from the Queen of England.
The story of Raducanu is remarkable, but more importantly it brings into sharp focus, the general disposition that many of us have, with respect to the underdog. Now you could argue that Raducanu is hardly an underdog, after all she is participating at a very mature level in the sport of tennis; something she has been working towards for years. The underdog element in my mind, is the fact that she is an outlier in terms of being projected for the win that she had. The world in general (perhaps not the bookies and betting shops…) is delighted!
Underdogs aplenty matey!
Literature is littered with underdogs (no pun intended) that come out as top dogs; consider David in the story of David and Goliath, Cinderella, Frodo Baggins from the Hobbit, Jane Eyre, even Harry Potter! The concept is made familiar to us pretty early on in our lives in various ways.
The enigmatic Steve Jobs gathered Apple employees at an off-site retreat in Carmel, California, a lifetime ago, in January 1983, and offered the “It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy” maxim in order to motivate his Apple developers. His intent at the time was to inspire the team to do things that were divergent from where technology was at the time. Computing was dominated by just a few big players like IBM & DEC who were all pretty much doing all the same thing. The Apple “Lisa” was released that same month, as one of the first PC’s with a graphical UI aimed squarely at individual business users, a radical divergence from the mini-mainframe computing with dumb terminals that had been on offer up until then. Since that time, people haven’t stopped looking at new ways of offering personal computing.
Recently we have seen that the same “rooting for the underdog” mentality manifest in the stock trading market with the emergence of the day trader “Ape” supporting so-called “memestocks” like Gamestop, AMC Entertainment and BlackBerry and even investing in crypto currency – the big competitor for traditional fiat currency or valuable base metals and other assets.
In this case, the suggestion with memestocks being that retail investor underdogs can impact the top dog markets in a way that hurts the deep pocket institutional short sellers who are considered to be market controllers and market manipulator top dogs. Through the power of numbers (and stimulus checks) If things don’t work out, the underdog investors will hopefully have not bet the house on these underdog stocks. If they come out as winners, it will be regarded as a victory for all the underdogs.
We love an ostensibly small and downtrodden character standing up against a stronger and greater protagonist like a Lord Voldemort and seeing them come out victorious. But is this really how we always think?
Maybe we also love top dogs?
There’s a lot of evidence out there that suggests that many of us will support the underdog, but I do wonder whether that really only happens when we are at some distance from the circumstances of the underdog, where there is a low risk to us of success or failure. I think that this is probably more the case when the underdog winning will not have an immediate or direct impact on us personally, or rather where there is relatively low risk.
Consider for example, your own likelihood of choosing a newcomer brand that you have never seen before or never experienced. It could be a new type of beverage, a snack or a restaurant. If the product holds enough visual appeal, you might try it, particularly if cost is not a barrier to trial or adoption.
Similarly, investing a stimulus payment in a memestock or crypto currency is putting money that has a low significance perhaps, into something opportunistically, a low risk flutter that might bring a reward or win greater than the initial outlay.
In a research paper from earlier this month by Mehmet Bac from Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Sabanci University and Parimal Bag from Dept. of Economics, National University of Singapore they suggest that the same kind of mentality may exist in the world of executive stock options and betting on oneself in sports. Bets, in their words “serve as costly commitments”; the model sounds equally interesting when you have startups competing jointly for VC funding or retaining talent.
Their hypothesis is that similar startups battling over dominance may use stock options in various ways to incentivize executives to stay engaged or crank up their motivation but that the underdogs might do this more aggressively than the top dogs.
It is easy to write underdog support off as largely being attributable to everyone loving the idea of supporting an underdog and the concept of schadenfreude (joy in the misfortune of others – particularly the powerful) but in reality the way we actually practice our support of the underdog may be infinitely more complex than simply blithely supporting the underdog.
We all, also love a winner and mentally we may be factoring the real likelihood of a win into where we place our bet, even begrudgingly. When we have more to win by going with the mainstream and generally supporting the top dog, we may surprise ourselves and simply land up going with the flow.
Sometimes a incalculable risk though, is the better choice. Getting out of your comfort zone and taking a chance may be the better, more enjoyable choice and it may actually yield a greater reward.
