Rohit Brijnath: The enduring thrill of anticipation

From the start, in the 1980s, it was the sense of a gathering storm which bewitched me. Play a while off, the stands faintly speckled, the pitch roped off, the tennis players warming up on an outside court, the scoreboards mute, the scratching of paper as it was rolled into the typewriter, sitting there like the field, blank, waiting.

The typewriter is gone, sport has altered indescribably, but not this: At the stadium, or at home, the unbearable, unbeatable swell of anticipation. Fluttering shuttles, gathering like a heap of flowers, as badminton players fine-tune their range like snipers. Tennis players hitting sliding practice serves, phat, phat, phat, like drummers finding a groove. Cyclists sitting quietly, wearing a thousand-yard stare, breathing gently, a sort of kindness to their lungs before they burst.

The most nervous days, Rahul Dravid remembers, was the first day of the first Test of a series. Stomach queasy, heart cantering. Even The Greatest would understand. Before a fight Muhammad Ali once thinks of the millions stopping their lives, factories closed, TVs on street corners, all for him, this kid from Kentucky, and it makes him nervous.

We all have lists about what we love about sport. Freshly mowed fields. Upside-down gymnast on a beam. Jinking runs of rugby. Brief meetings with old heroes—this year Marat Safin, smile of mischief intact—who transport you backwards. After winning a 2005 semi-final epic in Melbourne he did something I’ve never seen again. Tennis players shake hands after a match, then leave each other alone. But as Roger Federer, defeated, left the court, the Russian reached out to touch his shoulder. It was profound in so many ways.

But mostly I like the expectation of sport, the waiting, the rustling as players take their positions, a leaping Rafael Nadal testing his springs at the net before the toss, Vaibhav Suryavanshi surveying the field as if deciding which stand to dispatch the ball to, Rodri reading where someone will be in the next three seconds.

The drama is never just in the play but in the pauses in between. The beats between shots. Studying the boxer on the stool, swab up nostril, trying to summon a fresh fury. How much has he got? “(You) may even believe that you have him,” Mark Kram wrote on Joe Frazier, “but then suddenly you learn that you have not”.

During the play you can’t think, it’s too mesmerisingly fast, but the pauses are when tension squeezes in like cement between bricks. The high diver arranging herself into a handstand turns us as still as she is. At breaks we’re wondering, what will Lakshya Sen do? Imagination slips its handcuffs.

We’re investing ourselves, letting the game take us, trying to be tacticians and soothsayers, while shouting at home at over-explaining commentators because you need silence to stew and feel everything build.

The prelude, states the Encyclopedia Britannica, is a “musical composition, usually brief, that is generally played as an introduction to another, larger musical piece”. Which is what Jasprit Bumrah’s run up feels like. It’s not just the magic which consumes us in sport, but the thought of it, prayer for it, belief in it. It’s Armand Duplantis lifting his pole and staring down limits. And then you’re galloping with him and the anticipation rises with him.

Dravid will swear “every ball is an event”. Well, especially if Warnie was tossing the ball around. Mystery meet wonder. Then, almost sweetly Dravid says—the great player doing exactly what we do—that in any town, at any time, if he’s passing a match on a distant maidan he’ll turn to look and wait for a ball to be bowled. Who knows what might happen.

If I’m anticipating in the stands, then so is the athlete on the field, but not like me. My anticipation is looking forward to something, theirs can be about trying to foresee a future event. The returner predicting a serve. The goalkeeper visualising a penalty. “I like to feel the game,” Portugal’s penalty-saving savant Diogo Costa told The Athletic, “feel what my opponent is saying with his body language. A lot of the time, I choose a side based on his eyes”.

In every sport, anticipation differs. Dravid, on the pitch, wasn’t going to predict anything, just keeping faith in skill and instinct and then reacting to the ball. Anyway, anticipation for athletes can become exhausting, waiting for a whistle, sitting in a call room or a pavilion, letting possibilities swirl madly in the head. “If I anticipated too much,” says shooter Abhinav Bindra, “it drained me because I was an overthinker. You can start competing too early in your mind and it’s a sort of over-arousal.”

But Bindra, reminding us that there’s a distinctive engineering to various sports, dealt with a very subtle version of anticipation in the execution of his skills. It was about when to shoot.

When he brought his rifle down from 12 o’clock to the centre of the target, he’d have a tiny window when his body was ready, his focus pure, his position correct, the timing right, and he’d have to be ready for this moment, this fraction of a second when everything fit.

He couldn’t wait till the perfect picture of the target arrived because there was no time. His hands would be shaking imperceptibly and by the time he recognised the moment and pulled the trigger and the bullet left the rifle, the window was gone.

So he had to anticipate it.

“The moment is coming,” he explains. A moment he senses, which he’s familiar with, and he’s not even conscious of it but his brain has commanded his finger and the pellet has started its journey.

In front of him was a screen which would tell him if it was a 9.9, 10.2, 10.7. But in his head he had called the shot (i.e. score) even before looking at the screen.

You might say he had anticipated his own imperfection.

Rohit Brijnath (@rohitdbrijnath) is an assistant sports editor at The Straits Times, Singapore, and a co-author of Abhinav Bindra’s book A Shot At History: My Obsessive Journey To Olympic Gold.