The weirdest athlete rituals. Feng Shui bottles and basil in gaiters

The weirdest athlete rituals. Feng Shui bottles and basil in gaiters

What only superstitious athletes don’t go to in order to lure good luck.

Athletes are pretty superstitious people. Many soccer players take the field only with their right foot, such as Ronaldo and Roberto Carlos, and tennis player Maria Sharapova tries not to step on the court line. Athletes have typical rituals, superstitions, lucky things and amulets of varying degrees of weirdness. Goalie Iker Casillas, for example, wears his gaiters inside out, and hockey players don’t shave during the playoffs or step on the team emblem in the locker room. We’ve collected the weirdest rituals and habits that athletes from around the world have.

Gattuso is a fan of Russian classics

The famous Italian footballer Gennaro Gattuso turned out to be a big fan of Russian classic literature. Usually extremely harsh on the field, the Italian before games liked to read a couple of pages from F.M. Dostoevsky. Who knows, maybe before every hard tackle Gennaro wondered: “Am I a trembling creature or do I have the right?”. It was also written that Gattuso loves the works of Boris Pasternak. A worthy choice!

John Terry’s lucky urinal

John Terry, while captain of Chelsea, revealed that the club’s players have a happy urinal at the home arena of Stamford Bridge. According to him, he started the tradition and other partners picked up on it. We don’t know if the tradition is still alive after Terry’s departure, but a couple of years ago players would line up at the lucky urinal, ignoring the others.

Rafael Nadal and his bottles

Tennis star Rafael Nadal can’t play unless he puts his water bottles out in a strictly defined order. Nadal himself says in his book that this is how he tries to find order in his mind.

Salt grass for victory

Romeo Anconetani, the former president of the Italian club Pisa, salted the pitch before every home match. He believed it would help his team to succeed. According to rumors, once before an important match he poured 26 kilograms of salt on the field at once. Judging by the fact that “Pisa” has never been at the forefront of Italian soccer, the seasoning did not make the team’s game “tastier”.

Basil in gaiters

Romanian striker Adrian Mutu lacked grass on the pitch. He put basil leaves in his gaiters. The player also said he wore his underwear inside out so he wouldn’t be jinxed. Either superstitions don’t work or he should have guarded against the other, but the striker ruined his career due to drug problems.

Roman Bürki steals goals

The Borussia Dortmund goalkeeper likes to hold the ball in his hands before the game starts. The footballer’s craving for the projectile reached the scale of mania. Bürki literally snatched the ball from the referee and even children.

A reclusive coach

German coach Horst Ehrmantraut, who worked with Eintracht Frankfurt, sat apart from the team at games. For this purpose, he was allocated a plastic chair, which he put at the edge of the field and watched the game that way. The superstitious coach took the chair with him even for away matches. He piously believed that it influenced the energy field of the game. When the team went on a long winning streak, Ehrmantraut also started wearing the same tracksuit to games.

Pre-game performance from LeBron

NBA star LeBron James likes to toss talcum powder into the air before a game. LeBron gave up this ritual for a while, but soon returned to it again.