Seeing red over the Olympic strip

This Olympic's logo was an object lesson is paying vaunted professionals a lot of money for a very mediocre product, and the UK olympic strip is coming up much the same - it seems to have left out the red in the Irish, Welsh and English colours. (It is mainly blue, leading wags to point out its the only way Scotland will ever be seen to win anything. Well,the designer was called McCartney....)

Which could be bad news for the UK, because it appears that teams that wear red win more games than ones that don't - Economist:

Russell Hill and Robert Barton, two scientists from the University of Durham, who have researched the effect that wearing a particular colour can have on an athlete’s results. In a paper written in 2005, Mr Hill and Mr Barton argued that competitors garbed predominantly in red do better than rivals in other colours. After the British outfit was revealed to the general public, Mr Barton was quoted in Britain’s Guardian newspaper saying that Stella McCartney, the designer, had made a mistake in using too much blue.

In their 2005 paper, Mr Hill and Mr Barton studied four combat sports (boxing, tae kwon do, Greco-Roman wrestling and freestyle wrestling) that featured in the 2004 Olympic Games, for which contestants were randomly assigned red or blue outfits. After stripping out the effects of asymmetry, when one fighter was deemed superior to his opponent, the scientists found that contestants wearing red won significantly more fights than those in blue. If colour has no influence on the outcome of contests, reds should have won a similar number of fights to blues.

The research also looked to a lesser extent at the Euro 2004 football tournament, in which teams participated in national colours unless these conflicted with those of their opponents. Mr Hill and Mr Barton examined five teams that each used two kits throughout the competition—one red and one either white or blue—and found that all five had better results when they played in red. Although a less rigorous part of the overall analysis, this suggests the advantages conferred by red are not confined to combat sports.

And why is this - some hints from another piece of research:

In 2009, a team of German scientists working at the University of Munster found that combat sportsmen were more likely to win dressed in red than blue because of the effect on judges. During their experiment, referees watched clips of fights in which contestants’ outfits could be digitally manipulated. When shown in red, the same fighters scored better than when clothed in blue.

As the Economist points out, this stuff should be fairly well known in sporting circles so it is a missed opportunity for the UK. But thre is something depressing about the inevitability of "designers" putting form over function.

If the British do not bag a lot of medals there will be some very angry Londoners, as it wil be adding insult to the various injuries done already from wildly underestimated budgets, shutting off the transport system to commuters and more (and don't mention the limited ticketing to citizens).

And next time round, how about crowdsourcing the designs (and a lot more in fact) - costs less, involves the nation, and you will very likely also get better designs. Coming to think of it, why not this time round, its not too late to change the strip.