The Sport Psychology of Losing Badly
Throwing Away Medals: Why We Sometimes Struggle to Celebrate Second Place
We have all seen it.
An athlete finishes second in a major competition. They receive their medal. They stand on the podium. And then, sometimes, they take it off and throw it away.
It is particularly visible at events such as the FIFA World Cup or the Olympic Games. Occasionally it looks almost theatrical—an athlete removing the medal, tossing it aside, refusing to engage with the ceremony.
From the outside, it can seem irrational.
You have just become one of the best people in the world at what you do. Why would you throw away the evidence of it?
But psychologically, there is much more going on.
The strange psychology of second place
One of the most fascinating findings in performance psychology is that second place does not necessarily feel better than third place.
In a landmark study of Olympic medalists, researchers Victoria Medvec, Scott Madey and Thomas Gilovich found that bronze medalists tended to appear happier than silver medalists. The explanation was not that bronze was objectively better than silver. It was the way the athletes were comparing their outcome with alternative possibilities.
This is known as counterfactual thinking: our tendency to compare what actually happened with what might have happened.
For the silver medalist, the most psychologically available alternative is often:
I could have won gold.
The silver medal becomes a physical reminder of the gold that was missed.
For the bronze medalist, the comparison can be very different:
I could have finished fourth and gone home with nothing.
Suddenly, bronze represents an achievement.
This is one reason why the emotional experience of an outcome cannot always be understood simply by looking at the outcome itself.
We don’t experience results in isolation. We experience them in relation to the story we tell ourselves about what could have been.
Then comes the medal ceremony
There is another important factor.
Imagine losing an Olympic final.
You have spent years preparing for this moment. You have just experienced an incredibly intense competitive environment. Your opponent has beaten you. You are devastated.
And within minutes, you are standing on a podium while the athlete who beat you celebrates with the gold medal.
Then someone places a silver medal around your neck.
Objectively, it represents an extraordinary achievement.
Subjectively, in that particular moment, it can feel like a consolation prize for losing.
That distinction matters.
Near-miss outcomes can be particularly emotionally powerful because they highlight the gap between where we are and where we wanted to be. Rather than experiencing “I achieved something extraordinary,” the mind can become fixated on “I was so close.”
It takes emotional maturity to hold both truths at once:
I am devastated that I lost. And I can still recognise what I achieved.
That ability—to experience disappointment without allowing it to completely redefine the meaning of the experience—is a critical performance skill.
Our relationship with losing matters
Throwing away a medal can therefore tell us something broader about our relationship with losing.
There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to win. Competition can be enormously motivating. Ambition, commitment and a desire to be the best can drive extraordinary achievement.
The problem begins when winning becomes the only acceptable outcome.
“Second place is for losers.”
“You have to hate losing.”
“Win at all costs.”
These ideas can sound like motivational slogans. But taken too literally, they can create a very narrow psychological world.
If winning is success and everything else is failure, then losing becomes an irredeemable event.
And when we don’t know how to lose, the mind can become messy.
We can:
overlook everything we did well;
discount effort, learning and improvement;
become consumed by what was outside our control;
develop a fear of failure;
become excessively anxious about future performance;
avoid situations where we might fail;
interpret mistakes as threats to our identity;
become vulnerable to unhealthy or unethical behaviours designed to avoid losing.
Perhaps most importantly, we lose the joy of the journey.
When everything is about winning, the experience can become one long period of apprehension: What if I lose? What will people think? What will this mean about me?
And even when we eventually win, the emotional response can be less “That was amazing!” and more “Thank goodness that’s over.”
That isn’t sustainable high performance.
Learning to lose is a skill
Perhaps we need to stop treating losing as something we should protect people from and start treating it as something we should learn how to navigate.
How schools, parents, coaches, sporting organisations and companies respond to failure is an important test of the culture they create.
We often hear:
“Fail fast.”
But failing fast isn’t enough.
We also need to learn how to feel failure, understand it, recover from it and use it.
Because what happens after failure affects what happens next.
It influences confidence, motivation, participation, resilience, identity and future behaviour.
And this brings us to one of the most controversial subjects in youth sport: participation awards.
Are participation medals really the problem?
Participation awards aren’t new. They have existed in youth sport for decades.
And the evidence is more nuanced than the debate often suggests.
For younger children, recognition can communicate something valuable:
You matter. Your effort matters. You belong here.
Sport itself is associated with a range of psychological and social benefits for children and adolescents, including self-esteem, self-worth, resilience and wellbeing.
An award that recognises effort, commitment, improvement or participation can also create psychological space for children to take risks.
And that’s important.
If every mistake threatens a child’s sense of worth, they may become less willing to try.
But awards can also become unhelpful when they are used to avoid failure altogether.
If a child learns that simply showing up automatically produces a reward, the reward can become more important than the experience itself.
“I need a sticker.”
“What do I get if I do it?”
The danger is not the medal.
The danger is what the medal teaches the child it means.
Children don’t need to believe they won
There is a strange assumption in the participation-award debate that children will walk away believing they actually won.
They generally know the difference.
A child receiving a participation medal at an Under-8s event knows who won the race or scored the most goals.
The question isn’t whether every child should feel like a winner.
The better question is:
What do we want the child to learn from the experience?
That winning is the only thing that matters?
That losing means they aren’t good enough?
Or that they can compete wholeheartedly, experience disappointment, learn from it, appreciate their own performance and come back again?
For young athletes especially, confidence is incredibly important. Sport can become a place where children develop competence, identity, self-worth and a belief that they can do difficult things.
But confidence isn’t created by pretending failure doesn’t exist.
It is created partly by discovering:
“I can lose—and I’m still okay.”
“I can make a mistake—and keep going.”
“I can be disappointed—and learn from it.”
“I can fail without failure defining me.”
The real goal isn’t avoiding failure
Perhaps the debate about participation medals has become too focused on the medal itself.
The more important question is how we respond to the outcome.
Why are we giving the award?
How are we giving it?
What does it represent?
And does it match the developmental stage of the child?
Most importantly, how are we helping young people develop a healthy relationship with failure?
Because whether you’re eight years old competing in a weekend soccer tournament or an Olympic athlete standing on the podium, the psychological challenge is remarkably similar.
First, release the emotion.
If you’re devastated, you’re allowed to be devastated.
Then, separate the result from the person.
You lost the match. You are not a loser.
Then, look at your personal performance.
What did you do well? What did you learn? What can you improve?
And finally, find perspective.
The medal may not represent the outcome you wanted.
But it still represents something.
Learning to recognise that—without pretending disappointment doesn’t exist—is one of the most important skills we can teach athletes, children and, perhaps, ourselves.
Because learning to win is important.
But learning how to lose might be even more important.
