Who the most famous sports psychologists are

A specialist's fame and their usefulness to you personally are different things. The classics listed below either no longer practise or work with national teams and professional clubs. The value of the list is elsewhere: it shows where the methods came from that any practising sports psychologist uses today.

• Norman Triplett — in 1898 published the study considered the first in sports psychology: cyclists posted better times in the presence of a rival than riding alone.
• Coleman Griffith (1893–1966) — the "father of American sports psychology." In 1925 he headed the research laboratory at the University of Illinois (it ran until 1932), and wrote The Psychology of Coaching (1926) and Psychology and Athletics (1928). In 1937–1940 he worked with the Chicago Cubs baseball club — essentially the first example of a staff sports psychologist at a professional club.

• Pyotr Rudik (1893–1983) — the founder of sports psychology as a scientific discipline in the country. For over 60 years he worked at GTsOLIFK (today RSUPESY&T), headed the psychology department for around forty years, and authored more than 200 scholarly works and textbooks.
• Avksenty Puni (1898–1985) — the founder of Soviet sports psychology on its applied side. In 1947 he created the course "Psychology of Physical Education and Sport" at the Lesgaft Leningrad Institute of Physical Culture, led the psychology department for 30 years, and studied an athlete's psychological readiness for competition — a concept that still underpins pre-start preparation.
• Gennady Gorbunov — a successor of the Leningrad school, author of works on the practice of psychological preparation and the mental hygiene of sport.
• Yevgeny Ilyin — author of textbooks on sport psychology and differential psychophysiology that students of specialist universities learn from.

• Yuri Hanin — author of the Individual Zones of Optimal Functioning (IZOF) model, developed from the 1970s and later advanced at the Research Institute for Olympic Sports in Jyväskylä (Finland). The key idea: the optimal level of arousal is individual — some perform best with high anxiety, others with low.
• Robert Nideffer — the model of attentional styles and the TAIS test: he broke focus down into broad/narrow and external/internal.
• Terry Orlick — author of In Pursuit of Excellence, one of those who brought mental preparation into the practice of Olympic teams.
• Jim Loehr — work with tennis players and the concept of training "mental toughness," later carried over into the corporate world.
• Daniel Gould — co-author of the foundational textbook Foundations of Sport and Exercise Psychology, used to teach the profession worldwide.
• Ken Ravizza — applied work in baseball, co-author of Heads-Up Baseball: how to bring attention back to the present moment after a mistake.
• Steve Peters — a psychiatrist who worked with the British cycling team; author of The Chimp Paradox, a model explaining lapses of self-control under pressure.
• Bob Rotella — a practitioner in golf, author of books on working with confidence and pre-shot routines.

• The idea of individual zones of optimal functioning underlies how we show the "working zone" of nerves in the tests and the state journal: the norm is computed from your own successful starts, not from a sample average.
• The concept of psychological readiness for competition from Puni's work is in the pre-start checklists and preparation tools.
• Working with attention after a mistake is in the get-back-into-action techniques and the situation review.