Naomi Osaka and the Secret Power of the Underdog

Naomi Osaka doesn’t usually follow pretournament chatter before she hits the court, but last month was an exception. One evening she heard a former rival of hers, Caroline Wozniacki, analyzing the lineup for the Miami Open on TV and predicting who would advance.

Wozniacki’s picks assumed that Osaka would lose her next match.

The assessment was fair, given Osaka’s struggles lately. The 24-year-old’s extremely public unraveling since disclosing mental health challenges and withdrawing from the French Open last spring has been excruciating to watch. In the past year, Osaka fell from the top-ranked women’s tennis player in the world to 85th. She hadn’t made a final since early 2021. You don’t have to care about tennis to empathize with an extraordinarily talented person struggling to rally her way out of a world-class hole.

But, by Osaka’s own account, Wozniacki’s dismissal of her chances may have been just the jolt she needed. In her next match, on March 24, she soundly defeated her opponent, Angelique Kerber, qualifying for the semifinals.

After the match, Osaka attributed her success in part to Wozniacki’s slight: “I was kind of thinking about it in my head a lot during when I was playing just now,” she told reporters. “I don’t really say I had, like, a vendetta, but I was like, ‘Hm, I know I was kind of underachieving these last couple of months, but I still feel like I’m a pretty good player.’”

And she found that she was ready to prove it. So it turns out that Wozniacki gave Osaka a powerful gift: She underestimated her. Osaka’s breakthrough shows how being counted out can serve as rocket fuel for performance.

You’re probably familiar with the advice to think positively and visualize your success, while a fear of failure is generally seen as a negative mind-set. In its most extreme form, it’s known as atychiphobia. But sometimes playing with your back against the wall can be remarkably freeing. The only way out is up.

This isn’t to say that harsh criticism is a good way to spur someone to achieve. In Osaka’s case, her performance in Miami was a marked departure from just a couple weeks before, when she was brought to tears by a heckler in the standsat the Indian Wells tournament in California who screamed, “Naomi, you suck!” She lost in the second round. (She said afterward that the incident reminded her of racist treatment Serena and Venus Williams endured at the same tournament two decades earlier.)

But Wozniacki is a professional peer — a player Osaka has both beaten and been beaten by. And she delivered her assessment with bluntness, not cruelty. Critiques from our rivals land differently — and can serve as motivation. You know their standards and, more important, you know they’re probably right: Your performance isn’t where it belongs.

Researchers have documented the motivating effect of negative feedback from rivals for years. One study led by researchers at the University of Exeter in 2013 blindfolded subjects and had them throw darts at a target. If they struggled to aim and a researcher from their own school critiqued their performance, they faltered even more. But if a researcher from a rival school gave them negative feedback, the opposite happened: The rival’s comments triggered a comeback.

“Downward performance spirals can be readily observed in every domain of human performance,” one of the study’s authors said. “Our research shows that the ‘us versus them’ mind-set isn’t always a destructive force — sometimes it can be the key to re-motivating yourself and turning your performance around.”

Conversely, when you’re under a lot of pressure — as Osaka was when she was queen of the tennis world — winning can become more of a burden than a boost. Osaka, who dropped out of the French Open amid an outcry over her decision to decline press interviews, has been vocal about her struggles. At that point she had been managing anxiety and depression, as well as the specific challenges of becoming a global celebrity at age 20 (after beating Serena Williams in 2018) — all while keeping her athletic game the best in the world.

It’s an extraordinary challenge for anyone to bear those expectations, as Osaka described with frankness after losing a third-round match at the U.S. Open last fall: “When I win I don’t feel happy,” she said, blinking back tears. “I feel more like relief. And then when I lose, I feel very sad. I don’t think that’s normal.”

It’s hard to say what “normal” is when talking about world-class talent like Osaka’s. But for anyone facing relentless pressure to win, positive feedback can sometimes become more stifling than motivational: Instead of loving what you do, you start loving how well you do it. You start seeing losing as a crisis — and when your passion also becomes your job, as in professional sports, that isn’t exactly wrong. Then when you inevitably stumble, you break.

A reset of expectations can help. Realizing you’re no longer seen as the best, and in fact have become an underdog again, can release some of that pressure. It can revive the competitive spirit. Whether or not you win, it’s a path to reclaiming the best version of yourself.

Of course, being underestimated chronically or systemically, or for reasons that have nothing to do with your performance, can have the opposite effect and become simply deflating. Abusive leadership among coaches has been shown to negatively influence athletes’ performance, with consequences that can last the course of a career. And living in constant fear of failing can be limiting. (Fear shares a great deal in common with self-doubt.)

But few of us are feeling at the top of our game right now, as we try to pull ourselves out of the limbo of the pandemic. It’s been easy to lose momentum in our lives or careers, and as we look back with the rosy view of hindsight at prepandemic times, the rival we’re comparing ourselves with is the most formidable one of all: our former selves. When we inevitably encounter our own Caroline Wozniacki — a competitor, colleague or manager who is going to bet against us — what matters is how we respond.

Maybe, based on our performance, the critic has a point. But we don’t have to let that person be right. Once we see the disconnect between our potential and our performance, it’s up to us to channel the power of the underdog effect and fight back, to prove where we belong.

That’s what Osaka did at Miami. After her rally there, she catapulted ahead 42 slots in the global rankings, to 35th. She made her first final in a year. That’s where she lost, to 20-year-old Iga Swiatek.

Still, Osaka was back. And as she told reporters after the match, she has her sights set on reclaiming the top spot. “It feels kind of good to chase something,” she said. “That’s a feeling that I have been missing.”

Lindsay Crouse (@lindsaycrouse) is a writer and producer in Opinion who writes on gender, ambition and power. She produced the Emmy-nominated Opinion Video series “Equal Play,” which brought widespread reform to women’s sports.

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