Mozart is my "drug" — the strange training of the Italian cross-country skiers at the World Championships
Article by Giorgio Destefanis, special correspondent of La Stampa Sera, Tuesday 12 February 1991 (page 24, Sport section), from the cross-country skiing World Championships in Val di Fiemme. It tells how Italian skiers Albarello and Vanzetta prepare with Alfred Tomatis’s Electronic Ear. Translated from Italian; the original text appears in the Italian version and in the facsimile.
La Stampa Sera — Tuesday 12 February 1991, page 24 (Sport)
Mozart is my “drug”
The strange training of the Italian cross-country skiers at the World Championships. It is a precise treatment with a scientific basis, consisting of listening to musical sounds filtered through an electronic ear. Albarello and Vanzetta have been won over.
VAL DI FIEMME ● Mozart and Gregorian chant to go faster on skis. It is the latest idea in the endless search by athletes, coaches and assorted scientists for more elastic muscles and perfect coordination, the basic requirements of a great sporting performance. It comes from France, and it is not yet another version of autogenic training or the like, but a genuine treatment with precise scientific foundations. Several of the Italian skiers at Fiemme ‘91 are already convinced practitioners.
It goes without saying that muscular speed and coordination are a matter of brain, not just of fibres: hence the need to work on the nerve centres in charge of them. “The work has two parts: the first on the body, the other on the centres on which balance, coordination and energy recharge depend.”
The explanation comes from Adelaide Trovamala, 37, physiotherapist to the Italian men’s team at these World Championships, a collaborator of Dr Bertelè at the Centro dell’Ascolto in Milan. “The work on the body, the so-called ‘Mézières method’, consists of lengthening the muscle chains,” explains Adelaide Trovamala. “More intensive during training periods, gentler at competition time. Each muscle is not considered individually, but as a single functional whole made up of interdependent muscle chains. The aim is to lengthen the muscle chains while preventing compensation by other groups. The goal, besides lengthening, is also to rebalance the musculature in order to improve posture and muscle elasticity.”
So far, nothing very revolutionary, to be honest. But the best is yet to come, in the so-called second phase. “It is a discovery by the Frenchman, Professor Alfred Tomatis,” the physiotherapist of the Italian skiers explains. “It consists of listening to musical sounds filtered through an electronic ear designed, precisely, by Professor Tomatis himself.”
That explains Albarello and Vanzetta, lying on their beds, listening in religious concentration through DJ-style headphones to music played by sophisticated reproduction equipment. “Mozart and Gregorian chant are the most suitable music,” Adelaide Trovamala specifies. “The electronic ear selects the sounds, stimulating the ear in two parts, the vestibular and the cochlear. High-pitched sounds act on the vestibule, on which postural balance depends. One thus obtains finer, more precise control of motor action. There is also automatic regulation of muscle tone. Stimuli on the cochlear part allow continuous energy recharging of the central nervous system, hence greater concentration and better emotional control.”
To the layman, this is science fiction. Yet it seems obvious that a body in perfect physical and mental balance certainly works better than another, perhaps overtrained one, using those primitive methods that have often done more harm than good. The test in the field comes next time, when Albarello and Vanzetta will no longer find a mischievous change in temperature turning the wax on their skis into glue.
Giorgio Destefanis
Photo caption: “Vanzetta in action. Mozart, however, is not yet enough to win.”
Source: Giorgio Destefanis, “Lo strano training dei fondisti azzurri ai mondiali: Mozart è la mia ‘droga’”, La Stampa Sera, 12 February 1991, p. 24. © La Stampa. Translation from an image of the clipping; the last sentence, hard to read, should be checked against the facsimile.
Today: what science says
This 1991 article is a report: it describes the practice of a physiotherapist (Mézières method, then the Electronic Ear) with Italian cross-country skiers, without any measured result. Its own caption admits it: “Mozart is not yet enough to win”. Three ideas to sort out.
QUALIFIED — music does help athletes, but modestly. A meta-analysis of 139 studies finds small to moderate effects on physical performance (g = 0.31) and clearer ones on affective state (g = 0.48) (Terry et al., 2020, Psychological Bulletin). But this concerns music listened to during effort or in preparation, not filtered sound, and nothing singles out Mozart or Gregorian chant.
NOT CONFIRMED — the “Mozart effect”. A 2010 meta-analysis finds little evidence for a specific effect of Mozart on performance, with publication bias and results that are hard to replicate (Pietschnig, Voracek & Formann, 2010).
NOT DEMONSTRATED — the vestibular and cochlear mechanism. The idea that filtered high-pitched sounds regulate postural balance and that cochlear stimuli “recharge” the central nervous system belongs to Tomatis’s theory. We found no controlled trial of the Electronic Ear on athletes’ performance or on balance. The Mézières method, which the article cites as the first phase, was not part of our verification.