How would you celebrate if, say, the Oilers—or Leafs, Canucks, Habs . . . you get the idea—started winning big games? Well, you might celebrate by getting lucky.
That’s the gist of a study published in the British Medical Journal. In 2009, the people of Catalonia, Spain, were overjoyed when a last-second goal scored by Andres Iniesta for Football Club Barcelona meant victory over Chelsea, moving the club in to UEFA Champions League final. Nine months later, newspapers were reporting a forty-five per cent increase in births. According to the study, it was actually more like sixteen per cent, but still: that’s a pretty impressive response for victory in a sport that doesn’t even have cross-checking.
It’d be interesting to see some kind of follow-up to this study that consists of more than tracking a few year’s of birth rates and comparing them to football victories, but it’s hard to imagine someone would organize such a study. It’d also be interesting to see if the opposite was true: do sports losses lead to less sex? In our minds, it’s worth noting that we haven’t seen a Stanley Cup victory in this country for twenty years, and we do have a falling birth rate . . .
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Photo courtesy of John Pozadzides.
