International Day for Failure: how sport stars learn to embrace discomfort on way to success

Do you know what many of the most successful people in sport have based much of their success on?

Failure.

Roger Federer, Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, Serena Williams and many others have all espoused the value of failure, with Mr Jordan himself famed for the quote: "I've failed over and over again, and that is why I succeed."

Expanding on that missive in a TV commercial titled 'Failure', the most successful basketball player of all time stated: "I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed."

Jordan finished his career with six NBA championship titles, winning the NBA Finals Most Valuable Player award each time, a record that still stands.

So today, 13 October, International Day for Failure, Olympics.com learns from some of the best athletes of all time about why failure is an integral part of success, in sport and in life.

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Roger Federer, Serena Williams and Wayne Gretzky on embracing failure

In 2024, 20-time Grand Slam winner Roger Federer went viral, this time not for his former on-court prowess, but for remarks made off the court. In a commencement address for graduating students at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, he stated:

"In tennis, perfection is impossible... In the 1,526 singles matches I played in my career, I won almost 80 per cent of those matches... (but) what percentage of the points do you think I won in those matches? Only 54 per cent. In other words, even top-ranked tennis players win barely more than half of the points they play.

"The truth is, whatever game you play in life, sometimes, you’re going to lose a point, a match, a season, a job... It’s a rollercoaster with many ups and downs, and it’s natural when you’re down to doubt yourself and to feel sorry for yourself... But negative energy is wasted energy. You want to become a master at overcoming hard moments."

Another multiple Grand Slam champion, with 23 singles titles, Serena Williams, concurs:

"I really think a champion is defined not by their wins but by how they can recover when they fall."

"I don't like to lose—at anything—yet I've grown most not from victories, but setbacks."

Wayne Gretzky, a four-time Stanley Cup winner and considered one of the greatest ice hockey players of all time, put it more succinctly: "You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take."

Some of his fellow winter sports athletes will be taking their shot at success at the upcoming Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026, which start on 6 February, riding the highs and lows that the pinnacle event of their sports inevitably entails, with one of the biggest names of them all aiming to learn from a tricky showing at Beijing 2022.

Mikaela Shiffrin: 'You can fail but not be a failure'

Mikaela Shiffrin had always dreamt of competing in all alpine skiing disciplines at an Olympic Winter Games, and managed to achieve that feat at Beijing 2022. However, the results were very much not what the then 73-time World Cup winner and two-time Olympian was anticipating.

Three 'Did Not Finishes' in five individual races, plus a ninth in super-G and 18th in downhill, were not what Shiffrin had envisaged before the Games.

"Day after day, I just kept making the decision that I wanted to keep trying," the three-time Olympic medallist told Olympics.com months later. "It feels like I had a huge potential to contribute to Team USA and really failed on that account, again and again and again. But that's okay, well, it's not okay, but you can fail and not be a failure."

Indeed, Shiffrin has gone on to become the most successful skier in World Cup history, reaching 100 victories in February 2025, while also adding to her world medal tally, which now sits at 15 medals, including eight golds.

Fellow alpine skier, Lucas Pinheiro Braathen, also spoke to Olympics.com about the importance of failure when discussing his absence of major medals at a 2025-26 pre-season event.

Pointing to the 2023 world championships in which the Norwegian-born, Brazil-representing athlete erred in the final stages of the slalom to "hand" the medal to former team-mate Henrik Kristoffersen, plus missing out on the slalom Crystal Globe the previous season, Braathen revealed: “In the heat of the moment, it feels like tragedy. But with time, you start seeing all the lessons learned.

“I would never sit here as the person I am if it wasn’t for those experiences,” he says now, crediting learning from those failures as the platform for the best skiing of his career, such as winning the 2023 slalom World Cup title in Andorra.

Meanwhile, Paris 2024 Olympic judo champion Alice Bellandi embraces failure, as painful as it can be.

The reigning Olympic and world champion in the -78kg category told Olympics.com a year after winning gold: “I’m a big fan of defeats.

“You have to swallow the bitterness. That’s what builds you. When you lose, you need to look yourself in the mirror and say, ‘OK, what was the mistake? Where can I improve?

“I think my bad times made me who I am now. They form you, they teach you, they give you character.”

So then, the specific use of 'for' in today's International Day for Failure, not of, is key. The emphasis being on the concept of failure itself, as a learning opportunity, not a permanent state of being, something the best athletes in the world have learned, and they've done it by failing over and over again.

And that is why they succeed.

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