Sports Psychologist James Loehr Died at 83

James Loehr, who was among the first psychologists to bring counseling to sports, died on April 20 at his home in Golden, Colo. He was 83. The cause was idiopathic peripheral neuropathy, a disease of the nervous system, his family said.

Dr. Loehr worked with athletes in about every sport during his lifetime. However, his best-known triumph was with Dan Jansen, the U.S. speedskater who faltered at the 1988 and 1992 Olympics. Dr. Loehr instructed Jansen to keep a detailed daily journal so the skater could reframe the past and skate for himself; he used mental techniques to help Jansen approach the 1,000-meter race with a positive mindset. After slipping again in the 500-meter, Jansen ultimately won gold in the 1,000-meter at his final Olympics.

“It is one thing to possess the physical skills and yet another to be able to use them when it counts,” Dr. Loehr wrote in 1986. “In the final analysis, every athletic contest is a contest of control, control of the delicate mind-body connection.”

His breakthrough was in 1982, when professional tennis player Tom Gullikson contacted him after struggling on the court. In what he would later call the “16-second cure,” Dr. Loehr instructed Gullikson on a series of steps to take after every point, including thrusting his shoulders back, fixing his eyes on his racket strings and so on, which, according to Gullikson, “became a template for managing the time that is a critical factor in whether you will be successful on the next point.”

And when working with players at the academy of Nick Bollettieri, a celebrated tennis coach, Dr. Loehr instructed Seles and Courier on the “matador walk”—”a method of strutting confidently that he had devised while studying the habits of bullfighters in Spain,” as written in The New York Times.

James Edward Loehr was born on March 26, 1943, in Denver. He graduated from Regis University in 1964 with a degree in psychology, then went on to earn a master’s degree in education and a doctorate in counseling psychology from the University of Northern Colorado, in Greeley. Encouraged by his friend Joe Vigil, Dr. Loehr quit his psychologist position at a community health center, opening a sports psychology practice in Denver in 1978. That’s when he began focusing on this then-pioneering field.

Today, many professional athletes travel with their own “Dr. Loehr,” as well as nutritionists and even sleep consultants, seeing how psychology and other disciplines have gained wider application within sports field.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/06/sports/jim-loehr-dead.html