WRITER Michelle Hauschild

Elite athletes may not just be stronger, faster, or more skilled than the average person: they may also simply see better.

In high-performance sport, where milliseconds or millimetres determine outcomes, vision is emerging as a critical factor. Work with elite athletes across the world – including Australia and New Zealand – has revealed that many players possess visual acuity well beyond what is considered ‘normal’ in clinical practice.

It turns out you may not need a suite of high-tech equipment to find out who on the sports team sees best. Just ask the players.

“You can ask the other players who has the best vision, who’s the best at picking up the ball when they’re batting,” Sydney ophthalmologist and cricket enthusiast Dr Daya Sharma told mivision.

“What they tell you predicts what you would expect in terms of uncorrected vision, and also… the best seeing players have very low higher order aberrations. They will be the players with ‘supernormal’ vision.”

Dr Sharma started working on a project with Cricket Australia and Cricket New South Wales in 2024 – part of a multi-disciplinary team investigating the prevalence of UV damage in the eyes of cricketers. The team expected – and found – a high incidence of UV-associated eye disease.

The team also discovered that most players had good vision. No surprises there. With a small ball travelling at high speed, good vision seems a basic requirement.

But there were two other subsets of players. There were some players with exceptional vision, beyond what would normally be measured in clinic: supernormal vision, if you will.

More surprisingly, there was also a group of players who had somehow reached the pinnacle of their chosen sport with visual deficits.

MEASURING UP “When we did the next round [of visual examinations] last year, 2025, we were particularly interested in looking at more detail regarding visual performance,” Dr Sharma told mivision.

“And that’s why we had a whole bunch of different diagnostic devices, including topography, tomography, wavefront aberrometry, biometry using the

Anterion (which gives axial length plus detailed anterior segment parameters based on OCT), and the iTrace, which gives detail on optical quality.

“So, we really focused on expanding those measurements for optical quality and visual performance. It was more geared at understanding, okay, so how can we correlate performance and cricket with optical parameters, with visual parameters?

“A significant percentage of the players have what we call supernormal vision, so better than 6/6,” Dr Sharma said.

The concept of exceptional vision in elite athletes is not new. Professor Daniel Laby, a United States ophthalmologist (https:// sportsvision.nyc) and a former Assistant Professor at the Harvard Medical School, has spent more than three decades working with the vision needs of professional athletes.

He serves as a sports ophthalmologist for Major League Baseball teams and English Premier League clubs. He has also worked with players and teams from the US National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League, the National Football League, and the US Olympic team. He has literally written the book on sports vision (Eye of the Champion: Unlocking the Power of Sports Vision for Peak Performance: The Science and Strategies Behind the Visual Advantages of Elite Athletes).1

“If you think about sports, there isn’t any sport that an athlete plays with their eyes closed,” Professor Laby told mivision, “and so there must be some role of vision.

“The question is how to quantify what that role is and how to then use that as a metric for success potentially, and a way of intervention with training to improve it, to hopefully see better performance in the sport. And, so, I think vision plays a key role.”

But, he said, visual needs differ, depending on the sport.

“There’s no question that when you get to the elite level, visual function is better. We published in 1996, The American Journal of Ophthalmology.2 We showed the visual acuity of the average professional baseball player was 20/12 or 20/12.5. So not 20/20, not 20/15, but halfway between 20/15 and 20/10 – far better than average people on the street.

“Another paper I published had to do with our work with the Olympic team in Beijing, the softball team and the archers had excellent visual acuity, much better than the boxers, much better than the speed skaters, who only had average 20/20.3

“But if we looked, for example, at depth perception, the archers had very poor depth perception, whereas the boxers had pretty good depth perception – because they have to be able to tell how far the fist is, that’s coming towards them.

“For the archer, the target’s flat and is very far away, and there’s no stereopsis needed there. And, so, I think about each sport as having a visual profile… the visual profile of an elite athlete in a certain sport would probably be better than average… it really depends on what sport we’re talking about and what the needs are.”

Dr Sharma agreed, saying in cricket, specialist batters generally have exceptional vision. He references one cricketer who measured at 6/2.4. For context, if someone with 6/6 vision is at the batting crease, 18 m away from the bowler delivering the ball, a player with 6/2.4 could be another 27 m further away, yet still make out the same detail.

“She was identified [by her teammates] as the player who could see the ball the best… it’s really fascinating because she’s reading a line that other people near her can’t read, and even people who are halfway to the chart still can’t read. When you mention 6/2.4 it’s just a number, it’s like, ‘Oh, that sounds good’. But when you actually see it, even as an ophthalmologist, it’s hard to get your head around how good that vision is because we normally don’t think in those terms.”

However, specialist bowlers, even though they still must field and bat, “don’t necessarily have as good vision as you would expect, and that’s because they’re selected based on being able to bowl exceptionally well”.

THE LIMITS OF STANDARD TESTING

Despite the number of athletes with supernormal vision, most clinical assessments are not designed to measure performance vision.

Traditional visual acuity testing is static, high contrast, and performed without time pressure. In contrast, elite sport demands rapid processing under dynamic, unpredictable conditions. A cricketer facing a fast bowler may have only a few hundred milliseconds to judge the ball’s trajectory and commit to a shot. At that pace, even blinking

Professor Daniel Laby.

Dr Daya Sharma at the Cricket Australia / Cricket NSW vision testing day in 2025.

Vision testing with Cricket Australia/ Cricket NSW.

becomes significant. The decision window is so short that a blink at the wrong moment can mean missing key visual information entirely.

Dr Sharma said subtle visual issues that would go unnoticed in the clinic can become critical in this context. For example, instability in a contact lens or minor optical aberrations may not affect a patient’s ability to read a chart, but can interfere with tracking a fast-moving object.

As his work with Cricket Australia/Cricket NSW continues, Dr Sharma said he’s planning to increase the focus on visual performance “expanding on those more detailed tests that are relevant for picking up the trajectory of the ball really early”.

“Some of the equipment isn’t available in Australia, so we have to look at developing some tests ourselves. So that’s what I’m currently working on… I want to work on tests that are more directly applicable to the visual tasks of players, meaning simulating cricket-related visual tasks a bit better.”

Prof Laby conducting vision training with an athlete.

Julia Gluyas, goalkeeper for the NZ women's national hockey team, the Black Sticks, training her vision with Dr Robert Ng.

OPTIMISING VISION FOR PERFORMANCE

And what of players found to have less than ideal vision?

Some can be helped by relatively straightforward changes. Adjusting contact lens design or addressing binocular vision issues can improve visual stability and clarity. For others, refractive surgery may be considered.

Careful patient selection is critical. While laser vision correction can provide excellent unaided vision, it must be balanced against the risks and the athlete’s competition schedule. Even short recovery periods can be difficult to accommodate in elite sport.

As an example, Dr Sharma said one of the players from the last screening wore contact lenses for significant astigmatism, worse in one eye.

“He described for batting, he found it really difficult because the contact lens just was not stable enough. When he was waiting for the bowler to come in, sometimes the vision would intermittently blur and that does affect confidence and the ability to see the ball.”

After undergoing laser treatment, Dr Sharma said the player reported it taking a while for his brain to adapt to the vision being different. Since then, however, “his season has been great in terms of batting, and his bowling has been really good as well”.

“I can’t claim that his bowling has improved because of what I’ve done, but I suspect that the laser has improved his batting. This is the kind of thing that’s hard to prove though.”

While a player’s vision may objectively improve, performance outcomes such as batting or bowling averages are influenced by many variables and are difficult to isolate.

“It’s hard to translate those things into measurable quantities… it’s very complex,” Dr Sharma explained.

“We can’t make claims to say, ‘do laser and then the player’s going to perform better’. I don’t think that’s a reasonable statement. But in this case, I’m fairly convinced it is related.

“One of the things he really noticed early on, was that it was easier to see the ball in the early part of the flight [when fielding, during high catches].

“That for me is super interesting because there’s been a couple of injuries where it looks like the player has reacted late and then they make a sudden dive [to catch the ball]. My thinking is, if they can pick up the trajectory of the ball early as an outfielder, they’re going to run quickly to where they think the ball is going to land. And so ideally, when the player gets the ball, they should have both feet planted on the ground and then they’ve got a stable base. Whereas if they don’t pick up the ball early, they’re not getting to the spot quick enough, and have to make a late dive – that’s when they’re more likely to get injured.”

IMPLICATIONS FOR THE EVERYDAY ATHLETE… AND BEYOND

While these insights are being driven by work with elite athletes, they raise broader questions about how vision is assessed in everyday practice, and how these learnings can be applied to community sports people – the so-called ‘weekend warriors’.

While New Zealand optometrist Dr Robert Ng has worked with elite athletes – including the Blues Super Rugby team and Auckland Cricket as well as individual athletes from the NZ national hockey team – he has a general optometry practice and believes the principles applied to elite athletes have relevance in the everyday.

“So, starting with vision screening – probably your normal everyday eye exam that every optometrist does. You check the vision in each eye, you look at the near vision as well – some sports have a near close up component. You check binocular vision, [making sure the patient’s] eyes are straight, working together. Colour vision is another area you want to look at as well, because of the contrast of ball colours against the grass or background.

“A first line is probably making sure they can see optimally, remembering 6/6 may not be the best potential… maybe working harder to get more than 6/6… most of the papers have said athletes do have better than the normal 6/6, 20/20 vision,” he said.

He said while elite athletes may be looking at a vision correction providing slight tweaks to their performance, the differences can be significant for everyday athletes.

“I guess in the higher levels, that 1% [improvement] might be quite significant for an elite athlete. I guess the weekend warrior, there might be a bigger increase in performance [from vision optimisation],” Dr Ng said.

Dr Sharma said another learning to take from work with elite athletes is not to assume the goal of 6/6 vision.

“In baseball and in cricket, if we study those people, that subset of population who have exceptional vision and are very good at visually demanding tasks, I think it gives us a better insight into, as refractive surgeons, how we should optimise vision for the typical patient.

“I’ll give you an example. I saw a patient who had cataract surgery in one eye, and he said his distance vision wasn’t as good as what he remembered. And he was 6/4 or something like that.

“I remember thinking, ‘His unaided vision is excellent. What is he talking about?’ And then I refracted him, and he could refract to 6/3.

“So, the point is, there are some people out there who have exceptional vision, and if we stop measuring at 6/6 or 6/5, we don’t know what their true visual potential is.

“Sometimes, people might come in with a visual complaint, and they’re complaining because it literally is not as good as what they’re used to, but what they’re used to is so much better than what everyone else experiences.”

References available at mivision.com.au.