Famous Ambidextrous People (And the Ones Who Weren't)

First, how rare is it really

True ambidexterity — equal, spontaneous skill with either hand at nearly everything — is very rare. When 1.77 million adults were asked, about 2% said they use both hands equally[6], and equal skill at everything is rarer than what people report about themselves.

For comparison, the largest meta-analysis of handedness ever assembled puts left-handedness at around 10.6%[1]. Mixed-handedness — writing with one hand, throwing with the other — is a different thing entirely, and far more common than the real article.

Which is worth keeping in mind as you read the lists that circulate online. If genuine ambidexterity were as common as those lists imply, it would not be interesting enough to list.

Leonardo da Vinci — the strongest case

Leonardo is the one name on the traditional list that survives scrutiny, and the evidence got better recently.

He was known to his contemporaries as mancino — Italian slang for a left-hander — and scholars still authenticate his drawings partly through the left-handed hatching in his sketches. That much was never in doubt.

The newer finding concerns a landscape drawing of the Arno valley he made in 1473, at the age of 21. In 2019, researchers at the Uffizi Gallery and the Opificio delle Pietre Dure examined it and found something odd: the inscription on the front runs right to left in Leonardo's famous mirror writing, while the inscription on the back runs conventionally left to right. Both were written in the same ink used for the drawing itself, and calligraphic analysis matched both to Leonardo's hand[2].

The conclusion the researchers drew: Leonardo was born left-handed but was taught to write with his right hand as a child, and retained both. The study supervisor noted that his right-handed writing was "both cultivated and well formed" — not the scrawl of an untrained hand.

Two honest caveats. This rests on a single drawing, and the researchers themselves hedge with "presumably". And "could write with both hands" is a narrower claim than "was ambidextrous". But as historical evidence goes, this is about as good as it gets.

Sport, where it is actually documented

Athletes are the best-evidenced cases, for the simple reason that their performance is recorded in detail.

Santi Cazorla is probably the most genuinely two-footed footballer of the modern era, and the people who watched him every day back up the reputation. He took free kicks with both feet, and once took a corner with his right before switching to his left mid-run-up for a better delivery. Arsène Wenger admitted he could not tell which foot the man favoured.

What makes Cazorla valuable here is that he has explained exactly how it happened, and it was not a gift. "I have always preferred the right foot, ever since I was younger," he told Arsenal's own site — then he injured his right ankle, started leaning on his left, and stayed half an hour after training kicking a ball against a wall with his weaker foot, for years[3].

Rafael Nadal is the most interesting case on this page, and the most misunderstood. He is naturally right-handed and plays tennis left-handed. He writes with his right hand, plays basketball, golf and darts right-handed, and kicks a football with his left[4].

In his own words: "Because I write with my right hand, and when I play basketball or golf — or darts — I play right-handed too. But in football I play with my left."

That is not global ambidexterity. That is cross-dominance plus about twenty years of deliberate practice on one specific skill, which is precisely what trained ambidexterity looks like in the real world.

Baseball's switch-hitters are the clearest category of all — Mickey Mantle, Pete Rose and hundreds of others who bat from either side at professional level. Nobody is born able to do this. It is drilled from childhood because the tactical advantage is worth the work.

If you want the full picture of how this plays out on a football pitch, I have written separately about being ambidextrous in soccer, and the names that hold up are in two-footed footballers.

The names that do not hold up

Now the part that most lists leave out.

Albert Einstein was right-handed. There is no mystery here and no real debate — photographs show him writing on blackboards with his right hand throughout his life. The claim that he was left-handed or ambidextrous appears to be a straightforward urban legend, born of the appeal of linking genius to something unusual, and propped up by the left-brain/right-brain creativity myth.

Benjamin Franklin was, according to the best scholarship, also right-handed. This one is more interesting, because you can watch the myth form.

Franklin wrote a short satirical essay around 1779 called A Petition of the Left Hand, addressed "to those who have the superintendency of education". In it, the left hand complains — in the first person — that she was left to grow up untutored while her sister received masters for writing, drawing and music, and was "rebuked or beaten" for clumsiness when she reached for a pen.

It is a lovely piece of writing. It is also satire about educational inequality, thematically closer to Franklin's arguments for educating girls than to any statement about his own hands. He signed it "The Left Hand" — and somewhere along the line, a literary persona got mistaken for an autobiographical disclosure.

The Franklin scholar J. A. Leo Lemay addressed the claim directly and rejected it: Franklin was right-handed[5]. The circularity in the sources is easy to trace — advocacy sites cite the essay as proof of itself, listicles cite the advocacy sites, and everybody cites everybody.

Michelangelo, Nikola Tesla and a rotating cast of others show up on these lists with evidence ranging from thin to nonexistent. I have left them out rather than pass the claims along.

What the real cases have in common

Line up the people whose ambidexterity is actually documented and a pattern appears immediately.

Almost none of them were born that way.

Leonardo was left-handed and taught to use his right. Cazorla favoured his right foot and rebuilt his left after an injury, one wall-kick at a time. Nadal is right-handed; when his uncle made him drop the two-handed forehand, the left is what came naturally, and he built on it for two decades. Switch-hitters are manufactured, deliberately, by coaches.

The exceptions are so rare they barely form a category. What we call ambidexterity in famous people is, nearly every time, a trained skill that got started early and then got an enormous number of repetitions.

Which is either discouraging or encouraging, depending on how you read it. My reading: the mechanism is not genetic luck. It is practice, applied to one side of the body that everybody else ignores. The early start helps enormously — but it is a head start, not a gate.

Curious where you sit? The ambidextrous test takes two minutes and will tell you whether you are anywhere near that 2%. Most people are surprised by the result in one direction or the other.

If this was useful, share it with someone who loves lists of famous ambidextrous people: at least this one has sources.

Trained, not born

If the famous cases are almost all trained, the obvious question is what the training actually looks like.

That is the question I set out to answer for myself, and it took considerably longer than I expected. The short version is in my guide on how to become ambidextrous.

The long version is my book, "How to Become Ambidextrous": a proper starting assessment, dozens of graded exercises for writing, drawing and coordination, and a day-by-day programme built for adults starting from zero — which is to say, for people who missed the childhood head start that Nadal and Cazorla got, and want to do it anyway.

Nobody on the list above was born finished. Neither were you.

Find it on Amazon and start your own training!