For some athletes, the postponement in March of the 2020 Olympics and Paralympics had a silver lining. It gave them unexpected time to reflect on their career goals, improve training and prioritize their mental health.
That was the case for skateboarder Jordyn Barratt. She was confirmed to compete on the inaugural skateboarding team in Tokyo. “I would not have been able to work on things unless the Olympics got postponed,” said Barratt, 21. “From a mental standpoint, there’s stuff that I needed to sit back and think about and write about. I needed to learn and grow more, and that wouldn’t have happened unless I had this time to slow down and stop and reflect on things.”
Barratt is part of Team Toyota’s ambassador squad of U.S. Olympic and Paralympic women athletes, and she thinks the extra year leading up to the Games has allowed her to form relationships and learn from teammates.
Barratt, gymnast Laurie Hernandez, swimmer Simone Manuel, multisport Paralympian Oksana Masters and BMX racer Alise Willoughby of Team Toyota talked with espnW about how this pandemic and postponement have shed light on support systems, mental health and hope.
… Sleep is deemed essential for recovery and performance in elite sport, yet athletes often deprioritise it in comparison to other factors which may impact recovery. Poor sleep can lead to decrements in team-sports performance, which may be further impacted by fixture congestion and travel (see HERE).
Unlike other team-based sports, research into sleep behaviour and the effects on elite performance within cricket in sparse, especially in countries outside of Australia. Therefore, this study aimed to analyse sleep behaviour amongst South African cricket players and its influence on match performance
Last month, when Austin FC announced David Tenney would be the Club’s new Director of High Performance, it prompted some fans to wonder what that is exactly, as well as how it might be directed. High performance might sound like an abstract aspiration, but it’s actually a collaborative effort rooted in science, combining new innovations in data tracking and analysis with fitness, medical and nutrition regimens to help athletes maintain and refine their bodies.
“It’s an interdisciplinary department of fitness, sports science, and medical staff,” he explained. “It’s all the different specializations we have within those groups, brought together into a singular interdisciplinary team responsible for managing treatment, training, and the physical readiness of all the athletes.”
That’s the amount of time Appalachian State’s football coach felt he could get his team game-ready after extended time away.
When the Mountaineers play Arkansas State on Thursday, 26 days will have passed since their last football game. A COVID-19 outbreak caused a stop for practices and the postponement of two games. App State is 2-1 and has stayed there for nearly a month as the season moved forward without them.
“That’s college football in 2020,” Clark said. “We’re not the only program doing this. And again, whoever handles this the best will have the most successful season.”
Gary Roberts helped the Vegas Golden Knights from the ground up — or the ceiling down, rather — before they joined the NHL in 2017-18.
“I stood on the top of the Vegas practice rink with no roof, placing equipment,” he said.
Now Roberts will help the NHL’s newest expansion team, the Seattle Kraken, who announced him as one of seven hires in hockey operations Wednesday.
The former NHL forward will remain based in the Toronto area, where he runs Gary Roberts High Performance Training in Aurora, Ontario.
He’ll continue to teach nutrition and fitness in the offseason to players from other NHL teams, including Edmonton Oilers center Connor McDavid and Tampa Bay Lightning center Steven Stamkos.
Marcelo Bielsa can be both a mystery and an open book. The manager whose secretive quest for knowledge led to ‘Spygate’ will often happily reveal his team 48 hours before kick-off. His teamsheet is no guarantee of a formation and not merely because his players’ formidable fitness levels can take them all over the pitch. Deciphering the shape sometimes only comes after kick-off.
Leeds both look to impose themselves on the opposition and alter system because of them. A key to understanding Bielsa is to recognise the exception to his policy of man-marking all over the pitch lies at the heart of defence, where he wants a spare man. So if Leeds face a team with one striker, they will have a back four, usually in a 4-1-4-1 formation. Encounter a side with two up front, and he will pull Luke Ayling infield or Kalvin Phillips deeper as a third centre-back, sometimes in a 3-3-3-1 shape that few others dare emulate.
The innovation does not end there. Bielsa’s conception of a wing-back involves more of the former than the latter.
Gaze tracking has the potential to help people living with motor neuron diseases and disorders exert control over their environment and communicate with others. But estimating a person’s gaze isn’t a trivial task owing to variables including head pose, head position, eye rotation, distance, illumination, background noise, and the presence of glasses, face coverings, and assistive medical equipment. Commercially available gaze trackers exist — they use specialized sensor assemblies — but they tend to be expensive, costing up to thousands of dollars. Inexpensive software-based trackers, on the other hand, are often prone to lighting interference.
This challenge inspired a team of researchers at Microsoft to develop an ultra-precise, hardware-agnostic gaze tracker that works with any off-the-shelf webcam. In a preprint paper published earlier this month, they detail their work on a system that achieves an error of 1.8073 centimeters on GazeCapture, an MIT corpus containing eye-tracking data from over 1,450 people, without calibration or fine-tuning.
Tokyo Institute of Technology (JP), Tokyo Tech News from
Computer vision-based technologies are advancing rapidly owing to recent developments in integrating deep learning. In particular, human motion capture is a highly active research area driving advances for example in robotics, computer generated animation and sports science.
Conventional motion capture systems in specially equipped studios typically rely on having several synchronized cameras attached to the ceiling and walls that capture movements by a person wearing a body suit fitted with numerous sensors. Such systems are often very expensive and limited in terms of the space and environment in which the wearer can move.
Now, a team of researchers led by Hideki Koike at Tokyo Tech present a new motion capture system that consists of a single ultra-wide fisheye camera mounted on the user’s chest. Their design not only overcomes the space constraints of existing systems but is also cost-effective.
Named MonoEye, the system can capture the user’s body motion as well as the user’s perspective, or ‘viewport’. “Our ultra-wide fisheye lens has a 280-degree field-of-view and it can capture the user’s limbs, face, and the surrounding environment,” the researchers say.
Nutrition plays an essential role in the athletes’ performance and health. However, the focus is often placed on some variables such as energy consumption or adequate intake of macronutrients (proteins, carbohydrates, and fats), leaving out the important role of other elements such as vitamins.
The origin of vitamin D
Vitamin D is one of the main vitamins and plays an important role for our immune and cardiovascular system as well as our muscles; its deficiency is associated with numerous pathologies such as cardiovascular, rheumatoid, muscle weakness or osteoporosis.1 Vitamin D can be synthesised through the contact of ultraviolet-B (UVB) rays from the sun with the skin. These UVB rays convert the precursor 7-dehydrocholesterol, which is present in the skin, into D3 (cholecalciferol). Cholecalciferol can also be obtained from food (salmon, sardines, milk and fortified cereals, or egg yolk), increasing its absorption with foods high in fat. It is then when this molecule is transported to the liver to become 25(OH)D, the storage form of vitamin D, being able to be activated in the renal tubules to 1.25(OH)2D thanks to the parathyroid hormone.
… There were numerous questions asked concerning the decision to use Deivi García as an opener in ALDS Game 2 against the Rays, with J.A. Happ following as a bulk reliever. Boone said that the decision was made after the AL Wild Card Series victory over the Indians, nodding to Happ’s significant OPS advantage over the last three years against left-handed hitters.
“We were trying to exploit that a little bit, knowing that laying in the weeds was Gerrit [Cole] for a potential Game 5,” Boone said. “It was trying to creatively use our pitchers to try and get them in the best situations, to give us a chance to be successful in a game when you know we’re up against [Tyler] Glasnow. It evolved over a two-day period … we talked to J.A. about it and told him our thinking and our thought process.”
A social-media lurker, Cashman blamed himself for putting Boone in the position of having to mix and match with a rotation that he described as “at risk.”
… One big problem the study uncovered is that 29 percent of kids say they are no longer interested in playing sports. These aren’t kids who sat on the couch all day: They are kids who used to play sports before the pandemic. That’s higher than the 18 percent who said they didn’t want to go back to sports at the beginning of the pandemic.
So the bad news is that kids are playing less, and some kids are thinking of staying on the sidelines.
… “It’s been a challenge,” Bulls general manager Marc Eversley said. “But every single team is going through the same thing.”
After the Bulls — who own the No. 4 pick — wrapped up their practice bubble earlier this month, focus within the franchise shifted toward the Nov. 18 NBA draft. Left out of the NBA’s return in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., the Bulls had plenty of time to focus on the draft since the league initially went on hiatus in March. The building blocks also came into play at the right time — their new front office has been in charge of basketball operations for about six months and their coach in place for a month.
There are already a handful of conflicting thoughts on this year’s draft class from evaluators — who do not consider it very strong, which is evident in the high variance among mock drafts.