… It’s been said a lot but it can’t really be stressed enough but the U.S. women’s performance at these worlds has been nothing short of remarkable, especially given the institutional disaster that has been unfolding around them. The gymnasts have been remarkable composed amid all of the chaos, hitting complex routines while the adults around them fumble on far easier tasks, like not going through a potential CEO’s social media feed before announcing the hire. An advanced search on Twitter is not more difficult than doing a full twisting somersault on the beam. The gymnasts get the job done while the administration makes excuses.
… The two will race Sunday in New York City with lifelong goals in their pockets, having lifted U.S. women’s distance running to a place that was hard to envision during four decades of frustration. It raises the question of how Flanagan and Linden will follow their own acts.
What do you give the women who have everything? Chiefly, continuing to run is a gift to themselves. There’s an obvious lure to lining up as reigning champions of prestigious marathons. Their stature and marketing value are forever changed.
Yet both have seriously considered retiring, or at least ratcheting back, over the last year. The weeks of hard training and self-denial leading up to a major race are the same as they ever were, and each has had to find tangible motivation to slog through them. As it turns out, the sideways rain and frigid gales of Boston are what propelled them to this weekend’s start line, for very different reasons.
… In 1978, all the prerace talk was about Christa Vahlensieck of Germany, who came in as the world record holder, with 2:34:48 to win the Berlin Marathon in 1977. Some thought Marty Cooksey from California might figure, after her surprise win in the first Avon Marathon in Atlanta seven months earlier, though her 2:46:16 would leave her almost two miles behind Vahlensieck at her best. No other challenge looked possible. Defending champion and two-time winner Miki Gorman was 43 years old, and slowing.
So even the most expert among the media were bewildered when reports trickled through that a tall woman with pigtails, with an unlisted bib number, was building a huge lead. She wore a plain white top and red shorts, and she had run with Vahlensieck to 13.1 miles—looking as if she found the pace easy—then went past into the lead.
A’ja Wilson accomplished a lot in only one year, taking home Rookie of the Year, making the All-Star Game and earning a gold medal. But if you ask the young star about her trajectory, she’ll tell you she’s just getting started.
Plenty of athletes have the power to transform their sports. LeBron James changes the balance of power in the NBA every time he moves teams. Serena Williams has forced tennis to confront issues of racism and sexism. Neymar’s contract demands may soon affect global GDP rankings.
We should now include a 4ft 8in 21-year-old on that list. Through a perfect storm of circumstances – a strong claim to be the greatest ever in her sport and a series of misadventures in her national federation – she wields incomparable influence. She’s Simone Biles, and she is changing gymnastics in innumerable ways.
When the American competes at the World Gymnastics Championships in Doha this week, few of her competitors will have any hope of challenging her. On the mat and various apparatuses, she is beyond comparison. She literally rewrote gymnastics’ history at the age of 16, when she added a new, fiendishly difficult leaping tumble to the sport’s code of points; in the same year she won the first of her three successive World Championship all-round titles. She was one of the stars – in any sport – of the 2016 Rio Olympics, winning four gold medals. She took a break in 2017, but has returned to competition this year and is as dominant as ever.
The Journey is an original U.S. Soccer series that follows U.S. Women’s National Team players on and off the field as they work toward earning a spot at the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup in France. In this episode of The Journey, Sponsored by Motrin, we meet up with Crystal Dunn in North Carolina, the state where her soccer career began, and where she now plays her club soccer with the NC Courage. We also speak with one of her mentors, the legendary Anson Dorrance, who has known Crystal for almost a decade.
British Cycling has announced that its pool of female coaches is growing at a “hugely encouraging” rate, after the release of this year’s UK Coaching Awards shortlist.
Monica Eden, Patricia Quirke and Sarah Toone have all been shortlisted for UK Coaching awards. Eden is nominated for Talent Development Coach of the Year while Quirke is up for Coach Developer of the Year, and Toone hopes to bring home Community Coach of the Year.
23% of all British Cycling qualified coaches are women, in comparison to a national average of 17% in traditional sports coaching.
This study investigated the seasonal change in physical performance of 113 (Under 10: U10 [n = 20], U12 [n = 30], U14 [n = 31], and U16 [n = 32]) elite youth female soccer players. Players completed testing pre-, mid-, and post-season, including speed (10- and 30-m sprint), change of direction (CoD; 505 test), power (countermovement jump [CMJ]), strength (isometric midthigh pull), and aerobic capacity (Yo-Yo intermittent recovery test level 1 [YYIRL1]). A general linear model was used to evaluate the change in physical characteristics and the influence of covariates (baseline performance; change in maturity status) on each characteristic across the season. U10’s speed and CoD performance decreased from pre-post season, whereas relative strength likely improved. U12’s relative strength very likely improved; however, 10-m sprint performance decreased. Relative strength likely decreased, whereas 30-m sprint and CoD time very likely improved in U14’s. U16’s likely improved relative strength, CMJ, and 10-m sprint, and very likely improved 30-m sprint and CoD from pre-post season. U12-U16’s improved YYIRL1 performance pre-post season. Strength and conditioning coaches working with U10-U12 players should look to develop speed, lower-body power, and CoD ability as part of structured strength and conditioning sessions as well as within warm-ups before pitch-based sessions. With U14-U16 players’ manipulation of small-sided games combined with short-duration high-intensity running drills may provide an efficient training stimulus to develop the aerobic system while concurrently developing technical/tactical skills. Findings of this study provide a basis for the implementation of strategies to enhance the long-term athletic development of youth female soccer players.
For Jamie Tout, the memory of the New Zealand women’s rugby team’s journey to Ireland for the 2017 Women’s Rugby World Cup is still vivid. There is more than 11,600 miles between Wellington and Dublin and there was talk beforehand of whether or not the team – better known as The Black Ferns – would fly in business class or premium economy.
It was not, however, a long discussion for Head Coach Glenn Moore, Tout, and the rest of the Black Ferns’ performance staff. “We forfeited business class pretty early on in our preparation,” Tout tells the Leaders Performance Institute. “We preferred to go to Ireland four days earlier and use that time to settle and adapt, to go out there and play well rather than get the extra legroom or the extra glass of champagne.” It was part of a revamped programme that saw the Black Ferns win the World Cup for a record fifth time.
“We’ve always thought about how we can do things better with the resources we’ve got,” continues Tout.
The athletic training staff of the U.S. Women’s National Team does everything it can to make sure players have everything they need to stay healthy and at the top of their game.
That includes being proactive and focusing on identifying dysfunctional movements that may predispose elite athletes to future injury.
Sheri Walters, who has worked with the U.S. Women’s National Team program as an athletic trainer and physical therapist since 2016, explained that it’s part of a long-term process to help players reach their maximum potential through training, strength and conditioning, and more.
“We started doing quite a bit of testing, and we did it even before the Olympics,” Walters said. “We look at posture and movement patterns that can contribute to overuse injuries, or acute injuries like hamstring and groin strains, high-ankle sprains and knee injuries.
“When we’re doing testing, we’re looking for mobility and stability issues specific to hockey. We would put them on a corrective exercise program to give them more available range of motion, not only for injury prevention, but to create the stability they need to take a massive slap shot.”
Get prepared to see more New Balance jerseys in USATF Championship women’s sprint finals over the next few Olympic cycles. The Boston-based athletic shoe and apparel company signed two collegiate record holders, Sydney McLaughlin and Gabby Thomas, to multi-year contracts in a surprise move over the past two weeks.
Biotricity Inc. (OTCQB: BTCY), a medical diagnostic and consumer healthcare technology company, today announced that it will be expanding the scope of a previously approved clinical investigation of fetal heart rate variability (fHRV) to include maternal HRV and other key physiologic metrics for maximum predictive accuracy and efficiency. This extension aligns well with the Company’s ongoing research into clinical HRV and continues to leverage its strategic relationships to conduct innovative collaborative research without losing intellectual property (IP) or incurring additional costs.
Biotricity’s concept solution aims to overcome the limitations inherent in current maternal/fetal monitoring solutions.
According to Burtch Works (via DSSe), 85% of Data Scientists and 74% of Predictive Analysts are male. Considering the fields that make up those professions, the disconnect becomes even more apparent: only 18% of computer science bachelor’s degrees in 2016 were awarded to women, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Statistics does better, at almost 43% female, and economics (via the National Science Foundation) falls somewhere around 31%, but consider that overall, women earn 57% of all bachelor’s degrees awarded. Given the stark numbers in education, it’s not surprising that women are underrepresented among the Data Science and Predictive Analytics professions. Of course, that lack of representation means that the questions we ask, the variables we use in models, and even our interpretations of those models are all skewed by selection bias within our profession.
Optimal health is required to attain full athletic potential. Low energy availability (LEA) can compromise health and therefore impair athletic performance as described in the RED-S clinical model.
Dietary energy intake needs to be sufficient to cover the energy demands of both exercise training and fundamental physiological function required to maintain health. Once the energy demands for training have been covered, the energy left for baseline “housekeeping” physiological function is referred to as energy availability (EA). EA is expressed as relative to fat free mass (FFM). The exact value of EA to maintain health will vary between genders and individuals, roughly equivalent to resting metabolic rate of the individual. LEA for an athlete or dancer will result in the body going into “energy saving mode” which has knock on effects for many interrelated body systems, including readjustment to lower the resting metabolic rate in the longer term. So although loss in body weight may be an initial sign, body weight can be steady in chronic LEA due to physiological energy conservation adaptations. Homeostasis through internal biological feedback loops in action.
The WNBA continues to lead all professional sports leagues in hiring women and minorities for coaching and front-office positions.
The league earned an overall A-plus grade as well as A-pluses for racial and gender diversity in its hiring practices, according to a report card issued Thursday by The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports (TIDES).
It scored 97.6 points in the TIDES rating system — the highest score recorded since the organization began producing report cards in 1988.
… Layshia Clarendon, a guard for the Connecticut Sun, moved to the area last offseason to live with her now-wife’s family. The two couldn’t afford their own house yet. Not with Clarendon’s WNBA salary.
She wouldn’t disclose what she was making, saying only that it was not a maximum contract ($115,500, plus bonuses, in the WNBA). One report said the six-year WNBA veteran made $91,700 last year. That is far more than she made in her earlier years in the league, when she had to sustain herself on a total of $40,000 to $50,000 a year.
It takes some degree of financial freedom to be a professional athlete. More than just being above the poverty line, you need to be able to eat, train, travel, work long hours.
Saudi Arabia’s Football Federation (SAFF) has appointed two women to its board of directors for the first time in its history, and also named a new president.
I remember when I was in junior high school, I sat down and talked to my coach because I was thinking I might not want to play basketball in college. I was getting recruited by a lot of schools across the country and was up for scholarships, but I remember thinking and feeling that I just wanted to be “normal.” I didn’t want people to look at me like I was a guy because I was so passionate about a sport where you primarily only saw men at the highest level.
I didn’t have any strong female role models to show me female athletes were normal. I came from a generation where you didn’t see a lot of female athletes on TV because groups like the WNBA just didn’t exist yet. I had Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Michael Jordan, so I got to watch some great guys, but that still didn’t reflect what I could aspire to.
When Carolyn Virca embarked on her chemistry Ph.D., she noticed a clear gender rift right from the start. The men would grab beers before seminars or arrange other social activities that didn’t include her—the lone woman in the cohort. “They bonded in ways that I was not privy to,” she says.
Virca, who is now a postdoc at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, got through her initial feelings of social isolation by bonding with women who had started the program a year or two ahead of her. But the experience made her appreciate how students could get lost if they feel like outsiders during graduate school. So she wasn’t shocked by the results of a new study, which found an association between female Ph.D. students’ graduation rates and their cohorts’ gender ratios.
