… “The thing is Rafa’s always been unbelievable at comebacks,” Federer said in an interview last month. “He’s one of the guys who’s done it the best and the most almost. Every time he came back, he was always in the mix again to win big tournaments and be really, really difficult to beat and be one of the favorites, even on his weaker surfaces. So I think maybe on this occasion, he’s going to lead the way for me, to show how it’s done.”
Nadal is also the one making clearer plans for when he does finally retire. He opened his own tennis academy on his home island of Majorca in October, and Federer took a break from rehabilitating in Switzerland to be present for the ribbon cutting.
It was a moving scene: the two longstanding rivals seated side by side in a new facility that might never have existed if they had not pushed each other to improve and endure.
… the great Tom Brady is on the practice field in back of Gillette Stadium, passing footballs to Julian Edelman under the watch of throwing coach Tom House.
Brady brought House to Foxborough for a mechanical evaluation and tuneup. House is observing Brady’s passing from different angles. Is his arm at 30 degrees or 35 when he throws? Is his aim consistent? Is his foot placement enabling maximum hip drive? Is he effectively balanced?
When the Washington Capitals signed Alex Ovechkin to a $124 million, 13-year contract eight years ago, the long-term commitment and first nine-digit deal in NHL history represented a significant risk.
Owner Ted Leonsis and former general manager George McPhee’s concerns were about possible injury. But now that Ovechkin is one point away from 1,000 for his career, he has eased their concerns.
… This means the world to Johnson, whose path to MLS includes four years in West Ham United’s academy, a tenure that led to a contract offer vetoed by FIFA over child-protection concerns, and a college career that never really got going until he transferred from Maryland to Louisville before his junior season. It all served to obscure, at least on these shores, the depth and intelligence in his game.
“It’s really gratifying for me, personally,” Johnson said after Sunday’s outing. “Just because it’s a combination of a lot of things that didn’t go my way, [things that] went my way, [and I] ended up being here and am able to showcase myself. …
“[I’ve come] sort of full circle. It’s extremely gratifying, because I never stopped working. I wanted the chance.”
When a new coach comes in to a football program, it is up to him if he wants to retain any current staff or build his own staff. Willie Taggart has opted for the latter, and Oregon strength and conditioning coach Jim Radcliffe is the latest victim.
Willie Taggart has hired Irele Oderinde as Oregon’s new strength coach, ending Radcliffe’s three decade tenure with the team that began in 1985 when he was hired as the assistant strength coach. That made him the Pac-12’s longest tenured strength and conditioning coach.
Radcliffe is expected to continue to work with the university as the strength coach for the track and baseball teams in the spring.
Frank Shorter is known for saying, “Hills are speed work in disguise.” His quote is true whether you’re going up the hill or down it. You just need to make sure you don’t avoid doing it. Hills are massively beneficial for athletes. Running them regularly not only provides technical skills so you can run up them better in races, but they also provide strength gains from fighting the grade and gravity. These strength gains evoke physical adaptations not seen anywhere else in training.
Mike Snyder was clearing brush behind his brother’s western Massachusetts house, erecting a fence to keep deer from the blueberries, when the tick bit him. A few days later, on a flight to Norway with his family, his palms itched and his head grew woozy. So the Stanford geneticist dumped a bunch of wearable sensors on his tray table and began doing what he does best: measuring himself.
Low blood oxygen, said the Masimo pulse oximeter housing his finger, and the globe-shaped Scanadu he held against his forehead every few minutes. Weird heart-rate, said the two Basis smart watches strapped to his wrists. Immediately he feared the worst: Lyme disease. Caught too late, Lyme hijacks the body’s immune system to seek and destroy joints, nerves, brain tissue, and—this really made him anxious—the heart. Once his temperature rose in Oslo, he sped to the doctor.
Snyder’s approach to his personal health may seem overzealous, but he’s doing it in the service of science. All of his collected metrics are just one part of a larger digital health study from his team at Stanford
A graphene health sensor that goes on the skin like a temporary tattoo takes measurements with the same precision as bulky medical equipment. The graphene tattoos, presented in December at the International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco, are the thinnest epidermal electronics ever made. They can measure electrical signals from the heart, muscles, and brain, as well as skin temperature and hydration.
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin who are developing the sensors hope to develop them for consumer cosmetic use. They also hope the ultrathin sensors will provide a more comfortable replacement for existing medical equipment.
Injections and pain-relieving pills on game day. Potential lasting damage. B/R Mag’s survey of 50 current players sheds light on pro football’s dirty secret: Toradol
… The three are spearheading Pacific Pro Football, which is set to begin play in the summer of 2018. This is a new professional league, yet it isn’t looking to compete with the NFL – a la the now-deceased USFL or XFL.
It is instead, a right-sized developmental option for young players. It has the potential to change the route to the NFL for many who neither want, nor find worth, in the current NCAA system. And it will give the NFL, which is often frustrated at the style of play and the secrecy of the college ranks, a place with a preferable set-up for training and identifying potential draft picks.
“The need is there from both the players and the NFL,” Yee told Yahoo Sports. “This is neither the NFL nor the NCAA. It’s a supplement to the other products and we are convinced there is a market for this.”
… For a sport that hasn’t had a significant change in singles format since the ITF adopted the tiebreaker in 1971, tennis’ governing bodies are under growing pressure to innovate matchplay and curb the trends in match lengths that have added an average of 44 hours to the length of singles play at Grand Slam matches in the past decade.
In the recent era, tennis has seen a major shift in the style of play. It has transitioned from the fast-paced serve-and-volley play of the 1980s and 1990s to baseline play, where rallies are longer and fewer points are played at the net. This change, combined with the growing depth of the tour, has led to increased match lengths.
The January transfer window is often a period of opportunism and seeking a short-term fix. The ability to bring players in can depend on a whole range of factors, including costs elsewhere in the squad, the seller’s appetite to sell, payment terms, and so on.
The market conditions play a role, too; it’s useful to know how demand for certain types of players change in this different environment. Data from the English leagues in recent seasons shows that demand for attacking players increases, while demand for defensive players fall. A striker is seen as more likely to provide a quick fix than a defender.
… While bullshit may reach its apogee in the political sphere, this isn’t a course on political bullshit. Instead, we will focus on bullshit that comes clad in the trappings of scholarly discourse and buttressed with vast assemblages of data. Of course an advertisement is trying to sell you something, but, but do you know whether the TED talk you watched last night is also bullshit — and if so, can you explain why? Can you see the problem with the latest New York Times or Washington Post article fawning over some startup’s “breakthrough” in big data analytics? Can you tell whether a clinical trial reported in the New England Journal or JAMA is solid science, or just a press release for some pharma outfit?
In this course we aim to teach you how to think critically about the data and models that constitute evidence in the social and natural sciences.
… A couple years ago, FiveThirtyEight published a great data-driven feature explaining how Madden NFL’s player ratings are made, and how essentially one person is behind the whole system. Perhaps most useful for Madden NFL players, they provided a chart showing the most important traits for each position in the game. A lot has changed in the past couple years, though, and for the longest time I’ve wanted to figure out the “master equation” that actually turns player ratings into their overall rating so I know what traits to focus on developing. That’s the goal of this post, where I’m going to use machine learning to attempt to discover that “master equation.”
If you don’t care about how I computed the ratings, feel free to skip ahead to the “master equation” section.