Three months ago, Houston Astros All-Star shortstop Carlos Correa flat out told me he was going to have a breakout season and tech was going to play a big role.
I was expecting an endorsement pitch during a quick call about how he uses Blast Motion, a baseball bat sensor designed to help everyone from little leaguers to middle-aged softball players improve their swings. Our chat happened a week after Correa set the tone for his season, crushing a 450-foot home run on opening night.
But rather than offer a canned line, Correa lowered his voice and in hushed tones told me how he and his team really use the sensor. As many as four times a week, Correa attaches it to the end of his 33.5-ounce bat to measure his swing speed and impact. He says using the sensor during extended batting practice sessions before home games is particularly important.
One year and three days ago, Milos Raonic became the first Canadian man to reach a Grand Slam final when he beat an ailing Roger Federer, then 34, in five sets in the semis at Wimbledon. By the end of the match, which saw Federer call for the trainer multiple times to attend to both his right leg and his surgically repaired left knee, journalists were furiously tapping their keyboards, announcing the end of an era.
Then Federer did something even more shocking than lose to a 6-seed at All England: He took time off. After Federer beat Raonic in straight sets in the Wimbledon quarterfinals on Wednesday — the same day that saw No. 1 seed Andy Murray lose to American giant slayer Sam Querrey and Novak Djokovic retire in the second set against Tomas Berdych, and two days after Rafael Nadal fell in a five-hour marathon to Gilles Muller — it now seems the only era that might be ending is the one dominated by the omnipresent big four.
“Of course, I’m surprised to see them going out,” Federer said after his quarterfinal win. “Novak’s not missed any Slams, basically. I don’t want to say sooner or later these things unfortunately happen, but he’s played a lot of tennis in recent years. For him to be hurt at some stage is only normal. Andy, I hope by playing he didn’t make things worse.”
Carson Palmer considered retiring as recently as this offseason before he ultimately decided to return for the 2017 season. But according to his coach, Bruce Arians, Palmer doesn’t need to contemplate the end of his career because if he wanted to, he could play for another five years.
On Wednesday, Arians told “Tiki and Tierney” on CBS Sports Radio and CBS Sports Network that Palmer has the ability to play until he’s 42 years old. He just has to want to.
“Physically, body-wise, it’s like he’s 28 right now,” Arians said. “Sports science is amazing right now. He can play easily until he’s 42 if he wants to. He is hungry as hell right now. I wouldn’t let him go in OTAs. It was like taking candy away from a kid.”
… All three of Williams’s most recent opponents were born in 1997, the year she made her Wimbledon debut.
Twenty years later, Williams is part of the landscape and lore at the All England Club, and while many of those who have watched her from the start are feeling nostalgic, Williams — even at age 37 — is much more concerned with her tennis future.
On Tuesday, after fending off Ostapenko, the newly crowned French Open champion, 6-3, 7-5, in Williams’ 100th singles match at Wimbledon, Williams was asked what age she feels inside. She looked at her questioner with one of her inscrutable looks and answered like this:
“I don’t know; I don’t think about it,” she said. “I feel quite capable, to be honest, and powerful. So whatever age that is, as long as I feel like that, then I know that I can contend for titles every time.”
Elite athletes seem to epitomize health—lean, powerful, efficient, and bursting with energy. But that image is one that is almost always presented during competitions, when they are rested and focused; it doesn’t necessarily mean that the years of grueling training and obsessive dedication required to reach the highest levels of sport are good for a person. Stuart McMillan, who coaches more than 20 Olympic medalists in track and field, recently tweeted, “Elite sport is not healthy; hopefully, this is not controversial.”
Yet it is a controversial statement—an idea that’s been debated among athletes, coaches, and researchers for years. And it’s still a question worth asking: Does sustained elite performance damage one’s health?
The answer more generally depends on how you define health and to whom you are comparing elite athletes.
… Today I was taking a look at my American Express credit card statement and I thought, “this season is costing me so much money.” But at the same time it’s also been the best season of jumping I’ve had (not including championships).
So you’re probably wondering what I need to spend money on right? After all don’t the meet directors pay for my travel, my rooms, my meals?
Here’s a question: How do you get the best youth players, coaches and clubs together, at minimal cost, in a country that spans thousands of miles and features hundreds of approaches to the game?
That’s the task that faces the U.S. Soccer Development Academy, currently wrapping its 10th season of boys’ play and preparing for a fall expansion into new age groups and girls’ competitions.
For all the strides it has made, the Academy has not yet won over all its critics, many of whom complain about inflexibility, imbalance, travel and top-down organization. It’s a fair time to ask: Is the DA working?
… At IDEO, I use design to tackle systemic challenges, many of which center around youth. Recently, I’ve found myself faced with one of the most complex and intangible challenges yet: Designing purpose. Specifically, designing a program that helps young people explore purpose in their lives.
This initiative was inspired by a pattern my coworkers and I were noticing in the world of education. I’ll never forget my interview with 20-year old Karen, a young woman living in the Bronx with her mom and sister, who had recently dropped out of college. When I asked if she thought she might return to college in the future, she said, “I do want to go back, but I don’t want to waste money until I know what I’m going for.” She had a point.
This conversation, along with many others, helped us see that so much of what comprises a young person’s priorities are expectations set by adults. In the increasingly competitive environment of academia, teenagers feel a mounting pressure to achieve, make the grades, get the test scores, fill the resumé, and graduate college as a pinnacle of success. But why? Without agency, is all of this achieving at risk of feeling meaningless if it doesn’t translate it into a pursuit or career they actually care about?
You would expect the organizer of what is regarded as the world’s most widely viewed sporting event to have a pretty robust language services department. But the numbers will likely still surprise because, well, it is not easy to truly appreciate what it takes to cater to over three billion World Cup fans (or half the planet) in multiple languages.
According to Caitlin Stephens, Deputy Head of Language Services at FIFA, they translate some three million words per language per year, and counting. “FIFA has four official languages – English, French, German, and Spanish – which means that most communications and information for its members have to appear in the four languages,” Stephens explains.
The grass has been immaculately trimmed, the tennis whites are crisp and the champions are facing off. Wimbledon may look traditional but behind all that there’s a phalanx of cutting-edge technology making this year’s championships a vanguard of innovation. Think artificial intelligence, smart rackets and an all-knowing chatbot called “Fred”.
Having been put through its paces on the race track, the company’s smart garment technology and IoT solutions are paving the way for advanced connected health services.
… If you’re the one who consumes the data, you should wonder what the means and medians actually represent. If you’re the one who analyzes the data, spend time with the most granular that time and resources allow for. Something more interesting will almost always come out of it.
Much work, and many tools, are still needed to integrate artificial intelligence into the software engineering workflow, noted Peter Norvig, Google’s director of research, speaking at the O’Reilly Artificial Intelligence conference in New York last week.
Fundamentally, AI software is inherently different from other forms of widely used software, said Norvig, who is also a co-author of perhaps the most popular book of programming instruction for the field, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach.
“One way of looking at the traditional model of programming is to look at the programmer is a micro-manager, who tells a computer exactly how to do something step by step,” he said. With AI, we should look at the programmer more as a teacher, rather than a micro-manager.
I’m really excited to launch Acquisition, the latest tool available inside our Evolution platform.
The purpose of Acquisition is to help clubs mitigate risk and maximise success in the transfer market. Player trading is one of the biggest opportunities for a club to move the needle on performance, and yet as an industry we only get it right 50% of the time. The truth is, player recruitment is hard and is often more about the players we don’t sign.
No one has any idea which of the four semifinalists will win the women’s singles title at Wimbledon on Saturday. But there is one prediction you can make with confidence: The remaining matches will be close, hard-fought contests that could easily last three sets.
Women’s tennis matches keep getting longer and more grueling. Since the 2014 Australian Open, the four Grand Slams — including this year’s Wimbledon, which is not yet complete — have averaged 40.9 three-set women’s matches per tournament. That’s up from an average of 36.8 between 1988 and 2013. Last month’s French Open saw 46 women’s matches go the distance, which was the most ever at Roland Garros and tied for the fourth-highest tally at any Slam since 1988, according to the WTA. So far this Wimbledon, there have been 43 three-setters, with three matches left to play. One more would put this year’s competition in a three-way tie for the most three-set matches at Wimbledon since 1988 — the 2011 and 2008 tournaments each saw 44.