Tour de France winner Chris Froome has denied allegations of doping. However, the claims have caused a stir in the world of cycling and there could yet be a bigger problem on the horizon for the sport.
Not many people could handle playing, and living, in the shadow of a brother known as ‘King Henrik’. But Joel Lundqvist has shouldered that weight and thrived while suiting up for his hometown team.
… It’s media day before the start of last season, and Simmons’ Philadelphia 76ers teammate Joel Embiid has procured the ball. He’d retrieved it from the office of the team’s director of performance research and development, David Martin, who spent years in Australia working with the nation’s most elite footballers. Embiid loves ball sports, picks them up like a prodigy, so the Sherrin tantalizes him like a new toy. Simmons’ fellow rookie stands flipping it back and forth in his enormous hands.
“What do you do with it?” Embiid asks, at once both curious and mischievous, holding the ball as if it’s an ancient talisman that has been washed up on the banks of the Schuylkill River.
“Give it here,” Simmons says.
Embiid passes him the ball, and Simmons proceeds to put on a clinic.
“He’s good,” Martin says. “It’s been a while since he played competitively, but you could easily see that he had great aptitude as an Australian rules footballer.”
… The U.S. Women’s National Ice Hockey Team wanted to add the 18-year-old defenseman to its roster. Barnes would be the first addition to the Olympic player pool since the initial 23 athletes were named on May 5.
That meant moving to the training base in Wesley Chapel, Florida – immediately.
“They’d already talked to my coaches and it was a really quick turnaround,” said Barnes. “My team was really supportive, my coaches. I packed up my whole dorm at BC and withdrew and came down here.”
“Anyone would have done that, right?” said two-time Olympic silver medalist Kacey Bellamy. “Your dream is to go to the Olympics. No question, you come – and we welcomed her with open arms because she’s going to make us better.”
PLOS One; Christoph Triska, Bettina Karsten, Bernd Heidegger, Bernhard Koller-Zeisler, Bernhard Prinz, Alfred Nimmerichter, Harald Tschan from
The purpose of this study was to assess the reliability of critical power (CP) and the total amount of work accomplished above CP (W´) across repeated tests using ecologically valid maximal effort time-trials (TT) under laboratory conditions. After an initial incremental exercise test, ten well-trained male triathletes (age: 28.5 ± 4.7 years; body mass: 73.3 ± 7.9 kg; height: 1.80 ± 0.07 m; maximal aerobic power [MAP]: 329 ± 41 W) performed three testing sessions (Familiarization, Test I and Test II) each comprising three TT (12, 7, and 3 min with a passive recovery of 60 min between trials). CP and W´ were determined using a linear regression of power vs. the inverse of time (1/t) (P = W´ ∙ 1/t + CP). A repeated-measures ANOVA was used to detect differences in CP and W´ and reliability was assessed using the intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) and the coefficient of variation (CoV). CP and W´ values were not significantly different between repeated tests (P = 0.171 and P = 0.078 for CP and W´, respectively). The ICC between Familiarization and Test I was r = 0.86 (CP) and r = 0.58 (W´) and between Tests I and II it was r = 0.94 (CP) and r = 0.95 (W´). The CoV notably decreased from 4.1% to 2.6% and from 25.3% to 8.2% for CP and W´, respectively. Despite the non-significant differences for both parameter estimates between Familiarization, Test I, and Test II, ICC and CoV values improved notably after the familiarization trial. Our novel findings indicate that for both, CP and W´ a familiarization trial increased reliability. It is therefore advisable to familiarize well-trained athletes when determining the power-duration relationship using TT under laboratory conditions. [full text]
… Should the USA reconsider its style of play, perhaps adopt a more Latin style of play?
You have an advantage because you have a mixture of cultures and I think you guys need to be more open-minded to take advantage of that.
For example, in Germany, now there is a mixed culture and they changed their style as well. The United States can do that. They can change the style, you can play in more of a Latin way or combination of styles because you have everything to develop a new system.
Rachel Botsman, the author of Who Can You Trust?, talks about how trust works, whether in relation to robots, companies, or other people. Technology, she says, speeds up the development of trust and can help us decide who to trust. But when it comes to making those decisions, we shouldn’t leave our devices to their own devices. [audio, 19:02]
Daily Gazette (Schenectady, NY), John Cropley from
Getting blood drawn for medical testing may become quicker, less painful and more informal with new technology being developed by a General Electric startup.
The device developed by Drawbridge Health is usable by untrained personnel, takes a tiny amount of blood from a skin prick and stabilizes it so it will keep for days at room temperature until it can reach the testing lab. It’s a technology that could one day be available for in-home use by patients.
Today’s widely used blood-draw procedures require a trained phlebotomist to puncture the patient’s vein and draw one or more vials of blood in a clinical setting, before sending the vials, which must be kept cool, to a lab.
Biomedical engineers and ESPN reporters don’t often appear as lecturers on the same syllabus.
But they will this spring, along with a lawyer, a sports therapist, and other experts, in a new course called “Concussion: Medical, Scientific and Societal Perspectives.”
Stefan Duma is the Harry Wyatt Professor of Engineering. He has worked with colleagues across campus to develop the course, which meets the requirements for both the Pathways for General Education and Curriculum for Liberal Education.
JAMA, Endocrinology, Editorial; Richard J. Auchus, MD, PhD and Kirk J. Brower, MD from
The nonmedical use of performance-enhancing substances, particularly androgens and related drugs, has been a global public health problem for several decades.1,2 A meta-analysis of 271 studies published between 1970 and 2013 estimated lifetime prevalence rates of 6.4% among males and 1.6% among females.1 The use of banned performance-enhancing drugs in elite sports has received much attention but is merely the tip of the iceberg.
… the fraternity of current big league managers is younger on average than perhaps at any other time in recent memory. Seven managers, including four of the new hires, are the same age or younger than Ichiro Suzuki, the free agent outfielder who intends to play this season at age 44. And an eighth, Dave Roberts of the Los Angeles Dodgers, is just a year older.
These new managers don’t sound much like the older ones they replaced. Sometimes they say things such as: “All of the various departments around a baseball organization are the soil, and our players are the plants and the trees that are going to grow in that soil. … So as I think about managing a ballclub, I think about being really nutrient-dense soil.”
Football has already been transformed by big money – but the businessmen behind Man City are trying to build a global corporation that will change the game for ever.
… The motivation for a sports statistics symposium is predicated on the need for advanced analytic methods in games and sports. The application of statistical methods in sports is rapidly growing. Sports teams use statistical analyses to evaluate players and game strategies, and sports associations develop ranking and ratings systems of players and teams. The evolution of the application of statistics to sports is enhanced with extensive collaboration and interaction between sports analysts and professional statisticians. Unfortunately, opportunities for this collaboration are still relatively uncommon, as academic statisticians often work in isolation developing statistical methods for sports applications, while sports organizations often have limited access to advanced statistical expertise and cutting-edge statistical tools for the analysis of sports data. The main goal of NESSIS is to bridge this gap.
Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science blog, Andrew Gelman from
A fundamental tenet of social psychology, behavioral economics, at least how it is presented in the news media, and taught and practiced in many business schools, is that small “nudges,” often the sorts of things that we might not think would affect us at all, can have big effects on behavior. Thus the claims that elections are decided by college football games and shark attacks, or that the subliminal flash of a smiley face can cause huge changes in attitudes toward immigration, or that single women were 20% more likely to vote for Barack Obama, or three times more likely to wear red clothing, during certain times of the month, or that standing in a certain position for two minutes can increase your power, or that being subliminally primed with certain words can make you walk faster or slower, etc.
The model of the world underlying these claims is not just the “butterfly effect” that small changes can have big effects; rather, it’s that small changes can have big and predictable effects. It’s what I sometimes call the “button-pushing” model of social science, the idea that if you do X, you can expect to see Y. Indeed, we sometimes see the attitude that the treatment should work every time, so much so that any variation is explained away with its own story.
In response to this attitude, I sometimes present the “piranha argument,” which goes as follows: There can be some large and predictable effects on behavior, but not a lot, because, if there were, then these different effects would interfere with each other, and as a result it would be hard to see any consistent effects of anything in observational data.
The analogy is to a fish tank full of piranhas: it won’t take long before they eat each other.
… People in the business of college football say the pool of experienced candidates has dwindled, thinned by rapid turnover and less desire among established coaches to jump from one job to another.
“Hiring has always been difficult,” Penn State athletic director Sandy Barbour said. “I think the proven talent has been kind of picked over, if you will. So that puts a premium on athletic directors and institutions having a broader knowledge. All fan bases want a known, proven commodity. Name, win-the-press-conferences kind of a hire. That’s not possible for everybody to do.”