Russia World Cup hero Denis Cheryshev could be asked to provide anti-doping chiefs with documentary evidence an injection he was given was legal after his own father was quoted saying it contained “growth hormone”.
Investigators from the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (Rusada) were planning to contact all those involved in the treatment of an injury that sidelined Cheryshev last year, one his father Dimitri spoke about during an interview with Russian publication Sport Weekend.
Cheryshev, a star of his country’s shock run to the World Cup quarter-finals, was forced on the eve of Russia’s penalty-shootout win over Spain to deny taking performance-enhancing drugs following the comments attributed to his father.
One of the peculiarities of Wimbledon, when a niche sport becomes ubiquitous for a fortnight, is the snap judgements – how players, about whom those watching know very little or nothing at all, are defined instantaneously. And so when, a few minutes after 12 o’clock, Harriet Dart’s crosscourt backhand landed just wide, and she slipped to trail 4-3 and 30-0, some spectators had already made up their minds about her.
It was not very fair, but neither is the sport. True, this can be said of every game. But as Dart told me last year, if singles players are not in the top 100, then they are losing more money than they’re making. Given tennis’s global appeal – the sport has 14 million players in China alone – that is an extraordinary testament to the sport’s brutality. It is altogether crueller even than losing a World Cup match on a penalty shoot-out; instead, the infinitesimal margins of victory and defeat can be the difference between remaining a professional tennis player and finding a different job.
Read more at: https://inews.co.uk/sport/tennis/wimbledon-2018/wimbledon-harriet-dart-british-debutant-pliskova-brutally-small-margins/
The comprehensive plan to prepare players ahead of the tournament, which coach Juan Carlos Osorio detailed to ESPN FC, included four factors: mental growth, nutrition and diet, analysis of opposition and a strength program.
But less has been written or talked about regarding what has been going on during the tournament in terms of recovery from games and maintaining the players at as close to peak condition as possible. It’s not even a stretch to perhaps suggest that one of the reasons Osorio chose to repeat a starting XI for the first time against Sweden — his 51st match in charge — was down to how detailed a plan for recovery has been in place.
The plan for the recovery process for games and attempting to create an environment in which the players can be at their optimal level speaks to Osorio’s focus on seeking out the best practices in world sport and trying to emulate them.
Through one of Osorio’s meetings with Sir Alex Ferguson, the Colombian was put in contact with high-performance and recovery expert Dr. Robin Thorpe, who works at Manchester United.
With 90-minute games, soccer is usually considered an endurance sport. But strength is also key to avoiding injury and improving performance, according to research presented this month at the American College of Sports Medicine’s annual meeting in Minneapolis. Now teams from youth leagues to the World Cup are kicking this science into practice.
When it comes to keeping athletes healthy, “strength training plays a huge role,” says Shawn Arent, an exercise physiologist at Rutgers University who led the work. “You’re really providing the supporting musculature.” He notes robust muscles and tendons stabilize joints, minimizing the risk of a painful twist or tear. His research group partnered with the Rutgers women’s soccer team to add consistent weight lifting to the team’s training regimen. The results were immediate: After one season the team’s injury rate plummeted by 70 percent compared with previous years. Last fall marked the third straight year without a season-ending injury—a rare feat in a sport notorious for torn ligaments and sprained ankles. Arent is now working to publish his findings. “When you can keep your players on the pitch,” he says, “they can accomplish a lot more.”
Upper-body strength could even mitigate a major health concern among soccer players: brain injury from repeated headers, according to Thomas Kaminski, director of the Athletic Training Education Program at the University of Delaware.
Understanding physical literacy is now essential for P.E. teachers worldwide. But what is physical literacy and why is it so important?
More schools are placing an emphasis on physical literacy, especially in physical education. It has been identifying as a major outcome of quality programming. More than ever, teachers and youth coaches need to be able to integrate the concept into their lessons. In this post, we are going to look at everything you need to know about physical literacy and why it’s so important for children today.
Movement is the most common final output of nervous system activity and is essential for survival. But what makes this seemingly trivial statement so scientifically challenging? Neurons that contribute to when and how our body moves are distributed throughout the nervous system. Thus, even a simple movement such as arm flexion requires the coordinated activation of many different neuronal populations across multiple brain regions. A key question is how the nervous system produces diverse and precise actions aligned with the organisms’ behavioral needs. These processes are affected in diseases such as Parkinson’s or Huntington’s, in which aberrant motor behavior dominates. Recent studies are transformative in how we think about the control of movement. A common denominator of these studies is that brain regions that contribute to motor behavior can no longer be considered as interacting boxes. Instead, deep circuit-level insight based on specific neuronal populations emerges as being critical to revealing motor system organization and understanding its function. It is likely that insights at this level can also help to design more specific and direct interventions for diseases of the motor system and neuroprosthetics applied after injuries. [full text]
Previously, it has been concluded that the improvement in running economy (RE) might be considered as a key to the continued improvement in performance when no further increase in V[Combining Dot Above]O2max is observed. To date, RE has been extensively studied among male East African distance runners. By contrast, there is a paucity of data on the RE of female East African runners. A total of 10 female Kenyan runners performed 3 × 1,600-m steady-state run trials on a flat outdoor clay track (400-m lap) at the intensities that corresponded to their everyday training intensities for easy, moderate, and fast running. Running economy together with gait characteristics was determined. Participants showed moderate to very good RE at the first (202 ± 26 ml·kg−1·km−1) and second (188 ± 12 ml·kg−1·km−1) run trials, respectively. Correlation analysis revealed significant relationship between ground contact time (GCT) and RE at the second run (r = 0.782; p = 0.022), which represented the intensity of anaerobic threshold. This study is the first to report the RE and gait characteristics of East African female athletes measured under everyday training settings. We provided the evidence that GCT is associated with the superior RE of the female Kenyan runners.
While exhibiting at Sensors Expo, June 27-28, at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, CA in the MEMS Pavilion, booth #542, Bosch Sensortec announced the BHI260 and BHA260, the first two members of a new generation of smart sensor hubs. The devices are optimized for 24/7, always-on sensor processing and feature ultra-low power consumption.
With the help of an integrated sensor coprocessor and MEMS sensors, the BHI260 and BHA260 can handle sophisticated sensor processing tasks and data buffering without waking up the main application processor, and can even run entirely standalone. Their low power consumption translates into significantly extended battery lifetimes in wearables, hearables, AR/VR devices and smartphones.
Though late compared to other sports, but FIFA has finally recognized the importance of location technologies and GPS in soccer. Both on and off the pitch, the World Cup in Russia is seeing technology — GPS and location in particular — playing a bigger role than ever. While the goal-line technology, which has at its heart precise positioning, is already making waves in the championship, use of wearables, player positional data and metrics for tactical analysis are some of the others that are making news.
There’s a thinking in soccer these days that a club really is only as good as its training facilities. A few years ago, Premier League clubs decided it was important to either build or upgrade their training centers. Some of the biggest club teams in Europe also have them to keep their players competitive.
AC Milan, for example, was one of the first clubs in Italy to invest in a state-of-the-art training facility. The construction of Milanello in the early 1960s has been widely credited with aiding the club through its successes of that decade and again in the late 1980s and early ‘90s. Milanello, with its six grass fields and indoor gym, truly was ahead of its time.
Over the past two years, five MLS teams have made considerable financial commitments towards similar facilities. Last year, Atlanta United FC, an expansion club at the time, opening a $60 million facility. This year alone four other teams – Los Angeles FC, New York City FC, Real Salt Lake, and Sporting Kansas City – have gotten in on the training-facility craze.
Amsterdam Collaboration on Health & Safety in Sports from
We are proud of this one .. just popped up online today. It is possible to prevent sports injuries. Unfortunately, the demonstrated efficacy and effectiveness of injury prevention approaches are not translated into lasting real-world effects. Contemporary views in sports medicine and injury prevention suggest that sports injuries are ‘complex’ phenomena. If the problem we aim to prevent is complex, then the first step in the ‘sequence of prevention’ that defines the ‘injury problem’ already needs to have considered this. The purpose of this paper was to revisit the first step of the ‘sequence of prevention’, and to explore new perspectives that acknowledge the complexity of the sports injury problem. A better understanding of the injury problem in context will guide more context-sensitive studies, thus providing a new perspective for sports injury prevention research.
First, this paper provides a retrospective of the ‘sequence of prevention’, acknowledging contemporary views on sports injuries and their prevention. Thereafter, from the perspective of the socioecological model, we demonstrated the need for taking into account the complex nature of sports injuries in the first step. Finally, we propose an alternative approach to explore and understand injury context through qualitative research methods.
If you’re a Real Salt Lake follower and happen to track the day-to-day lives of players on social media, you’ll more than likely stumble upon updates on the team’s travel days as you’re scrolling down on your phone.
But you couldn’t find a thing Thursday morning.
Like any other traveler, RSL’s contingent of roughly 30 players, coaches and staffers were at Salt Lake City International Airport around 7 a.m., like everyone else a bit bleary-eyed, but staring a seven-hour travel day directly in the face. That’s what it takes for RSL to get to Columbus, Ohio, where on Saturday evening, the club will face the Crew as it does once a season.
Before Sam Fuld appeared in 598 major league games and attracted a following as a scrappy outfielder, he earned an economics degree from Stanford. A few years ago, he would have had two choices upon retirement: Go to work for a big league organization as an outfield-baserunning coach or pursue a job at an investment banking firm on Wall Street.
Now a Plan C career path exists for Fuld. Four months ago, it took him to a conference room at Spectrum Field in Clearwater, Florida, where he spent several days explaining weighted on-base average to 63 Philadelphia Phillies in English and Spanish.
Fuld, 36, joined the Phillies in November as the team’s major league player-information coordinator. His mandate is clear: to bridge the divide between the statistical and scouting worlds and dispense knowledge to players who are receptive to new ideas.
The New York Times, James Glanz and Agustin Armendariz from
Every weekend during soccer season in Britain, security personnel find them in stadiums, tapping furiously at their phones or talking nonstop into a mic — mysterious customers often wearing hoodies to conceal earpieces and their identity. While focused with unwavering intensity on the action of the game, they show none of the engagement and excitement of the ordinary fans around them.
The unofficial data scouts — or data thieves, depending on who is describing them — are quickly ejected once they are discovered.
The fleeting data they are collecting — the minutia of what is happening in the game — is the lifeblood of sports betting, perhaps the most crucial and valuable element of the entire industry. If gambling operators are to monetize sports betting fully, they have to offer wagers on far more than the outcomes of games. Data on the second-by-second action — exactly when a goal is scored, where it landed in the net, who had the assist — creates manifold betting opportunities.
The Big Ten has asked the NCAA to consider developing a national college football injury reporting system in reaction to the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that allows states to legalize sports gambling.
The conference’s athletic directors proposed to the NCAA Football Oversight Committee in June what would be a first-ever weekly national injury reporting mandate. The ADs claim an injury report is necessary to protect the integrity of the sport.
Such a move would alter one of the most ingrained and long-standing traditions in college football — coaches concealing injuries. From the earliest days of the sport, the decision to release such information has typically been made by the coaches themselves, sometimes flying in the face of fair play and transparency.
With the cross-country growth of sports betting in its infancy, it is becoming imperative that injury information be accurate and widely available.