SportPesa News, Farid Kipirash and Mutwiri Mutuota from
It’s approaching midday and after an absorbing conversation that has spanned for over an hour, hunger pangs are beginning to bite the three men converged at the middle of a farm located a few kilometres from Eldoret, the self-styled ‘City of Champions’.
Two of the men had earlier landed from Kenya’s capital, Nairobi in the early hours of Tuesday, October 9 where they had met the third, Olympic marathon champion and world record holder, Eliud Kipchoge, who granted them an interview like no other.
In Part 1 and Part 2 of the pioneering ‘A Day In The Life With’ series on SportPesa News, Kipchoge- who remains the only Kenyan to have won the complete set of medals at the Olympic and IAAF World Championships- opened up on diverse topics ranging from his insane Nike Breaking2 run to his preference of music.
Caroline Wozniacki, her tennis season over after a loss at the WTA Finals on Thursday, revealed that she had recently received a diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disease that can cause joint pain and stiffness and problems with mobility.
“In the beginning, it was a shock,” Wozniacki, 28, said at a news conference in Singapore, the site of the WTA Finals. “Just, you feel like you’re the fittest athlete out there — or that’s in my head, that’s what I’m known for — and all of a sudden you have this to work with.”
… Tatum is still prone to those defensive mistakes—be it with a late rotation along the back line, bungling a switch, getting beat backdoor, failing to box out, or over-helping off/fouling a quality jump shooter—but none of them can be attributed to poor effort. As someone who’s responsible for a diverse collection of skill-sets and positions, from a possession-to-possession basis, the need to process information is constant. His wingspan and general awareness help make the learning process a bit more smooth than it’d otherwise be, though; physically, his on-ball progress is already evident in spurts.
“I think one of his key areas of emphasis has been core strength, so that he can play lower longer. Especially with the way the game is being called now, so you can’t wrap people and hold onto people, you’ve gotta be able to play low, you’ve gotta be able to play in a stance, so I think that’s the number one [area of growth],” Brad Stevens said before Tatum’s 24-point, 14-rebound performance against the Knicks. “You know, he’s always been a guy that can put the ball in the hoop and do a lot of positive things for your team, but he can get a lot better in a lot of areas and I think it all centers around that core strength.”
If the English won Waterloo on the playing fields of Eton, the Boston Red Sox won World Series Game 2, if not the series in its entirety, on the backfields of Fort Myers. As Boston rookie manager Alex Cora and his staff planned spring training last January, hitting coach Tim Hyers came to him with an idea: a dedicated station on a back field just for situational hitting.
“I loved it,” Cora said. “I’ve heard people say a strikeout is just another out. I never believed that was true.”
Hyers set up a pitching machine on the field and either cranked it to his maximum velocity—not quite 100 mph—or programmed it to spit out nasty breaking balls.
“Because when you get to two strikes,” Hyers said, “that’s what you’re going to see. The idea was to get away from your ‘A’ swing and go to a ‘B’ swing. We practiced just fighting off the pitch. Just get to another pitch.”
Malcolm Gladwell is a bestselling author, the host of the Revisionist History podcast, and a curator of the Next Big Idea Club. Alex Hutchinson is a former physicist whose latest book, Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, is an official Next Big Idea Club selection. The two recently sat down to discuss how top athletes push themselves to achieve, and why learning to endure pain comes with some surprising benefits.
During five years working in high-performance sport around the world, we have identified some common themes for teams that achieve sustainable success.
Underpinning them all is strong leadership. We believe there are five key roles that high-performance teams are introducing, both in football and other sports, that are having a truly transformational effect. Here they are:
… “Over the past two, three years we’ve grown so much closer,” U.S. midfielder Lindsey Horan said. “Now, we’re becoming closer than ever and this tournament (the Concacaf Women’s Championship) has brought us even closer. Going out and winning like we did and not getting any goals scored against us and staying as a team the whole time, that’s incredible and shows the true character of this team.”
Ellis is now into her third decade of coaching and knows that when a squad is a close as the U.S. women are, it’s much easier for everyone to be on the same page in terms of shared team goals.
SB Nation, Silver Screen and Roll blog, Christian Rivas from
… Jordan Flight Lab manager Malcolm Jones, a student himself, explained to Silver Screen and Roll what exactly a Flight Lab is, and why it adds a new, exciting dimension to the everyday retail experience.
“We’re all sports science students,” Jones said. “We’re either masters students or Ph.D. students, and we’re either physiologists or biomechanists in this space today. We use this Jordan Flight Lab as an opportunity to apply the research that we’re doing to real people and athletes, not just theoretically. We have our own research that we’re doing, but when Jordan has an event, they tell us what they’re highlighting and we scale our research to highlight that.”
A team of Iranian biomedical engineers has made an unpowered exoskeleton that reduces metabolic rate while running. The news is a major milestone in the science of human augmentation, where researchers have long been unable to craft a lightweight wearable device that improves on human metabolic rate during exercise.
Even powered exoskeletons have had difficulty improving on metabolic rate. In the mid and late 2000s, researchers from Ekso Bionics, one of the pioneers in the field of robot-assisted walking, had difficulty creating a robot that was light enough to wear but assistive enough to increase metabolic endurance. That the challenge has been so difficult to crack is a testament to the efficiency of the human body.
Spectrometers — devices that distinguish different wavelengths of light and are used to determine the chemical composition of everything from laboratory materials to distant stars — are large devices with six-figure price tags, and tend to be found in large university and industry labs or observatories.
A new advance by researchers at MIT could make it possible to produce tiny spectrometers that are just as accurate and powerful but could be mass produced using standard chip-making processes. This approach could open up new uses for spectrometry that previously would have been physically and financially impossible.
… The deterioration of technical and physical performances in the 2nd half of a game is well-known, being characterized by a decrease in high intensity running,(9) number of sprints,(6) distance covered,(10) ball possession, ball passes and shots.(11-14) Also, more goals are conceded in the last 15 minutes of a game.(15-17) Strategies for self-adjusting game rhythm can, at least partially, explain the decrease in performance during the second half,(18) but it is more likely that is justified by the cumulative effect of fatigue.(3, 9, 19)
Increasing muscle glycogen levels before exercise, through a carbohydrate-rich diet in the last days before the game, has been shown to delay fatigue and raise performance.(7) Therefore, carbohydrate intake recommendations were set aiming to maximize pre-game muscle glycogen levels.(20) The intake of carbohydrates is also recommended immediately before and during match play to help maintain stable blood glucose concentrations throughout the game.(11, 12, 21, 22) However, evidence has been accumulating that challenges the common notion that high glycemic carbohydrates is the best approach.(11, 21-23)
… “Baseball used to have big personalities,” Lewis said. “It hasn’t accommodated them recently. Baseball has steadily been drained of emotion. The analytics movement has drained it of emotional content. And technology on the field has. What used to be a source of great drama was the manager coming out of the dugout, and lifting third base and hurling it into the outfield, and kicking dirt on the umpire. There’s no point in doing that anymore… You raise your hand and say, ‘Can we review the videotape?’ It’s become much more slickly professional.”
We show that propensity score matching (PSM), an enormously popular method of preprocessing data for causal inference, often accomplishes the opposite of its intended goal — thus increasing imbalance, inefficiency, model dependence, and bias. The weakness of PSM comes from its attempts to approximate a completely randomized experiment, rather than, as with other matching methods, a more efficient fully blocked randomized experiment. PSM is thus uniquely blind to the often large portion of imbalance that can be eliminated by approximating full blocking with other matching methods. Moreover, in data balanced enough to approximate complete randomization, either to begin with or after pruning some observations, PSM approximates random matching which, we show, increases imbalance even relative to the original data. Although these results suggest researchers replace PSM with one of the other available matching methods, propensity scores have other productive uses.
When people think about working with data, they usually think about the technologies that help us capture, manipulate, and make arguments with data. Over the last decade we’ve seen radical growth and innovation in the toolchains available to do this, leading to a huge increase in the number of people that have started working with data in some capacity. For data literacy learners, it is tempting to let the tool dictate the outcomes. Need to make a chart? Let the tool recommend one. The problem is that these tools don’t help you with the process of working with data. The tools won’t write your data story for you — you have to run that process yourself. Here are a couple of examples that help illuminate this gap that I see, and how my work with Catherine D’Ignazio on the Data Culture Project helps address it.
Research finds that NBA coaches give slightly more playing time to players of their own race, but the gap disappears at playoff time. Research by Letian Zhang.