Simone Biles is the last person international gymnastics officials should be using to try and make a point.
In an effort to deter other gymnasts from trying skills they are not physically capable of doing, the International Gymnastics Federation watered down the value of a new element Biles plans to do at the world championships. That’s right. Penalize the reigning world and Olympic champion, who is almost cautious when it comes to adding difficulty, for the potential recklessness of others.
“Am I in a league of my own? Yes. But that doesn’t mean you can’t credit me for what I’m doing,” Biles told NBC after learning of the decision this week by the women’s technical committee.
In our May, 2019 issue of Triathlon Magazine Canada we looked at the issues around diversity in triathlon. As part of that feature, we spoke with Cherie Gruenfeld, a 13-time Kona age group champion and also the founder of a program called Exceeding Expectations. Today we learned that Gruenfeld will be inducted into the USA Triathlon Hall of Fame, which gives us a wonderful excuse to publish the story that highlights just some of her amazing contributions to the sport.
… The hero of the night was Oliver Bierhoff. Rescuing his country with a trademark bullet of a header, the Udinese striker then achieved legend status when his deflected strike was insufficiently parried away by Petr Kouba, landing in the bottom left corner of the Czech goal. Though Germany’s storied history of improbable fightbacks gave the result a sense of inevitability, few at the start of the tournament would have backed Bierhoff – a controversial inclusion who earned his first international cap a mere four months prior – to be the man who provided the heroics on that summers night in London.
While now Bierhoff enjoys statesmen like-status in his homeland, a revered symbol of efficiency and leadership who saved his country on various occasions, such notions would have seemed fanciful or even outright laughable earlier in his career, when the young forward was hounded out of the Bundesliga on a wave of derision and ridicule.
… “What we learned in 2015 is you need a break and you need to do that mentally and physically,” Ertz said. “It is a shift from that as well and I think the new coach will kind of understand that as well, whoever that will be. Our staff has been absolutely fantastic and the support has been huge. I think that’s what we learned in 2016. So I’m really excited for 2020, but right now it’s kind of a weird bittersweet moment of just really excited obviously for the growth of it, but also a hard time because you do close a chapter.”
The year is winding down for some players, but others are preparing for a stretch run with their club teams. Five NWSL sides have one week left in the season. The four playoff teams, all already clinched, still have one or two big matches left in 2019.
… “Most people in general don’t know what a union is,” David Foster, the NBPA’s deputy general counsel, said. “We have to educate our players about what we do and how we can help them, and Chrysa is like the bridge between us and them.”
Added Chris Paul, who was elected the players’ union president about a year before Chin returned to the NBPA: “I can’t think of a person who has a better relationship with guys in the NBA.”
The league’s older players trust her because they’ve known her for years. The younger players trust her because their veteran counterparts tell them to. “When guys call me with issues, whether something big or about their escrow check, I’m always telling them to call Chrysa,” Paul said. “She’s probably tired of me giving her number out.”
University of California-Santa Barbara, The UCSB Current from
Attention runners: The next time you go out for a jog, you might want to strap a light resistance band between your feet. This rather quirky but oddly effective hack, according to UC Santa Barbara mechanical engineer Elliot Hawkes, could make you a more efficient runner by approximately 6.4%.
“In running, the energy is mostly wasted,” said Hawkes, who conducted research on this topic while at Stanford University. His paper appears in the Journal of Experimental Biology.
On July 20, Avisail Garcia launched a home run which impacted the Rays’ 2008 AL East championship banner above the left field stands in Tropicana Field. Statcast reported a distance projection of 459 feet and some observers questioned this estimate as short given its impressive impact point. How do we check the Statcast projected distance?
… The company takes a multipronged approach to gathering insights about a user’s gait. FeetMe’s sensor comes in the form of a shoe insole and includes both pressure and motion sensing technology. The system is also outfitted with an algorithm to help analyze a person’s walk.
The sensors can be used in gait evaluation and in rehabilitation services. It can also be used to help stimulate modality. The sensors come with a corresponding app, tailored to either evaluations or rehab, which helps the end users visualize the user’s mobility. The company also has a dashboard that lets doctors and caregivers see the progress of the user.
Penn State University, Daily Collegian student newspaper, Ryan Lam from
… Perhaps the team’s biggest problem has been the lack of stability and cohesiveness, which stemmed from the rolling list of injuries on the roster.
Coach Erica Dambach, looking at the bigger picture, thinks a lot of positives could come from the bad experience in being sidelined.
“It is part of the journey as an athlete, too often, unfortunately,” Dambach said. “I’ve just seen too many positive things come out of those moments in terms of strength of people, strength of athletes, coming out of the other side stronger than they’ve ever been, knowing that they can take on everything.”
University of California-San Francisco, Research from
Scientists at UC San Francisco and Harvard University have shown for the first time that cooking food fundamentally alters the microbiomes of both mice and humans, a finding with implications both for optimizing our microbial health and for understanding how cooking may have altered the evolution of our microbiomes during human prehistory.
In recent years, scientists have discovered that many facets of human health – ranging from chronic inflammation to weight gain – are strongly influenced by the ecological health of the vast numbers of microbes that live in and on us, collectively known as our microbiome. This burgeoning field has sparked efforts at UCSF and across biomedical research to better understand how our environments and behavior can improve human health by shaping healthier microbiomes.
In the middle of the visiting clubhouse at Oakland Coliseum grew the puddle of beer, a foot or so in diameter and a couple inches deep. The smoke had cleared on the Tampa Bay Rays’ American League wild-card game victory over the Oakland A’s but not on their celebration, which was perfumed with cigar clouds. Every team in their position — low payroll, awful stadium, apathetic fan base, minimal recognition, entire Pringles can on their shoulder — appreciates a moment like the one in which the Rays reveled. Not every team includes a player who will rain dance in a beer puddle.
And yet there was Ji-Man Choi, 28 years old, thicc with two C’s, surrounded by teammates glad to provide a Bud Heavy shower amid his leap into the shallow pool. As Choi landed, the spent beer splattered around the room, basting Jesus Aguilar and Willy Adames and Avisail Garcia and Anthony Banda. All of whom, like Choi, started their careers in other organizations and wound up in this totally backward place, where, paradoxically, their use of analytics is humanizing.
… So what do we know about the data that is used for soccer analysis? Previous studies have shown that people are pretty good at agreeing about what type of event occured in a soccer game (e.g. shots, tackles). But as far as I can tell, the accuracy and precision of locations of game events among the various data providers has not been studied. As Joe Mulberry pointed out when looking at the troubling inconsistencies between spatial tracking data and event data, small differences in locations can have big effects on downstream analysis including expected goals (xG) models. In other words, small inconsistencies in how data is tracked can have big consequences for the models built off that data. So what are the differences between how soccer data providers collect and report their data?
To partially answer this, I took to Twitter. I created a Google survey that asked a user to watch a video of a goal and then code the location of a shot using Peter McKeever’s fabulous online tool. While the specifics of how companies code the data are still a bit shrouded, this method is probably a crude version of what data companies do. But instead of (presumably) well paid and well trained professionals doing the work, it is random, totally trustworthy, people on the internet doing it for free.
… “Be careful what you wish for,” Harbaugh told reporters Monday during his weekly news conference. “A lot of loopholes, we’ve seen, (and) they drive trucks through them. I can’t visualize how that might be a competitive advantage, or how that would work.”
Harbaugh, now in his fifth season as head coach at Michigan, with a four-year stint at Stanford and three-year stint at Stanford before, says he’s thought through what should be done. He estimates that 300,000 student-athletes play football, while estimating that the NFL employs about 2,000 per year.
His idea? Lift the rule prohibiting football players from going pro until their fourth year in college.