US Women’s National Team soccer star Megan Rapinoe is questioning whether the 2020 Summer Olympics, already delayed until 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic, will happen next summer, and if her days as an Olympic athlete are already behind her.
“Frankly, I think the Olympics are in doubt next year,” she told CNN’s David Axelrod in an episode of his “The Axe Files” podcast released Monday. “The more I think about it logistically, just bringing everybody together like that with the absence of drug therapies or anything like that just seems difficult.”
For 34-year-old Rapinoe, a two-time World Cup winner and Olympic gold medalist, any further delay could spell uncertainty for her career.
The past year should have been a victory lap for Mikaela Shiffrin. Instead, it left her on empty after she lost first her Nana, then her dad, then her skiing. But she refused to let it break her, and now her spirit is returning thanks to one very special relationship.
If given the option, Rafael Nadal said he would scrap this season entirely so tennis could resume normally in 2021.
The second-ranked Spaniard, who is 33 years old and has won 19 Grand Slam titles, said he hoped to resume playing this year but doubted it could happen because of the coronavirus pandemic.
“I would sign up right now just to being ready for 2021,” Nadal said in interviews with El País and other Spanish newspapers published Tuesday. “I’m more concerned with the Australian Open than with what happens later this year. I think 2020 has been practically lost. I’m hopeful of being able to start next year.”
… In Latin America, only a minority of women in professional leagues have formal contracts and nearly all players work at least one extra job to make ends meet. Average contracts last two to three months and pay rarely exceeds minimum wage levels.
Now as the continent fights off the Coronavirus decisions being made by owners and administrators show that Fútbol Femenino is being given a low priority and in some cases seen as expendable.
The Galaxy have permanently shuttered their elite girls’ soccer academy, leaving more than 80 girls looking for new places to play.
The decision to close the first girls’ academy to be fully funded by an MLS team was made two weeks after the U.S. Soccer Federation ended its support of the nationwide boys’ and girls’ development academy program.
“At present, having a girls’ academy wasn’t tenable for us as a club in the current environment,” club spokesman Brendan Hannan said.
… “You’ve got Billy!” Bellows Rod Brind’amour, Head Coach of the Carolina Hurricanes. The short statement is met with sarcastic groans from a Hockey Team that just blew out an opponent and protected their house in an excellent home win. They did another Storm Surge and are ready to go home but not before meeting with Billy.
Who is Billy? Well, Bill Burniston, the Head Strength and Conditioning Coach of the Carolina Hurricanes and the right-hand man of coach nicknamed Rod the Bod for his physical prowess and strength.
Although technically part of the medical staff on the team, Billy can be attributed to a lot fo the success of the team. His strength and conditioning programs are the biggest reason behind the team’s ability to play at 100% and stay healthy for most of the season. Last year saw them break an NHL record with ten players playing a full 82 games. That is on Billy.
This year, even though, there have been multiple injuries resulting from vicious hits, as well as several trades, there are still nine players who have played every game of the season so far. Billy is the Carolina Hurricanes’ secret weapon.
Being an offensive lineman doesn’t just require athletes to be muscular; it mandates that they are bigger than their bodies want to be. To maintain the size and weight required by the position, prospects and veterans alike are driven to adopt extreme eating habits. But once their careers are over, it’s not always easy to return to a healthy lifestyle.
… In a new study, researchers from Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research, the University of Washington, UIUC, and Carnegie Mellon University use a physics simulator to learn to predict physical forces in videos of humans interacting with objects.
The researchers say current recognition or geometric approaches lack the physicality of action representation, and propose their method to improve physical understanding of human-machine interactions: “While the goal of being able to infer these forces is desirable, it is unfortunately tedious (if not impossible) to acquire direct supervision for this task.” Supervision provides essential signals for labelling training data, but obtaining ground-truth labels for forces is a challenge that remains unsolved. Are there any alternatives for supervision? The team observed that a full geometric understanding could be recovered by simulating the effects of physical forces on objects, and used a physics simulator for supervision.
Anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries have been a rising concern in the early years of the women’s Australian Football League (AFLW), eliciting headlines of a ‘knee crisis’ surrounding the league. There has been a focus on female biology as the primary factor driving the high rate of ACL injuries in the AFLW. Emphasising Australian football (AF) as being dangerous predominantly due to female biology may be misrepresenting a root cause of the ACL injury problem, perpetuating gender stereotypes that can restrict physical development and participation of women and girls in the sport. We propose that an approach addressing environmental and sociocultural factors, along with biological determinants, is required to truly challenge the ACL injury problem in the AFLW. Sports science and medicine must therefore strive to understand the whole system of women in AF, and question how to address inequities for the benefit of the athletes. [full text]
Club doctors have written to the Premier League to express their concerns over the return of football, it has been reported.
According to The Athletic, doctors from all 20 top flight clubs have sent an email to the Premier League’s medical advisor Mark Gillett and director of football Richard Garlick.
It is claimed that the email features 100 questions and issues over players and staff returning to training.
As many NBA teams weigh re-opening team facilities while the coronavirus pandemic continues, a lingering question remains: Can the league find a way back to safely playing games in the near future?
The answer is far from simple, said Dr. Rand McClain, Chief Medical Officer for Los Angeles-based LCR Health. But after qualifying with the fact that he’s an “eternal optimist,” he broke down the reason he sees the NBA’s return as anything but a pipe dream.
“The linchpin in this has always been the testing,” McClain said in an interview on NOLA.com’s Bird Watch podcast. “And that is available, so anyone who says it isn’t feasible logistically or otherwise – it is feasible.”
To determine the incidence of anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries in the National Hockey League (NHL) and to examine the effects of this injury on return-to-play status and performance. Design:
Case series; level of evidence, 4. Methods:
This was a 2-phase study. Phase I used the NHL electronic injury surveillance system and Athlete Health Management System to collect data on ACL injuries and man games lost over 10 seasons (2006/2007-2015/2016). Data collected in phase I were received in deidentified form. Phase II examined the performance impact of an ACL injury. Players were identified through publically available sources, and performance-related statistics were analyzed. Data collected in phase II were not linked to data collected in phase I. A paired t test was used to determine any difference in the matching variables between controls and cases in the preinjury time period. A General linear model (mixed) was used to determine the performance impact. Results:
Phase I: 67 ACL injuries occurred over 10 seasons. The incidence for all players was 0.42/1000 player game hours (forward, 0.61; defenseman, 0.32, goalie, 0.08) and by game exposure was 0.2/1000 player game exposures (forward, 0.33; defenseman, 0.11; goalie, 0.07). Forwards had a greater incidence rate of ACL tears with both game hours and game exposures when compared with defensemen and goalies (P < 0.001, <0.001; P = 0.008, <0.001, respectively). Phase II: 70 ACL tears (60 players) were identified. Compared with controls, players who suffered an ACL tear demonstrated a decrease in goals/season (P < 0.04), goals/game (P < 0.015), points/season (0.007), and points/game (0.001). Number of games and seasons played after an ACL injury did not differ compared with controls (P = 0.068, 0.122, respectively).
Conclusions:
Anterior cruciate ligament injuries occur infrequently, as it relates to other hockey injuries. Despite a high return to play, the performance after an ACL injury demonstrated a decrease in points and goals per game and per season.
Women’s soccer around the world is being held back due to a continuing lack of basic employment rights and standards at international competitions, a report from global players’ union FIFPro has said.
The document, published on Wednesday, says that being a professional soccer player is still not a viable career option for women in many parts of the world, despite record attendances at matches over the past year.
“The professional women’s game is subject to adverse labour conditions which negatively impact the sporting performance of players, pose direct obstacles to the development of their potential or force them to leave the game early,” the report said.
Medium, Conversations with Tyler podcast, Tyler Cowen from
… He joined Tyler to discuss whether the world as a whole is becoming harder to predict, whether Goldman Sachs traders can beat forecasters, what inferences we can draw from analyzing the speech of politicians, the importance of interdisciplinary teams, the qualities he looks for in leaders, the reasons he’s skeptical machine learning will outcompete his research team, the year he thinks the ascent of the West became inevitable, how research on counterfactuals can be applied to modern debates, why people with second cultures tend to make better forecasters, how to become more fox-like, and more. [audio, 54:19]
… Chris Gorski, Inside Science: Why did you write a book about how bias is involved in in baseball and how people can recognize their own biases?
Keith Law: One of the great things about baseball is that we have so many discrete decisions happening within games, before and after games, even before and after seasons, and copious data available to us. That just makes it perfect fodder for many types of analysis that would be harder to do on sports like basketball or hockey that are more continuous flows.
Is being aware of biases the best method of overcoming them? What else do you have in your pocket?
Awareness is the most important thing. Most people don’t know that these things exist. It’s not like we were taught them in school — other than moral hazard and sunk costs, those came up in my economics classes.