… “Just because it didn’t resume doesn’t mean we’re under threat or at risk,” Chelsea manager Emma Hayes said Saturday. “I trust in the people running the league and I believe we’ll come back bigger, stronger and better from this.”
When the Blues last played — before the international break and the coronavirus shutdown — they were a point behind leader Manchester City but with a game in hand.
“They tried desperately to resume the season,” Hayes said. “Everybody has to appreciate the players too. I think it got to a period where they wanted a termination in the season and then safeguard and ring-fence everything that we worked hard towards in the women’s game — to start in a timely and safe manner for the upcoming season.”
… “I have been and I will always be very, very outspoken about the things that matter to me,” [Kaiya] McCullough told Power Plays in a phone call last Friday.
McCullough grew up in the predominately white and wealthy Orange County, California. (She wrote a must-read article about her childhood last week, “Letter to a younger me.”) Her mother is white, and her father is black.
“Growing up with a white mother was very difficult for me because I didn’t look like her,” she said. “I’ve never had the privilege of not looking like I do. It has definitely been a conversation I’ve been having for most of my life.”
… scientists—Michael Joyner of the Mayo Clinic, Sandra Hunter of Marquette University, Alejandro Lucia of Universidad Europea de Madrid, and Andrew Jones of the University of Exeter—outline the basic model of marathon physiology, in which performance depends on three key traits: maximal oxygen uptake (VO2 max); sustainable intensity (which is closely linked to lactate threshold); and running economy (a measure of efficiency). Then they discuss which factors may have affected these three traits to enable the recent boom in fast marathon running, including genetics, body shapes, training, drugs, and of course shoes.
It’s interesting stuff—but what really caught my attention was the 17 pages of responses from 35 different groups of other researchers that the journal also published. If you really want to get a sense of the full diversity of what endurance researchers are interested in these days, scanning these responses is a great start. Most of the ideas are at least somewhat familiar, but a few are unexpected.
Emma Hayes has said that even after seven trophies in eight years as the Chelsea Women manager she still dreads being sacked.
“I’m like any other football manager in that respect, we all live in fear of losing our job,” Hayes said after Chelsea were pronounced champions of a curtailed Women’s Super League season. “I’m not complaining though. I feel I’m exceptionally lucky to have an owner who has an interest in women’s football and understands what we need.”
Collective behaviors in sports teams emerge from the coordination between players formed from their perception of shared affordances. Recent studies based on the theoretical framework of ecological dynamics reported new analytical tools to capture collective behavior variables that describe team synergies. Here, we introduce a novel hypothesis based on the principles of tensegrity to describe collective behavior. Tensegrity principles operate in the human body at different size scales, from molecular to organism levels, in structures connected physically (biotensegrity). Thus, we propose that a group of individuals connected by information can exhibit synergies based on the same principles (group-tensegrity), and we provide an empirical example based on the dynamics of a volleyball team sub-phase of defense. [full text]
Runners are creatures of habit. We eat the same prerun meal, wear the same shoes, and circle the same five-mile loop every day. It’s ironic then that robust options and innovations are hallmarks of the running industry. Shoes, apparel, gear, and even races are constantly being tested, tweaked, and upgraded with new features and technology. Runners, though, tend to stick with what works.
Take our watches, for example. Most runners wear one, but few do much with their watch besides track their total time, distance, and average pace. Garmin, the brand many runners use as shorthand for any GPS watch, wants to change that. To help illustrate just how much their line of Forerunner GPS watches can do, we asked a few runners how they’ve used watch technology to enhance their miles. They showed us what we’re missing, and helped us identify the perfect Forerunner for every kind of runner.
EurekAlert! Science News, Rana Healthcare Solutions LLC from
Shimmer Research, a global leader in wearable technology for research applications, today announced that the Open Wearables Initiative (OWEAR) has uploaded its open source software and datasets database for wearable sensors and other connected health technologies to its website at http://www.owear.org.
“We are proud to announce the release of the OWEAR database, which includes the organization’s initial index of open source software and datasets, together with validation papers,” said Geoffrey Gill, president of Shimmer Americas and an OWEAR co-founder.
Current Reviews in Musculoskeletal Medicine journal from
Purpose of Review
The purpose of this review is to describe the current evidence on the most common sports-related ankle injuries. Joint anatomy, epidemiology, clinical findings, diagnostic approach, and treatment are presented with a specific focus on the available evidence towards return to play. Recent Findings
Recent findings show that ankle sprain is the most common injury in the world of sports. Bony fractures, cartilage defects, and syndesmotic lesions are frequently seen in association with the more severe type of ankle sprains. Summary
In summary, the majority of the athletes’ ankle sprains are managed conservatively with excellent outcomes and full return to their pre-injury level of play. However, it is essential to differentiate the single ligament sprain from a more complex injury to the ankle joint. The evidence-based treatment and rehabilitation programmes are associated with a better prognosis and a faster time to return to sport participation. [full text]
Ryan O'Hanlon, No Grass in the Clouds newsletter from
… In soccer, stats like expected goals have given us a better understanding of how top goal-scorers score most of their goals — constantly getting into good positions, rather than finishing their chances at an especially high clip — and what players are most likely to keep scoring goals or stop scoring goals. Take a step back in the chain, and you’ve got expected assists: what players are playing the passes that lead to those high-quality chances. Given the low-scoring nature of the sport, players who do either of these things are providing something valuable, but it’s still only a small percentage of everything that goes on across a 90-minute match. What if there’s a player who takes great shots but constantly turns the ball over, or a guy who conserves all of his energy, rarely shoots, doesn’t defend, and focuses only on playing the killer pass?
To answer these questions, the folks at American Soccer Analysis created a metric called goals added, or “g+”. It’s the latest in a string of possession-value models that aim to put a value on everything that happens with the ball across a match. The ASA model is the slickest one I’ve seen yet in the public domain, and it works from a pretty intuitive premise: every on-ball action both affects a team’s likelihood of scoring and conceding a goal. They then ascribe the changes to those likelihoods to individual players, and eventually the model spits out, you guessed it, the number of goals that everyone has added.
… In the same week as England’s Football Association ended the season for its top two women’s leagues, Germany’s Frauen Bundesliga restarted behind closed doors.
It is not that Germany’s leagues have not been financially hit by Covid-19. Last month Kicker magazine reported 13 of the 36 top clubs faced insolvency.
But, crucially, four of the country’s leading clubs — Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund, RB Leipzig and Bayer Leverkusen — have contributed heavily to a solidarity fund for teams in the men’s third division and the Frauen Bundesliga, which covers the cost of coronavirus testing.
Structural racism in British sport is so deep and pervasive that it amounts to a kind of apartheid and needs a South African-style truth and reconciliation commission to tackle it, a Sport England board member has said.
Chris Grant, one of the most senior black administrators in British sport, has written to UK Sport and Sport England urging them to establish a forum where people can talk frankly about historical and present-day issues without criticism or prejudice.
“The idea of a commission isn’t to shame people,” Grant said. “But to shine a light on these longstanding problems and change them.”
… Black athletes consistently find their status as the beloved icons of mostly white fans is contingent on willingness to silence their own political voices. Just this season, when Inter Milan’s Romelu Lukaku was racially abused by fans of Cagliari, the “ultra” fans of Inter Milan who call themselves the Curva Nord did not defend their star striker but instead issued a public statement in defence of the Cagliari ultras. Even to his own side’s supposedly most-committed fans, Lukaku’s position was precarious because he called attention to his racist treatment.
By resuming professional league matches, football players are being asked to take unknown risks to their health while occupying roles in society which make it peculiarly hard for them to speak out and be heard. If the fundamental question here is to weigh the safety of players against what they can do for public morale, who is supposed to do the weighing? Who can fairly evaluate players’ obligations to the general public, when the truth for so many fans is that their footballing heroes are not “just people too”?
… James Jones, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Delaware, Newark, who has studied the psychology underlying prejudice and racism for over 50 years, thinks it’s a real possibility.
Jones is the author of “Prejudice and Racism” and “The Psychology of Diversity: Beyond prejudice and racism.” He was awarded the 2011 Lifetime Contribution to Psychology award from the American Psychological Association.
“In one sense, I’m hopeful this is finally an inflection point, a watershed like the 1960s were, that fundamentally changes how we approach things,” Jones told Science. “We’ve done a lot of research about how to reduce people’s adherence to stereotypes and help different groups recognize their commonalities.”