It’s been six months since most of the prospects in the 2020 NBA draft last suited up. Players from up and down the board explain the sacrifices and setbacks they faced in their long journeys to draft night.
… When Haaland was about 9 years old, he and his friends started meeting on weekends to practice and scrimmage on their own at an old stadium in Bryne. They trained together officially a couple of times a week with their coaches, but that wasn’t enough.
“I was always waiting for the weekends so I could go there, play football, then go home and watch football on the television,” says Haaland on a rainy October afternoon in Dortmund, Germany. Fresh off scoring a late goal in the Champions League the day before, Haaland, who turned 20 in July, looks relaxed but serious on Zoom in a tan fleece jacket, his white-blond hair obscured by a backward baseball cap.
Haaland is often compared with legendary Swedish striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic because of their shared Scandinavian background and thirst for goals.
This study elucidated spatiotemporal and ground reaction force determinants of running speed and acceleration for female sprinters during the entire sprinting. Fifteen female sprinters completed 60 m sprints. Kinematic and kinetic variables were measured using force platforms over a 50 m distance from the start. Results demonstrated that higher step frequency (11th–27th steps, r = 0.517–0.717) through shorter support time (12th–27th steps, r = −0.535 to −0.634) could be determinants of running speed. Moreover, increasing step length (1st–10th steps, r = 0.550–0.938), suppressing increases in step frequency (2nd–7th steps, r = −0.639 to −0.870), suppressing decreases in support time (1st–5th steps, r = 0.599–0.709) and increases in flight time (4th–7th steps, r = 0.523–0.649) can be essential for greater running acceleration. Propulsive mean force (1st–5th steps, r = 0.663–0.876) and anteroposterior net mean force (all steps, r = 0.697–0.894) are likely determinants of greater running acceleration. At the maximal speed phase there was no correlation between running speed and the other variables. Differences with previously found male sprint determinants suggest that training targets specific to female sprinters are necessary for improving training designs and race strategy.
Elite athletes are particularly susceptible to sleep inadequacies, characterised by habitual short sleep (<7 hours/night) and poor sleep quality (eg, sleep fragmentation). Athletic performance is reduced by a night or more without sleep, but the influence on performance of partial sleep restriction over 1–3 nights, a more real-world scenario, remains unclear. Studies investigating sleep in athletes often suffer from inadequate experimental control, a lack of females and questions concerning the validity of the chosen sleep assessment tools. Research only scratches the surface on how sleep influences athlete health. Studies in the wider population show that habitually sleeping <7 hours/night increases susceptibility to respiratory infection. Fortunately, much is known about the salient risk factors for sleep inadequacy in athletes, enabling targeted interventions. For example, athlete sleep is influenced by sport-specific factors (relating to training, travel and competition) and non-sport factors (eg, female gender, stress and anxiety). This expert consensus culminates with a sleep toolbox for practitioners (eg, covering sleep education and screening) to mitigate these risk factors and optimise athlete sleep. A one-size-fits-all approach to athlete sleep recommendations (eg, 7–9 hours/night) is unlikely ideal for health and performance. We recommend an individualised approach that should consider the athlete’s perceived sleep needs. Research is needed into the benefits of napping and sleep extension (eg, banking sleep). [full text]
The Guardian, A Mark Williams and Tim Wigmore from
… Failure to manage anxiety and cope with the demands at a crucial moment can lead to a catastrophic drop in performance, known as choking. As the pressure in a match rises, so can an athlete’s anxiety.
Anxiety is a reaction to pressure or stress. It tends to arise during performances that trigger the fear of losing, or fear of damage to your standing. The symptoms of anxiety are psychological – worry and fear – and physiological – including sweaty palms and an increased heart rate. Anxiety uses up attention and working memory, hindering performance.
Athletes find themselves thinking about processes that normally come automatically. This was Boswell’s experience.
One of the best measures of running fitness is lactate threshold (LT), which is the running speed or heart rate at which lactate — an intermediate product of aerobic metabolism in the muscles — begins to accumulate rapidly in the bloodstream. If your training program is working, two things are sure to happen. One is that you will run faster at the point where your blood lactate level spikes. The other is that your heart rate at this threshold will increase (i.e., your lactate threshold heart rate will move closer to your maximum heart rate).
In addition to being useful as a measure of running fitness, lactate threshold is also useful for establishing individual intensity zones for training. That’s because LT happens to fall at a moderate intensity level. Efforts that are more than a little faster than the pace or heart rate that corresponds to LT are defined as high intensity and offer a different set of benefits than moderate-intensity training. Efforts that are more than a little slower than the pace or heart rate that corresponds to LT count as low intensity and offer yet another set of benefits.
State-of-the-art image-classifying AI models trained on ImageNet, a popular (but problematic) dataset containing photos scraped from the internet, automatically learn humanlike biases about race, gender, weight, and more. That’s according to new research from scientists at Carnegie Mellon University and George Washington University, who developed what they claim is a novel method for quantifying biased associations between representations of social concepts (e.g., race and gender) and attributes in images. When compared with statistical patterns in online image datasets, the findings suggest models automatically learn bias from the way people are stereotypically portrayed on the web.
Rezzil, the market-leading VR training & cognitive development tool used by some of the world’s biggest soccer clubs to train their elite players today debuted its home consumer version Rezzil Player 21. Initially available on HTC Vive and Valve index, Rezzil Player 21 has been built with Rezzil’s professional-level VR simulation technology used to train pros in clubs around the globe. After completing their drills, players can see if they are top of the table material by seeing their scores uploaded to the global leaderboards. Rezzil Player 21 is free on Steam and requires VR trackers with straps in order to play.
… “At this point, we know how the virus is transmitted. We know how to create safe environments to prevent transmission. We know how to deploy diagnostic testing to rapidly identify positive individuals. We have better treatments, and there’s a vaccine pipeline that is robust,” Dr. Isaac Bogoch told me last week.
I’ve spoken to Bogoch on a couple of occasions during the pandemic. He’s an infectious diseases physician and scientist with the Toronto General Hospital Research Institute, who has consulted with both the NHL and Major League Soccer players’ associations in helping them develop “return to play” protocols for COVID-19. He also has a charming, clinical ability to tell it like it is, which I appreciate.
… Despite the audacious claims made by hundreds of so-called “anti-aging” products, there’s nothing modern science can do to truly stop the aging process. That said, armed with the right tools, we can come to understand the aging process, which can enable us to take steps that help us age better.
That’s why a team of world-renowned scientists at Elysium Health created the groundbreaking Index Biological Age Test—to help people understand how they’re aging on a cellular level.
Elysium Health was founded by Dr. Leo Guarente, director of the Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research at MIT, in order to explore compelling scientific advancements and landmark discoveries that could lead to proactive health solutions that improve lives. Elysium has partnerships with some of the world’s top universities, including Harvard, Oxford, and MIT, and its scientific advisory board includes not one, not two, not even three, but eight Nobel Laureates. In other words, this isn’t a company selling health gimmicks. Rigorous science is at the core of everything they do.
Yahoo Sports, GO Banking Rates, Joel Anderson from
Pay inequity has fast become one of the most prominent symbols for our society?s systemic sexism. It forces many women to reprioritize their career and life goals ? and can prevent those same women from achieving them altogether. However, it?s important to note that while the gender pay gap is representative of certain broad truths about American society, it can also become very complicated the more specific you get. From industry to industry, office to office, the circumstances that feed into pay inequality are bound to vary ? from direct and outright discrimination to more tacit issues with company culture.
That makes the question of women?s pay equity in sports all the more interesting. Female athletes clearly work just as hard as their male counterparts, but one of the biggest reasons male athletes often net millions in salary while similarly talented women earn a fraction of that comes down to league revenues. As long as the NBA keeps generating more money than the WNBA ? from ticket sales, merchandise and television rights ? player salaries in that league will always be higher.
But even within that context, there are signs that female athletes are still underpaid ? most notably in soccer where members of the U.S. women?s national team earn less than their male counterparts in spite of the team?s higher event revenues and consistent success at the international level. So, what would gender pay equity in sports really look like after considering the differences in how much money each sport earns? Here?s a closer look at some of the factors that are a part of this contentious issue.
For the San Francisco 49ers players remaining from 2018, Thursday’s game probably dredged up many unwanted but familiar feelings.
Decimated by injuries and with the new twist provided by the COVID-19 pandemic making matters worse, the Niners opened Thursday night’s 34-17 blowout loss to the Green Bay Packers with a whopping $80.8 million worth of cap space on injured reserve.
For as much as the 49ers (4-5) wanted to put on a brave face and show the world they shouldn’t be counted out, this overwhelming reality remained: What’s left of these 49ers simply isn’t good enough to keep up with most legitimate playoff contenders.
The NBA season ended just under a month ago with uncertainty around when the 2020-21 season would begin. On Thursday night, the National Basketball Players Association player representatives completed a vote approving a Dec. 22 start date for a 72-game regular season.
Per a report by Adrian Wojnarowski, the NBA and the NBPA will now will finish negotiating the financial terms on an amended collective bargaining agreement, which will take into next week. The trade moratorium is expected to be lifted shortly prior to the 2020 NBA draft on Nov. 18.
… Points per game is the latest compromise inflicted on an already-makeshift schedule. Away teams are mostly traveling to and from opponents’s cities via charter flights on the day of their games. That’s led to a heavily-regionalized slate. Clubs face near-neighbors as often as four times while not even meeting most of the rest of the league even once.
“It is a little bit monotonous,” said New England Revolution head coach Bruce Arena in September. “That’s the reason they expanded the playoffs as well, because the schedule is so unbalanced. It bothers us. When you see the schedule, there are five teams in our conference we don’t play this year. The one thing I guess you can say is an advantage is that you don’t have to do much scouting because you’ve played these teams so many times.”
Making Sense Of: COVID and Football tradeoffs
Cornell University has been held up by Bloomberg News (link) and Inside Higher Ed (link) as a model students-in-attendence campus. Infection test positivity rates have been as low at 0.006% in a recent week. Bloomberg’s writer, Emma Court, a Cornell alum, provided some backstory, explaining the pivotal role of Provost Michael Kotlikoff played, as a veterinary scientist with in-depth understanding of infectious disease and of Cornell facilities he oversaw creation of the school’s COVID testing lab, based in Cornell’s Veterinary College. The University of Notre Dame brought its on-campus testing lab online in late-September. This was before the school’s President, John Jenkins, contracted COVID, testing positive days after attending a crowded, mostly maskless White House event. By mid-October new cases were again spiking at the South Bend school, and Notre Dame announced that the maximum size of any on-campus gathering would be reduced from 20 to 10 people. (MIT research now shows that limiting gatherings to 10 or fewer people reduces super-spreader events.)
It’s probably a mistake to point a huge foam finger and say “Sports Bad!” Stanford University health economist Maria Polyakova makes the point that the pandemic’s negative health impacts have a complicated inter-relationship with the pandemic’s negative economic impacts. Every state, she found, experienced economic damage. “Health damages early on, however, were highly geographically concentrated.” Optimal policy is bound to hurt some more than others. There’s been impressive scientific progress to counter COVID, so much human immuno-chemistry and basic biochemistry and AI-assisted therapies, but the social science lags.