“Many people think I am crazy. I think also I am crazy,” Sifan Hassan said after winning gold in the 1,500-meter race at Tokyo 2020 on Monday. That’s because the 28-year-old Dutch runner has set her sights on a historic treble: winning a medal in the 1,500-, 5,000- and 10,000-meter races.
No one in Olympic history has completed a medals medley across a middle-distance event and both long-distance races in a single Games. Hassan, who was born in Ethiopia but fled to the Netherlands as a refugee when she was a teen, wants three golds. But a medal of any color in each event would be unprecedented. To do so, she will cover 24.5 kilometers (15.2 miles) on the Olympic Stadium track and run six races across eight days.
Yahoo Sports, Detroit Free Press, Evan Petzold from
Right-handed reliever Kyle Funkhouser isn’t exactly Casey Mize or Tarik Skubal — the 24-year-old starting pitchers with innings limits this season — but the Detroit Tigers are still taking a cautious approach with one of their most promising bullpen arms.
Manager AJ Hinch wants Mize, Skubal, Funkhouser and other pitchers without an abundance of big-league experience to pitch through September, but he doesn’t want to risk injuries by overtaxing them in the jump from a 60-game schedule in 2020 to 162 games in 2021.
There’s not an exact science to the process.
“You never know what each guy can handle or what they can’t handle,” Hinch said Thursday. “You got to use your judgment in how you’re using them. First and foremost, I want to win as many games as we can, but I want to do it with guys that are pitching the full season for the first time in their career.”
In 1981, Milt Wagner was an 18-year-old shooting guard from Camden, New Jersey, who made the McDonald’s All-American Team.
Twenty years later, in 2001, Dajuan Wagner emerged from Camden as a genre-morphing combo guard who was not only a McDonald’s All-American but also rated the No. 1 boys basketball recruit in the country.
And now, with another 20 years passed, Dajuan Wagner Jr. has blossomed into the No. 1 recruit in the Class of 2023. He turned 16 in May. The boy they call D.J. is the pride of Camden, just as his father and grandfather were in their own eras.
SI.com, Fan Nation, All Lions blog, Christian Booher from
When the Detroit Lions announced Thursday’s practice would be a walkthrough, it raised some eyebrows. After two practices in full pads, the decision to scale back was an interesting one.
However, this is something head coach Dan Campbell said was in the plans. After two full speed padded practices that featured close to full contact, Campbell is lightening the workload during Thursday morning’s practice.
“I knew, leading into this week, this would be a tough week for (the players),” Campbell said. “I told them early in the week, and I put it up, and I said, ‘Listen. We come off the day off, it’s very much like an acclimation day, which was Monday. And then we’re gonna red line you for two days, full pads.’ Which we did. And then I said I’m gonna back way off on Thursday.”
In the past decades, researchers have extensively studied (elite) athletes’ physiological responses to understand how to maximize their endurance performance. In endurance sports, whole-body measurements such as the maximal oxygen consumption, lactate threshold, and efficiency/economy play a key role in performance. Although these determinants are known to interact, it has also been demonstrated that athletes rarely excel in all three. The leading question is how athletes reach exceptional values in one or all of these determinants to optimize their endurance performance, and how such performance can be explained by (combinations of) underlying physiological determinants. In this review, we advance on Joyner and Coyle’s conceptual framework of endurance performance, by integrating a meta-analysis of the interrelationships, and corresponding effect sizes between endurance performance and its key physiological determinants at the macroscopic (whole-body) and the microscopic level (muscle tissue, i.e., muscle fiber oxidative capacity, oxygen supply, muscle fiber size, and fiber type). Moreover, we discuss how these physiological determinants can be improved by training and what potential physiological challenges endurance athletes may face when trying to maximize their performance. This review highlights that integrative assessment of skeletal muscle determinants points toward efficient type-I fibers with a high mitochondrial oxidative capacity and strongly encourages well-adjusted capillarization and myoglobin concentrations to accommodate the required oxygen flux during endurance performance, especially in large muscle fibers. Optimisation of endurance performance requires careful design of training interventions that fine tune modulation of exercise intensity, frequency and duration, and particularly periodisation with respect to the skeletal muscle determinants. [full text]
Professional golfer Alena Sharp started getting “the yips” whenever she would try to putt. She experienced severe anxiety and physical tension that crept up her arms and into her jaw. So she started using a technique called “quiet eye,” which not only improved her aim but also helped her calm her body and mind.
In this episode of our documentary series The Mental Games, we explore what may be happening in the brain during quiet eye. And we learn how everyone, from surgeons to pilots and even toddlers, might benefit from using this technique. [video, 9:02]
One of the joys of watching the Olympics is seeing the speed, strength and grace of the competitors. It’s amazing how the best athletes in the world make it look easy, but for anyone with personal experience in a particular sport, there’s an appreciation for the hard work, sacrifice and dedication that goes into producing medal-winning performances.
Given the high standards of Olympic competition, it’s not surprising that coaches and athletes look for any possible advantage — from dietary regimens to equipment innovations and novel training methods — to maximize the chances of success.
One of the more recent tools in the Olympic arsenal is wearable technology, which many of us are familiar. Devices such as Fitbit, Garmin, Polar and the Apple watch allow us to measure and track various aspects of our health and performance.
Wearable tech was especially useful to keep track of athletes when training grounds were shut down because of the pandemic. The English Premier League used it to keep track of their players during remote training after the country went into lockdown.
… the total investment in SportsTech startups until June 2021 has already crossed $5b, surpassing the total amount invested in any of the last 5 years. In fact it has crossed the total amount invested in any year ever! At least since 2000, from we’ve been recording this data and we’re pretty sure it will cover any previous year as well.
As mentioned in last year’s VC report, SportsTech investment has usually followed a pattern of high and lows. So after a low in 2019 followed the previous record in 2018, much was expected from 2020. And though the pandemic affected things significantly, it was still a very strong year. Now it seems like the high we were expecting has finally arrived in 2021 and we still have half a year left to see where the peak actually is.
So what’s fueled this rocket ship? After taking a closer look at the data, here are our 3 key takeaways
The designer behind the lightning fast Olympic Stadium track in Tokyo has said it gives a 1-2% performance advantage to athletes, making it the quickest in history.
Super spikes, hot weather and the track have all been cited as contributing to a number of sensational times, with the Norwegian Karsten Warholm becoming the latest to leave jaws dropping by breaking the 400m hurdles world record as he became the first man to go under 46 seconds.
Andrea Vallauri, track designer for Mondo, said the new surface made a far greater difference than most realised. “Every time there is an Olympic Games we try to improve the formulation of the material and Tokyo has been no different,” he said. “The track is very thin, 14mm. But we have added a new element: these rubber granules.
… Scientists are interested in learning more about circadian rhythms in order to help people know the best times of day to sleep, eat, exercise or take medications. But traditionally these studies involve participants living in a time-isolation clinic for several days, where researchers control light and dark periods.
But now researchers from the University of Michigan propose a new method to understand people’s circadian rhythms using wearable smartwatches.
The NCAA has released guidance for fall training and competition amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2021 Fall Training and Competition document includes testing, quarantine, isolation, and other athletic and nonathletic activity considerations for unvaccinated and fully vaccinated Tier 1 individuals. As previously defined, Tier 1 individuals are those with the highest exposure (for example, student-athletes, coaches, athletic trainers, physical therapists, medical staff, equipment staff and officials).
“Current vaccination rates remain inadequate to provide community-level immunity,” NCAA Chief Medical Officer Brian Hainline said. “It is essential that member schools work in concert with federal, state and local public health officials to develop COVID-19 prevention and management strategies that make sense for them.”
Trends over time in the incidence of ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) surgeries in National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I baseball players are currently unknown. Purpose/Hypothesis:
The purpose of this study was to evaluate the trends in UCL surgeries over 3 years in Division I baseball programs. We hypothesized that surgical injuries would be consistently high over the course of the study. Study Design:
Descriptive epidemiology study. Methods:
Athletic trainers from Division I baseball programs were invited to participate in an electronic survey over 3 seasons. A total of 155 baseball programs agreed to participate in 2017, 294 programs participated in 2018, and 296 programs participated in 2019. After each of the 3 collegiate baseball seasons, the athletic trainer from each program entered anonymous, detailed descriptive data and surgical information on injured players into a secured database. Results:
During the 3 years of this study, 100% of the enrolled programs successfully completed the survey (155/155 in year 1, 294/294 in year 2, and 296/296 in year 3). This registry of 745 completed surveys over 3 years represented 25,587 player-years from Division I collegiate baseball. The percentage of programs with at least 1 UCL surgery during this time was 57% in 2017, 51% in 2018, and 49% in 2019. The majority of these players were pitchers (84% overall from the 3 years). Seniors underwent a significantly lower percentage of the UCL surgeries (8% in 2017, 10% in 2018, and 13% in 2019) than did underclassmen. Surgeries were performed most often in-season and least often during the preseason. A slight majority of players undergoing surgery originated from warm-weather states, but the number of these players was never significantly higher than was the number of players from cold-weather states. Most surgeries performed each year were UCL reconstruction, but the percentage of UCL repair with ligament augmentation increased each year (10% UCL repairs in 2017, 20% in 2018, and 25% in 2019). Conclusion:
UCL injuries requiring surgery were found to be a major source of morbidity in Division I collegiate baseball, supporting our hypothesis. This study can serve as a baseline for tracking long-term trends in UCL surgeries in collegiate baseball.
Few college football coaches know the mental and physical grind that comes with navigating a long postseason better than Chris Klieman.
The Kansas State coach was formerly at FCS juggernaut North Dakota State, whose teams routinely compete for national titles in a division where that means playing 15-plus games per season.
“It’s a grind to play 16 games or 15 games a year,” Klieman said. “We did it for eight straight years. But when you’re competing to try to win a championship, you kind of find a way to get through it. We protected the guys in practice the best we could.”
Japan’s summers are hot, humid, and can be deadly. If records are being broken during events at the Olympics, Tokyo 2020 could also emerge with perhaps a record it wouldn’t have wanted.
Before the pandemic, heat stroke was the biggest risk to athletes for the Tokyo Olympics, but during the first week of the Games the heat has been compounded by humidity values ranging from 66 to 84%, making it feel much hotter, and limiting the body’s ability to cool down through sweat and evaporation.
“When you take into account not only the temperature, but also humidity, I would say that a Tokyo Summer is the worst in the history of Olympics,” says Makoto Yokohari, professor of environment and urban planning at the University of Tokyo and adviser to Tokyo 2020, who spoke to CNN before the Games started.
PLOS One; Luca Pappalardo, Alessio Rossi, Michela Natilli, Paolo Cintia from
Women’s football is gaining supporters and practitioners worldwide, raising questions about what the differences are with men’s football. While the two sports are often compared based on the players’ physical attributes, we analyze the spatio-temporal events during matches in the last World Cups to compare male and female teams based on their technical performance. We train an artificial intelligence model to recognize if a team is male or female based on variables that describe a match’s playing intensity, accuracy, and performance quality. Our model accurately distinguishes between men’s and women’s football, revealing crucial technical differences, which we investigate through the extraction of explanations from the classifier’s decisions. The differences between men’s and women’s football are rooted in play accuracy, the recovery time of ball possession, and the players’ performance quality. Our methodology may help journalists and fans understand what makes women’s football a distinct sport and coaches design tactics tailored to female teams. [full text]