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Athlete articles

Post by Kriegsspiel » Tue Feb 19, 2019 2:18 pm

It’s More Than Just the Shot - Steph Curry

Neat article. I love deeper in depth training articles like this.
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Re: Athlete articles

Post by Kriegsspiel » Wed Feb 20, 2019 6:16 pm

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Post by Kriegsspiel » Wed Jul 03, 2019 4:46 pm

In August 2004, a small group of scientists at the venerable Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) bet all their chips on the primacy of general, non-sport-specific athleticism

The AIS scientists had a year and a half to try to qualify a woman for the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, in the winter sport of skeleton, in which the athlete begins by running down the ice with one or two hands on a sled and then, in a leap fairly like the disco move "the worm," gets on board and careens down an ice-coated track face-first on her stomach at more than seventy miles per hour.

The Aussie scientists had never even seen the sport, but they had learned that the beginning sprint accounts for about half of the variation in total race time. So they announced a nationwide call for women who could fit snugly on a tiny sled and who could sprint. Thus began Australia's Winter Olympics equivalent of American Idol, and it would draw commesurate media attention Down Under.

Based on written applications, twenty-six athletes were invited to the AIS in Canberra in SE Australia to undergo physical tests in the hope of earning one of ten funded training spots. The women came from track, gymnastics, water skiing, and surf lifesaving, a popular sport in Australia that mixes open-water rowing and kayaking, surf paddling, swimming, and footraces in the sand. Not one woman had heard of skeleton, much less tried it.

Five of the ten spots were filled solely based on the 30-meter sprint, the other five by consensus of the scientists and AIS coaches, based on how well the athletes did in a dry land test during which they had to jump on a sled fitted with wheels.

As far as the world skeleton community was concerned, the project was a doomed sideshow. "Everyone in the sport told us, 'You guys will never succeed.' says Jason Gulbin, then a physiologist at the AIS. "They told us, 'it's a real feel thing. It's an art. You need time in this sport.' The biggest naysayers were really the coaches from other countries."

The women of the AIS project certainly had no feel for the ice, but they were outstanding all-around athletes. Melissa Hoar had won a world championship title in the beach-racing category of surf lifesaving. Emma Sheers had been a world water skiing champion. "It was a real curiousity," Gulbin says, "to dump basically beach babes in skeleton who had never done it before."

After selection, it was time to find out whether the women could actually get down the ice, bones intact. The scientists swalled their nerves and headed to Calgary at the start of the winter season for the first runs on ice. It didn't take a Ph. D. to evaluate the results.

Within three slides, the newbies were recording the fastest runs in Australian history, faster than the previous national record holder, who had had years of training. "That first week on the track, it was all over," says Gulbin. "The writing was on the wall."

So much for needing a feel for the ice. Suddenly, the initial helpfulness became standoffishness as rival skeleton athletes and coaches realized they stood to be displaced or embarrased by women they had previously viewed as rank novices.

Ten weeks after she first set foot on ice, Melissa Hoar bested about half the field at the world U23 skeleton championships. (She won the title in her next try.) And beach sprinter Michelle Steele made it all the way to the Winter Olympics in Italy.

The AIS scientists chronicled the program's success in an aptly titled paper: "Ice Novice to Winter Olympian in 14 Months."

Australia, a world sports powerhouse, has thrived off talent identification and "talent transfer," the switching of athletes between sports. In 1994, as part of the run-up to the 2000 Sydney Olympics, the country launched its National Talent Search program. Children ages 14-16 were examined in school for body size and tested for general athleticism. Australia, home to 19.1 million people at the time, won 58 medals in Sydney. That's 3.03 medals for every million citizens, nearly 10 times the relative haul of the United States, which took home 0.33 medals per million Americans.

As part of the Australian talent search, some athletes were ushered away from the sports in which they had experience into unfamiliar ones that better suited them. In 1994, Alisa Camplin, who had previously competed in gymnastics, track and field, and sailing, was converted into an aerial skier. Camplin was an outstanding all-around athlete but had never even seen snow. On her first jump ever she broke a rib. On her second, she hit a tree. "Everyone thought it was a joke," Camplin told Australia's Channel Nine TV network. "They told me I was too old. They told me I started too late." But by 1997, Camplin was competing on the World Cup circuit. At the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, despite breaking both her ankles six weeks earlier, Camplin won the gold medal. Even after that victory, watching the sparsely experienced Camplin on skis was like watching a giraffe on roller skates. She crushed her victory flowers when she fell trying to ski down the mountain to the gold medal winner's press conference.

- from The Sports Gene by David Epstein
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Re: Athlete articles

Post by sweetbthescrivener » Fri Jul 05, 2019 11:14 am

I was a Golden State Warriors fan as a kid, and that was a pretty tough thing to be for years, seeing as how the Warriors had a talent for drafting players, then trading them away to teams that would go on to win the championship; they also had a talent for passing in the draft on players who would become mega-superstars. Or, they would pick up players with drug problems, age problems, or injuries while giving away the farm.

I find it hard to root for the current smug and shiny Warriors, I must say, having been so loyal for decades to a team that was a loser, but it was our loser.

It turns out all this time, I was actually a boiling frog. I knew it was bad, but had no idea how truly terrible the management was at the team of my childhood. I had an incremental sense of failure.

Then I came across this article from a few years ago in Grantland, where all of the management failure were put together in one handy reference article.

If you have an appreciation for the truly terrible, you will love this litany of missed opportunities and bad ideas. It turns poor management into an art form. They chronicle the missteps of my team right up to the time the acquired Curry.

"How to Annoy a Fan Base in 60 Easy Steps

https://grantland.com/features/how-anno ... asy-steps/
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Re: Athlete articles

Post by Kriegsspiel » Mon Aug 12, 2019 7:16 am

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Re: Athlete articles

Post by Kriegsspiel » Sat Dec 14, 2019 6:38 am

College Football’s Best Player Doesn’t Set Foot on a College Campus Much
LSU quarterback Joe Burrow, who is likely to win the Heisman Trophy on Saturday, is a graduate transfer who takes his classes online
. . . all MALA students take “some combination of web-based and/or in-person courses” and that online classes are common within LSU’s graduate schools. Approximately 17% of the 5,750 graduate students registered at the university are enrolled exclusively in “distance education,” according to the National Center for Education Statistics. A further 5% of graduate students take some combination of online and in-person classes.

The move has worked out famously for all involved. Burrow is perhaps the most talented quarterback in LSU history and the 2019 Heisman Trophy front-runner. The Ohio native forever endeared himself to the Tigers’ rabid fan base by trotting onto the field before the Texas A&M game in a Cajun-inspired “Burreaux” jersey. He then hung 352 passing yards and three touchdowns on the Aggies in just over three quarters.

But this hero of the LSU campus is also a stranger to the LSU campus.

“Since he’s been here I’ve never seen him on campus,” said junior center Lloyd Cushenberry III, Burrow’s upstairs neighbor in Baton Rouge. “He likes to go in his room, play Xbox Rocket League. Or he’s watching documentaries on space or something.”

. . .

“He eats in the cafeteria with us, but after, Joe goes in his little habitat and it’s over with. Nobody is connecting with Joe after that,” said wide receiver Justin Jefferson, in the locker room after LSU’s 37-10 win over No. 4 Georgia in last Saturday’s Southeastern Conference Championship.

When asked whether he knew where Burrow lived, Jefferson shook his head and relayed the question to fellow standout receiver Ja’Marr Chase.

“Hell no!” replied Chase. “We’ve been trying to get him to come out for some time. But he don’t do nothing.”

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Joe Burrow is a Northerner, born in Iowa, and raised in Ohio where his dad coached for Ohio University. Maybe he's just not a fan of the oppressive southern climate :P
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Re: Athlete articles

Post by Kriegsspiel » Thu May 07, 2020 4:37 pm

The placebo effect is well known for its medical benefits, but there is evidence it could give athletes an edge, too.

The Pico Simón Bolívar is one of the highest mountains in Colombia. Near the top, there is only half as much oxygen as at sea level, a dizzying 5,500m (18,000 feet) below. The air up there makes it hard to walk and causes fatigue and headaches, so the body tries to adapt: breathing rate increases, the heart beats faster and blood vessels expand to get more oxygen to tissues.

As you might expect, giving someone an oxygen tank to breathe from will reverse these changes. They’ll quickly feel less tired and their head will stop pounding as their heart rate and breathing return to normal. What you wouldn’t expect is that you can achieve exactly the same thing if the oxygen tank is a fake – it’s empty.

Fabrizio Benedetti is the scientist behind these experiments. Based in Italy at the University of Turin, he has given people placebo oxygen on mountains in Colombia, Alaska and his laboratory in the Alps and observed the same thing –fake oxygen tanks can mimic the effects of the real thing. link
Because 2020, I wonder how much placebo contributes to corona cases? If you REALLY believe you're sick, will you be sicker?
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Re: Athlete articles

Post by Kriegsspiel » Sat Sep 26, 2020 6:41 am

https://twitter.com/david_perell/status ... 7428702208

Bryson DeChambeau has been my favorite golfer for years. Even when I wasn't really into golf (and he wasn't really that good) ^-^ Intuitive respect for the weirdness, I guess.

Now he's put on 50 lbs and is the best golfer in the world.

Image



* BTW, getting that gif was a horror show. Not recommended.
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Re: Athlete articles

Post by Kriegsspiel » Thu Nov 10, 2022 6:08 am

Female college athletes are making millions thanks to their large social media followings. But some who have fought for equity in women’s sports worry that their brand building is regressive. link
I don't see the problem here. Yass queens!, etc.
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Re: Athlete articles

Post by dualstow » Thu Nov 10, 2022 8:00 am

O0
RIP Marcello Gandini
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Re: Athlete articles

Post by Mountaineer » Thu Nov 10, 2022 8:23 am

I always suspected many of you guys were big athletic supporters. ;)
DNA has its own language (code), and language requires intelligence. There is no known mechanism by which matter can give birth to information, let alone language. It is unreasonable to believe the world could have happened by chance.
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Re: Athlete articles

Post by Kriegsspiel » Tue Jan 31, 2023 4:23 pm

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