From The Economist
THE Winter Olympics begin in Vancouver in three weeks’ time. An audio guide from our local correspondent tells visitors what to expect of this diverse, temperate city.
“You need to recognise that while we may seem very similar in many respects, Canadians are not exactly like Americans. American executives, for example, are commonly inclined to move quickly and cut right to the chase when advancing a project or coming to a decision. Canadians generally don’t do that.”
From Sam Kean in 3 quarks daily:
Head injuries have dogged the National Football League since its very early days, since even before facemasks. But, donning the proud mantle of tobacco scientists everywhere, the NFL’s experts refused to admit until just a few months ago that it wasn’t a coincidence so many former players ended up with neurological damage by the time they turned fifty. The word going around is that a few skeptical medical men in charge of the NFL’s official investigation into the matter, a team led by one Dr. Ira Casson, had been dismissing the link between concussions and cognitive difficulties. Casson seemed obviously full of crap, and after Congress hog-piled onto the issue to scold the league, the NFL finally dismissed Casson and reevaluated the evidence. It was damning. In one study, coroners discovered that twelve of thirteen former NFL players had a buildup of a plaque in their brains—a plaque—called tau, a snarl of protein that disrupts neuronal function and that has been linked to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. Many of the NFL players died in their forties; another autopsy revealed the beginning of tau tangles in an 18-year-old.
From Jessica Flint, in Vanity Fair
Will Vancouver-born Milan Lucic make Canada’s 2010 Olympic hockey team when the roster is announced on Wednesday? Pray that the Zamboni gods will be so kind: the world wouldn’t want to be denied of what could be an epic Olympic rivalry between the 21-year-old Boston Bruins winger and the Toronto Maple Leafs’ defenseman Mike Komisarek, 27, a contender for a spot on Team U.S.A. In November 2008, when Komisarek was playing for the Montreal Canadiens, the two players exchanged such monster blows that Lucic literally dismantled Komisarek, whose shoulder popped out of its socket, forcing the Habs bruiser to the bench for more than a dozen games. Komisarek retaliated the following April by cross-checking Lucic in the face.
“Hypothetically speaking, let’s say you have a rival in the National Hockey League,” I said to Lucic when I met up with the six-foot-three-inch brawler a few weeks ago at the N.H.L. offices in New York City. “Would that carry over onto an Olympic stage if you are playing for Team Canada and your league rival is playing for, say, Team U.S.A.?”
Lucic’s toothy grin suggested he knew exactly to whom I was alluding. But then again, I could have been referring to any number of players: Lucic got into 13 fights in 2007, his rookie year, leading the Bruins in roughhousing. In his sophomore regular season, his fight card totaled 10. (By comparison, Komisarek, whom Sports Illustrated nominated one of the 12 most rugged players in N.H.L., recorded a total of six fights in the 2007 and 2008 regular seasons.)
From Jessica Flint, in Vanity Fair
The first thing that struck me when I met 2006 Turin silver medalist Gretchen Bleiler earlier this year was how much bad ass is contained in such a little frame. After all, the five-foot-five-inch half-pipe snowboarder is best known for a daredevil trick called the Crippler 540—an inverted aerial move with one and a half rotations and a backflip. “But new for this year will be a Crippler 720,” the 28-year-old e-mailed me last week, “where you rotate 180 degrees more.” Yowsers.
Bleiler was in New York City last summer unveiling her winter 2010 Oakley snowboarding outerwear and clothing line. After having skied Park City wearing her faux-fur-trimmed jacket, flattering snow pants, and super-soft organic T-shirts a few months before, I was looking forward to seeing her new pieces. From the playful urban hints on this season’s coat—including a graffiti graphic and toggle buttons—to snowboarding pants with an adjustable gathered cuff, I nearly forgot that the blonde sartorialist walking me through her stylish collection is also a three-time X Games gold medalist who can throw down tricks that put the word “extreme” in the term “extreme sports.”
From Michael Mewshaw, in The Washington Post
Pro tennis could teach the mafia about omertà. Although dozens of champions have chattered away to ghostwriters, their memoirs have generally remained silent about the game’s seamy realities. Presented to the public as clean family fun, an upscale entertainment for the country-club set, top-level tennis is actually played by the physical and emotional mutants of a misery machine that leaves them too ill-educated or psychically damaged to understand what has happened to their lives. Like most victims of abuse, they’d rather not talk about it.
So it’s both astonishing and a pleasure to report that Andre Agassi, who was castigated for an ad campaign saying “Image is everything,” has produced an honest, substantive, insightful autobiography. True to the genre of jock hagiography, it has its share of stock footage — total recall of famous matches, the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat and an upbeat ending. But the bulk of this extraordinary book vividly recounts a lost childhood, a Dickensian adolescence and a chaotic struggle in adulthood to establish an identity that doesn’t depend on alcohol, drugs or the machinations of PR.
Unfair advantage? Because they produce less force with each step, lightweight sprinting prostheses probably don't give amputee athletes a leg up. Credit: Orthopedic Specialty Hospital
From Michael Torrice in ScienceNOW Daily News.
In 2007, South African double-amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius became the first disabled athlete to compete against able-bodied runners, placing seventh in the British Grand Prix. But his J-shaped carbon-fiber prostheses, called the Össur Flex-Foot Cheetah, sparked a debate within the athletic world: Do the devices give him an unfair advantage over able-bodied competitors? The answer, according to a new study of six amputee sprinters, is no.
Scientists debate whether the Össur Cheetah boosts performance. Some experts believed that Pistorius’s setup would allow him and other amputee sprinters to move their legs faster than able-bodied runners and reach high speeds more easily. But last summer, a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge showed that Pistorius’s prosthetic limbs didn’t generate as much force against the ground as biological legs.
Christopher Green of York University and Ludy Benjamin of Texas A&M University are editors of Psychology Gets in the Game: Sport, Mind, and Behavior, 1880-1960, a new book from the University of Nebraska Press.
Although sport psychology did not fully mature as a recognized discipline until the 1960s, pioneering psychologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, making greater use of empirical research methodologies, sought to understand mental factors that affect athletic performance. Though the psychologists behind the studies described here worked independently of one another and charted their own distinct courses of inquiry, their works, taken together, provided the corpus of precedents and foundations on which the modern field of sport psychology was built. The essays collected in this volume tell the stories not only of these psychologists and their subjects but of the social and academic context that surrounded them, shaping and being shaped by their ideas.
From Malcolm Gladwell at The New Yorker
One evening in August, Kyle Turley was at a bar in Nashville with his wife and some friends. It was one of the countless little places in the city that play live music. He’d ordered a beer, but was just sipping it, because he was driving home. He had eaten an hour and a half earlier. Suddenly, he felt a sensation of heat. He was light-headed, and began to sweat. He had been having episodes like that with increasing frequency during the past year—headaches, nausea. One month, he had vertigo every day, bouts in which he felt as if he were stuck to a wall. But this was worse. He asked his wife if he could sit on her stool for a moment. The warmup band was still playing, and he remembers saying, “I’m just going to take a nap right here until the next band comes on.” Then he was lying on the floor, and someone was standing over him. “The guy was freaking out,” Turley recalled. “He was saying, ‘Damn, man, I couldn’t find a pulse,’ and my wife said, ‘No, no. You were breathing.’ I’m, like, ‘What? What?’ ”
Inhabitat.com’s Bridgette Meinhold reports:
A bubbly new soccer and rugby stadium is popping up in Melbourne that will feature a highly engineered exterior structure combined with many sustainable features. Designed by Cox Architects, the Melbourne Rectangular Stadium is a marvel of architecture and engineering with it’s bubble-like facade inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome. Construction is fully underway, allowing a glimpse into how the cantilevered structure is being put together.
When completed in 2010, the stadium will seat 30,000 spectators as they watch both the Melbourne Victory Soccer Team and the Melbourne Storm Rugby Club. The stadium will also house a sports medicine facility and many administrative offices for the city’s sports organizations. The stadium’s design was inspired by the geodesic dome and it features a unique cantilever design that provides shelter for the spectators without inhibiting their view of the game below. More…
The New York Times‘ Rob Hughes writes:
Cheating in sports has been around a very long time, but is there more of it in the world today? And if there is, surely with modern science we can deal with it?
The sports pages Tuesday were indicative of the trend: The jockey banned for providing inside information to bettors, the motor racer allegedly instructed to deliberately crash to alter the outcome, the rugby player who feigned a blood injury, the dopers in athletics, and, of course, the furor in soccer over top players simulating fouls to obtain penalties by deceit.
On Tuesday, UEFA, which oversees soccer in Europe, banned Eduardo da Silva, the Arsenal forward, for two matches. A disciplinary panel decided to over rule the match referee, by concluding from video evidence that Eduardo deceived the referee into thinking he was tripped by Celtic’s goalkeeper Artur Boruc in the Champions League last week. More…
Richard Pound, 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games Vancouver Organizing Committee, Montréal, Canada
www.SportConference.com
Richard Pound is director of the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games and, since 2007, has been a member of the International Council Arbitration for Sport. He is the founding Chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency (1999-2007) and remains a member of its Foundation board. In February 2008, he was awarded the Laureus “Spirit of Sport” Prize for his work as head of the World Anti-Doping Agency. In addition, Mr. Pound has been named to Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world for his relentless efforts to rid sport of performance- enhancing drugs. More…
Accommodation for the 2010 Sport and Society Conference in Vancouver, Canada may now be booked. Please see the Conference Accommodation webpage for more information.
Professor Barbara Evans, University of British Columbia, Canada
www.SportConference.com
Professor Barbara Evans 
commenced her present appointment as Dean of the Faculty of Graduate Studies at the University of British Columbia in early November 2007. Prior to this Professor Evans was Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research Training) at The University of Melbourne, with particular responsibilities for the oversight of policy, management and quality assurance for research higher degree programs, postgraduate generic skills training and research supervision.
Since 1997, she had also been Dean of the School of Graduate Studies (SGS). Professor Evans has been an invited speaker at many international conferences in the US, Canada, Europe and Asia focused on graduate and research higher degree education, and has been invited to review Graduate Programs at several Australian and international universities due to the School’s excellent reputation. More…
Sir Philip Craven, International Paralympic Committee, UK
www.SportConference.com
Sir Philip Craven MBE was elected President of the International Paralympic Committee in 2001. Under his Presidency the International Paralympic Committee has developed to become one of the leading sports organizations in the world. Sir Philip is also a member of the International Olympic Committee and a Board Member of the London 2012 Organizing Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games.
In addition, Sir Philip serves as the International Paralympic Committee representative in several international organizations including the Foundation Board of the World Anti-Doping Agency and the Administration Council of the International Committee for Fair Play. More…
Samuel Abt of the New York Times reports…
No jokes, please, about that extraordinary bicycle race, the Penal Tour de France, that is wending its way around the country in a pack composed of convicts, prison officials and policemen. Hold the wheezes about how, if a low-ranked rider wins, it will be highway robbery, or, as a tumultuous sprint to the finish develops, somebody will get away with murder. Nothing about how, instead of a yellow jersey, the leader will wear one with black and white stripes. Above all, no references to a breakaway, in French an echappée or, shudder, an escape. Well, maybe one. It comes from Daniel, a 48-year-old prisoner in Nantes, whose last name was not given when the Tour de France Pénitentiaire was announced there last month. More…
Matt Poms of USA Today reports…
A report from the Orlando-based Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport has given the NBA an “A” on its 2009 Racial and Gender Report Card, but showed the league could improve in a few areas. The group, directed by Dr. Richard Lapchick of the University of Central Florida, concluded the league “remains the industry leader on issues related to race and gender hiring practices.” The NBA received a score of 94.9 in the race category, down slightly from its record high of 96.2 last year, and an 89 for gender. That mark was the highest in league history and rose from 84.5 last year. The report praised NBA commissioner David Stern, noting he has “taken the lead on diversity issues in sports.” Under Stern’s watch this past season, 35% of employees in the NBA league offices were people of color, and 43% were women. More…
More than 700 rooms will be based below the podium level of the Stadium, including eight changing rooms and an 82m track in the west stand for athletes to use when warming-up. Since last May, construction has included installing more than 4,500 reinforced concrete columns into the ground, up to 20m deep, to provide the foundations for the Stadium structure. Twelve of the 85-tonne steel roof sections have been lifted into place and the remaining 16 will be in place by the end of 2009. The first permanent footbridge to the Stadium ‘island’ has been lifted into place and work on the supports of the other four bridges has begun. More…
A Texas Rangers fan sporting a “Yankees Suck” t-shirt, claims she was almost ejected from Tuesday’s game against the Bronx Bombers at Rangers Ballpark in Arlington, Texas.
Kristen Knapp-Webb, of Carrollton, said a security guard approached her and demanded that she turn her t-shirt inside out, or face being kicked out of the game altogether. She says the guard told her that the Texas Rangers organization considered the shirt to be inappropriate because of the profanity. More…
The seven teams in the newly launched Women’s Professional Soccer league are about two months into their inaugural season, playing in front of crowds that average about 5,400 and in front of viewers tuning into the Fox Soccer Channel. The league’s initial success is just part of the reason for high hopes that this league will thrive, according to Commissioner Tonya Antonucci, who spoke to the annual convention of the Association for Women in Sports Media in Philadelphia on Saturday.
To read more…http://sportsmediasociety.blogspot.com/2009/05/womens-pro-sports-can-gender-really-be.html