By a simple food-in/energy-out model, a run on the treadmill or swim in the pool should make you want to eat more. But recent findings have suggested that exercise can actually help to slow overeating. And a new study presents evidence that the body’s physiologic response to exercise can help retune the nervous system’s cues and make the body feel less hungry, rather than more so.
Hunger is a complex sensation, but it is determined in part by neurons located in the hypothalamus, which send signals to the brain telling it that you’re either hungry or sated.
South Williamsport, Pa. — This week, after notching its only victory at the Little League World Series, the team representing Europe went to an interview room under Lamade Stadium. Only a few reporters turned out to speak with the manager, Gary Harrington, and two of his players.
Still, thousands probably saw Harrington’s grin and heard him say, “Our goal was to come here and have fun, which we definitely did.” The interview was available live on broadband. It was carried by an emerging Web site, based in Alpharetta, Ga., called Youth Sports Live.
People love sports traditions because they unite an entire fanbase. Traditions transcend individuals and connect the owners to the players to the fans to the security guards.
Each tradition is special in its own way. Whether it was started long ago or came about by accident or just by chance, each tradition keeps a special place in sports fans’ hearts and remains an expression of loyalty to their team, or to athletics in general.
For any practitioner of Zen who imagines he has achieved a state of detached equanimity, the ultimate test must be to watch his national side play at soccer’s World Cup. That England’s team is dull, I tell myself after the first game, I can handle; that they are truly dire, I reflect after the second and third, is perhaps only par for the course. When, in their first knockout match, England goes 2–0 down to a fluent and attractive Germany, it seems the perfect opportunity for resignation and acceptance.
In honor of Spain’s World Cup victory, n+1 contributor Eli S. Evans introduces and translates a Juan José Millás column from El País:
On Sunday Spain’s soccer team won the World Cup for the first time, initiating a nationwide party that will probably last through the week. While such a victory, and the resulting celebration, may indeed lift spirits from Barcelona to Madrid, it will not change the fact that, thanks to some two decades of rampant real estate speculation and unregulated lending, Spain finds itself in the midst of arguably its worst economic crisis since the end of the Franco dictatorship. With that rather cruel irony in mind, I offer a translation of an El País column by Juan José Millás, published exactly one week before the World Cup opening ceremony. Among Spain’s most celebrated contemporary novelists, Millás is no less celebrated for his work as a literary journalist. He is known for his deceptively simple, mercilessly incisive commentaries on politics and daily life.
London - There was a time when the discreet men in blazers who run Lord’s cricket ground in London would have considered it an abomination to equate baseball with cricket in any fashion. Yet, there it is, an exhibition behind the famed Lord’s pavilion, cricket’s holy of holies, celebrating the similarities — and, in case anybody thought cricket’s traditionalists had run up the white flag, the differences — between cricket and baseball.
In witness of how much has changed in English attitudes toward America’s national game, the exhibition is being jointly hosted by the Marylebone Cricket Club, for more than 200 years the rule maker in worldwide cricket, and the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. The Hall of Fame will host the exhibit beginning next April, representing baseball’s own start on coming to terms with a game that many baseball enthusiasts have long loved to disparage.
One night in 1942, Nikolai Starostin, founder of the Spartak Moscow football club, woke to find a torch shining in his eyes and two pistols pointed at his head. He had spent years waiting for his arrest; Lavrenty Beria, head of Stalin’s secret police and director of Dinamo Moscow football club, did not like him. He was taken to the Lubianka for long interrogations. Among other things, he was accused of conspiring with the German Embassy to assassinate Stalin and set up a Fascist state. In the end he and his three brothers were convicted of theft, swindling and bribery. They each got ten years in Siberia – such a mild sentence that it was practically a let-off. ‘The future seemed not so gloomy after all,’ Starostin wrote in a memoir. He knew why he’d been so fortunate. The Starostins ‘personified Spartak. Beria had to deal with the hopes of millions of fans, ordinary Soviet people.’
On a long July afternoon in 1966, in north-west London, England’s footballers won the World Cup. By the time they beat West Germany, after extra time, with the help of a dubious goal, it was too late for the early editions of the Sunday papers. Only on the Monday was Fleet Street able to register the moment in its full glory. The Mirror, then the most popular daily ever published in Britain, with sales of 5m, knew a piece of history when it saw one. Its front-page splash proudly announced: A BOUNCING BABY GIRL FOR PRINCESS ALEX. Winning the World Cup was not as big as the birth of Marina Ogilvy, the Queen’s first cousin once removed.
The Sun didn’t lead with the football either, preferring a story about a pay squeeze; for weeks there had been a sterling crisis, and the prime minister, Harold Wilson, had loomed far larger than any footballer. Even the two papers’ sports pages, which in those days were tucked inside, went less than crazy. The Mirror had two pages reflecting on the final, the Sun a little less. In the broadsheets, two-thirds of a page did the job, as it had done throughout the tournament. Three months earlier Time magazine had run its famous cover on Swinging London. And yet, even as London swung, and Britain’s bright young things, led by the Beatles, conquered the Western world, it was as if the national mood was still being dictated by Rudyard Kipling: if you can meet with triumph and disaster, and treat those twin impostors just the same…
The vuvuzela is the symbol of the 2010 World Cup. It’s a one metre plastic trumpet, something like the Brazilian corneta, really loud and raucous. At its best a vuvuzela sounds like a fog horn.
Everyone has a vuvuzela. In their tens of thousands, in the beautiful new soccer stadiums, they have the sonic effect of massed rocket launchers, deafening foreign players and commentators. The locals are already deaf. You also hear vuvuzelas blown on the streets everywhere in Cape Town, and in houses, in hotel rooms, on the upper floor balconies of the bars on Long Street as the procession of fans goes by every evening.
Look, can we get this straight, right from the get-go, from the first whistle: It’s football, O.K.? Football. Not soccer. It’s never been soccer. Nobody but midwestern cougars calls it soccer. Soccer is a late-19th-century English-university slang word that’s an abbreviation of “association,” as in “association football,” to distinguish it from “Rugby football,” which, incidentally, is the origin of the game Americans call football, first played by Ivy League toff boys in 1867. In French, it’s le football. In German, it’s Fuβball. In Spanish, it’s fútbol. In Russian, it’s фymбoл. Though, weirdly, in Italian it’s calcio, from the Latin for “heel.” You may, if you really insist, call it “footie.” It also universally, and without contradiction or cultural snobbery, answers to the appellation “the Beautiful Game.”
The football World Cup is, by a country mile, a long hop, an eagle, a furlong, and the whole nine yards, the greatest sporting event in the world, ever. It’s been estimated that more than 715 million people watched the cup final in 2006. By the way, that’s almost 10 times the number that watched the Super Bowl that year. Two hundred and four nations tried to qualify for this year’s World Cup (for 32 spots). To put that in perspective, there are only 192 in the United Nations.
The 2010 FIFA world cup inspired one of the largest consolidated research exercises in South Africa in years. Culminating in a 2009 book, Development and Dreams, the research found the economic benefits of the global tournament had been wildly over-stated but its infrastructure and social legacies would be considerable, said co-editor Dr Udesh Pillay.
Development and Dreams: The urban legacy of the 2010 World Cup pulled together four years of research co-funded by the Development Bank of Southern Africa and led by the Centre for Service Delivery of the Human Sciences Research Council, or HSRC, which published the book. Pillay is the centre’s director.
Today, infographic powerhouse The New York Times has entered this emerging arena as well: their blog “Goal” [goal.blogs.nytimes.com] now features a new data analysis module that delivers detailed football match information in real-time, after which it acts as a detailed interactive archive once the game has finished. A live module also appears on the homepage of The New York Times - Global Edition.
In what seems to be a simple re-skin of the Sprint Widget Mosaic Dashboard, the Castrol 2010 Football World Cup Cup Live Tracker [castrolfootball.com] displays all sorts of real-time soccer trivia and sports statistics about the current tournament. From the “total amount of goals” so far, over the “amount of energy burnt by all players”, to the “number of cards issued”, Castrol claims there a lot of “live insights” to be made through exploring this uber-widget dashboard.
Only days before the start of the World Cup, South Africans seem as anxious about the planet’s biggest soccer festival as they are excited. In a torn country, threats of strikes and uprisings by the poor have put a damper on euphoria. Some groups may use the spectacle to further their own interests.
Peter is a gas station attendant in Springbok, the capital of South Africa’s Namaqualandes region, which is famous for its wildflowers. It’s only a short distance from the border with Namibia, but you get the first sense here of the football fever that’s about to explode across the nation. Hardly any flags can be seen, only a few fans have decorated the mirrors of their cars in the country’s colors, and there aren’t many people passing through with Bafana-Bafana shirts — Springbok is not like the big cities.
Creative agency iris has unveiled Wenlock (right) and Mandeville (left), the mascots for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
The two characters are based on blobs of steel used to make the girders for the Olympic stadium, and feature headlights derived from the hire light on London taxis.
Wenlock, the mascot of the Olympic Games, is named after the English town of Much Wenlock, which inspired Baron Pierre de Coubertin to found the modern Olympic movement.
Mandeville, the mascot of the Paralympics, is named after the town of Stoke Mandeville, the birthplace of the Paralympic Games.
We recently solicited your questions for sports economists David Berri and Martin Schmidt, whose new book, Stumbling on Wins, explores the statistics of sports vicory and the mistakes that teams make.
Your questions were particularly good for this Q&A, and Berri and Schmidt avidly took the bait, covering topics like draft strategy, inefficient scoring in the NBA, and salary caps. Thanks to all for your participation.
The qualities that set a great athlete apart from the rest of us lie not just in the muscles and the lungs but also between the ears. That’s because athletes need to make complicated decisions in a flash. One of the most spectacular examples of the athletic brain operating at top speed came in 2001, when the Yankees were in an American League playoff game with the Oakland Athletics. Shortstop Derek Jeter managed to grab an errant throw coming in from right field and then gently tossed the ball to catcher Jorge Posada, who tagged the base runner at home plate. Jeter’s quick decision saved the game—and the series—for the Yankees. To make the play, Jeter had to master both conscious decisions, such as whether to intercept the throw, and unconscious ones. These are the kinds of unthinking thoughts he must make in every second of every game: how much weight to put on a foot, how fast to rotate his wrist as he releases a ball, and so on.
In recent years neuroscientists have begun to catalog some fascinating differences between average brains and the brains of great athletes. By understanding what goes on in athletic heads, researchers hope to understand more about the workings of all brains—those of sports legends and couch potatoes alike.
If you go by the official record, Sherri Murrell of Portland State University is the only lesbian coach in Division I women’s basketball. She is, after all, the first and only coach to come out. The first and only, out of more than 350 teams.
One lesbian coach. Do you believe it?
Coach Murrell herself said that fear is thick for other gay coaches. “There’s a lot of negative recruiting going on right now,” she said in a recent interview. That is, coaches competing for the best talent will dismiss another program as being a haven for dykes, playing on the homophobia of prospective athletes and their families, and so make their own program supposedly more appealing.
Fans of sports underdogs have had an amazing run these past few months. In February, the New Orleans Saints won their first-ever Super Bowl, an upset victory over the invincible Colts. At the beginning of April, a little-known college from the Midwest made it to the NCAA basketball title game against the hated Blue Devils. (When the kids from Butler finally lost, the papers called them “triumphant in defeat.”) And more recently, the Oklahoma City Thunder very nearly forced the defending champion Los Angeles Lakers to a seventh game in the first round of the NBA playoffs.
Reason tells us this run will soon be over—underdogs are underdogs because they usually lose. I wasn’t the only one whose heart sank when Butler’s final shot rimmed out, and I won’t suffer alone when Oklahoma City gets bumped from the playoffs. We all share in the occasional joy—and more frequent misery—of rooting for the improbable.
Surrounded by women athletes and Olympians Vice President Biden announced today that the Obama administration is rolling back a controversial Title IX compliance requirement enacted under the Bush administration.
“Making Title IX as strong as possible is a no-brainer,” Biden said this afternoon at an event at George Washington University. “What we’re doing here today will better ensure equal opportunity in athletics, and allow women to realize their potential - so this nation can realize its potential.”
The Phoenix Suns sported a different type of jersey Wednesday night while playing in the NBA playoffs. The black jerseys were emblazoned with the words “Los Suns”. It was the team’s way of protesting the recently-signed controversial Arizona immigration law. Host Michel Martin speaks with Sports Illustrated writer Pablo Torre about last night’s game and the unprecedented mix of sports and politics on the court.
MICHEL MARTIN, host:
Last night, the debate over Arizona’s tough new immigration law shifted to the courts, or I should say the court the basketball court, that is. The Phoenix Suns protested the immigration restrictions in their home state by sporting a new jersey that reads Los Suns during last night’s playoff game. They won, by the way. They defeated the San Antonio Spurs.
Sports Illustrated writer Pablo Torre joins us now from New York to talk about this unusual mix of sports and politics. Welcome back. Thanks for joining us.
Mr. PABLO TORRE (Writer, Sports Illustrated): Thanks, Michel.
In two short years, ESPN Films has become an industry heavyweight in the genre of sports filmmaking. Beginning in 2008 with the Peabody-winning documentary Black Magic and continuing with the ambitious launch of 30 for 30, the unprecedented documentary series featuring 30 of today’s finest storytellers bringing to life 30 of the most remarkable sports stories from 1979 to 2009. ESPN Films has been able to break away from what was traditionally thought of as a sports film. They’ve reimagined the genre, and by showcasing stories of passion, triumph, and loss the resurgence of sports-themed films has never been stronger.
The tough thing about winning a silver medal in the Olympic ice-hockey tournament is that, unlike the gold- and bronze-medal teams, the second-place team earns its spot on the podium by losing a game.
“I don’t know how I’m going to deal with the loss,” Team U.S.A. hockey goalie Ryan Miller told me when I met up with him yesterday in New York City. “I’m still sort of right in the middle of it. I’m going to keep working towards my next goal, which is helping the Buffalo Sabres make the play-offs.”
A few days ago, I wrote about a test, now being marketed in the United States, that predicts whether your toddler has more potential as a power athlete or as an endurance athlete. The test examines ACTN3, a gene that affects fast generation of muscular force. Fray poster Andrea Freiboden isn’t impressed. “What a lot of crap. Just look at the race of the athlete,” she writes:
“Generally, people of West African origin have more fast twitch muscles which allow intense bursts of power. This is why running backs, defensive linemen, and receivers are almost all black. We don’t need any expensive test…”
Nuance is the mortal enemy of essayist Christopher Hitchens. Whether it’s his rapturous support for Bush’s Iraq invasion or his best-selling dismissal (God is NOT Great) of religion, Hitchens will always eschew a surgical analysis for the rhetorical amputation. Beneath the Oxford education, he has become Thomas Friedman in an ascot, with all the subtlety of a blowtorch.
Now Hitchens has turned his attention to sports and the ensuing essay in Newsweek, called “Fool’s Gold: How the Olympics and other international competitions breed conflict and bring out the worst in human nature” is everything you might fear. I’m no fan of the politics that surround the Olympic games but when Hitchens takes out his dull saw, nothing connected to sports is spared.
As he writes, “Whether it’s the exacerbation of national rivalries that you want or the exhibition of the most depressing traits of the human personality (guns in locker rooms, golf clubs wielded in the home, dogs maimed and tortured at stars’ homes to make them fight, dope and steroids everywhere), you need only look to the wide world of sports for the most rank and vivid examples. As George Orwell wrote in his 1945 essay ‘The Sporting Spirit’ after yet another outbreak of combined mayhem and chauvinism on the international soccer field, ‘sport is an unfailing cause of ill-will.’ “
Almost four decades after the federal education law called Title IX opened the door for girls to participate in high school and college athletics, a crucial question has remained unanswered: Do sports make a long-term difference in a woman’s life?
A large body of research shows that sports are associated with all sorts of benefits, like lower teenage pregnancy rates, better grades and higher self-esteem. But until now, no one has determined whether those improvements are a direct result of athletic participation. It may be that the type of girl who is attracted to sports already has the social, personal and physical qualities — like ambition, strength and supportive parents — that will help her succeed in life.
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?’ ”
By Katherine Harmon, in Scientific America
By Mark Hyman, in The New York Times
By Bryan Sakakeeny, in Bleacher Report
From Eli Evans, in n + 1
By John F. Burns, in The New York Times
Review by Simon Kuper, in London Review of Books
From Intelligent Life Magazine
By Imraan Coovadia, in n + 1
From Information Aesthetics
From Information Aesthetics
By Karl-Ludwig Günsche, in Cape Town
From Tribeca Film
