BEIJING  — If you build it, he will come,” Ray Kinsella, the farmer in the 1989 film “Field of Dreams,” hears, mystically, as he walks through his cornfield. So at seemingly ruinous cost, he razes the cornfield and builds a ball field, and is rewarded with an endless stream of ticket buyers stretching to the rural Iowa horizon.

In 2008, the Chinese built a ball field — boy, what a ball field — known worldwide for its lattice-like architecture as the Bird’s Nest. Alas, after the 2008 Olympics, the ticket buyers haven’t come. Right now, the Bird’s Nest serves as a winter amusement park known as the Happy Ice and Snow Season. In April, a promoter may stage a celebrity rock concert to “establish China as a world leader for global peace and a healthier planet.” Or not.

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Our Scholarship Winners:

Nancy Anderson

Curtis Suver

Anne-Marie Bourgeois

Cindi Textor

Rook Campbell

Jesse Wagner

Colin McGuire

Jun Yue

Please click here to find out more about each of these recipients!

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.”

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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.

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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.)

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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?’ ”

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