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Monthly Archives
August 29, 2005
Posted by Nick
Here's a good argument in favor of the technological encroachment in sports such as tennis and golf.
Did you watch the final men’s match at Wimbledon this year? What amazingly well-played tennis. Powerful serves, masterful returns, electric net play, and, by golly, lots of prolonged baseline volleys.
See, once the big servers became so prevalent, kids started practicing returns – really good, offensive returns, not just defensive prayers. Suddenly, the 120-mph serve wasn’t as much of an advantage because (a) every one could hit them and (b) lots of guys learned how to return them.
Perhaps young golfers today will learn that, thanks to the equipment, the playing field has leveled in terms of length. It seems every kid these days is long, so what advantage is that? Maybe the scales will tip and in order to get the edge, kids will learn how to do amazing things with their clubs, move the ball in heretofore unseen ways, develop shots no one’s dreamed of yet...
I'm not sure I agree with all of this, but it's nice to hear an optimist about technology and sports for a change.
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Posted by Nick
More study is needed on the effects of hi-level athleticism on long-term health:
And now someone cares enough to put figures to it. A former athletic trainer for the Pittsburgh Steelers, Kevin Guskiewicz started the UNC center at the request of the NFLPA, which finally wanted to know if the premature death figures were true.
In the last five years, Guskiewicz has surveyed approximately 2,700 former NFL cases, or nearly 70 percent of the players on roll.
Hey, Kevin: How'd you get so many guys to cooperate?
"Their wives wanted to know more than they do," he said.
His research is encouraging and alarming.
Good news: The mortality rate of the players surveyed is "pretty much in range" with the general population.
Bad news: Men who played in the '40s and '50s have a BMI "significantly lower" than players from the '90s, who haven't reached their mid-50s yet.
The average BMI of an NFL player in the '90s is 32, which the government officially classifies as obese. Some register in the 40s, nearly twice the normal range.
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Misc.
Posted by Nick
I get a sense that a serious technology backlash is going to hit golf soon. Why? There's all the anecdotal evidence from folks complaining that it's ruining the great old courses like St. Andrews. What's more, when you're naming your golf clubs after porn mags, you're going to alienate even those folks who are OK with the shrinking of courses thanks to technology. One company is releasing a golf club it's proud to dub "barely legal".
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August 28, 2005
Posted by Nick
Former pitcher Mike Marshall is claiming he can train pitchers to avoid injury. This Murray Chass piece is fascinating.
At his training center, where the students live for 40 or 48 weeks, he teaches his method of pitching, which employs Newton's three laws of motion.
"There's a better way of producing force without using the traditional pitching motion, which has flaws," he said. "This is an epidemic that needs to be researched. We have to teach them how to pitch so they don't have flaws."
To eliminate flaws, Marshall teaches a different pitching motion from the one pitchers traditionally use.
"I want the ball to go back toward second base, then toward home plate in as straight a line as possible," he said. "The traditional motion has anywhere from 5 to 9 feet of side-to-side movement in ways that put unnecessary stress on the arm and do no good for the quality of pitches and cause injuries."
Marshall's pitching motion also requires a pitcher to use his legs differently and not "reverse rotate" his hips as much as pitchers traditionally have.
It calls for a lot more reporting -- if the benefits of Marshall's training are so obvious, why is he being ignored? -- but if Marshall is on to something, this should get a lot more attention.
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Posted by Nick
I might have to try this out -- there's a good idea in here -- but I just can't see this device designed to help your swing actually working very well.
The new Suunto G6 enables the golfer to discover the perfect swing. After each swing, they can check their tempo, rhythm, backswing length and speed. This feedback helps identify the best shots, developing muscle memory to repeat only the good shots. After the session, the players can analyze their overall consistency.
More than two years of development and research were needed to integrate three acceleration sensors in the lightweight (55g / 1.92 oz.) Suunto G6 watch. As this watch measures 200 times a second the movement of your wrist with extremely high accuracy it is called a wristop computer.
Improvement relies on consistency, that's why Suunto G6 measures the consistency index. It indicates the overall accuracy for systematically repeating similar golf swings. It indicates the muscle memory because accuracy relies on consistency!
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Posted by Nick
The Times has a good look at the controversy in baseball over sabermetrics.
Like any good intellectual spat, this one involves high-brow questions and low-brow insults. It also has attracted interest from fields as far from the dugout as medicine, Hollywood and Wall Street, which find themselves grappling with the same question as baseball managers: when information can be gathered more cheaply and quickly than ever before, should people rely less on their hunches and more on numbers?
"I've been sat down and told they can give me a better way to do everything," Tony La Russa, manager of the St. Louis Cardinals and the hero of a new book celebrating the hunch, said last week, describing the statistics crowd. "They really are convinced that they can sit there and crunch out a formula that negates my power of observation.
"It's been a little irritating, because there's a certain arrogance with that whole group."
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August 26, 2005
Posted by Nick
I've been thinking of compiling a list of technologies I hate. I need to narrow down the criteria, but top of the list will be the automatic flush toilet. Somewhere in the top ten will be artifical turf in sports. I'm dismayed to see in some regions turf is making a comeback.
FieldTurf is considered the originator of the new surfaces, known as "in-fill" systems. Rubber chips, and sometimes sand, are worked in between the synthetic blades to stand them up and provide extra cushioning.
"The big advantage is they cost less than the old AstroTurf fields, which ran about $1 million each, and they're softer than the old AstroTurf fields," said John Huard, a FieldTurf sales representative based in Naperville.
The only known research comparing high school athletic injuries on grass versus turf was done in 2004 by Michael Meyers of West Texas A&M University and Dr. Bill Barnhill, an Amarillo, Texas, orthopedic surgeon. They found the incidence of football injuries nearly equal on the two surfaces.
A study by Roseanne Naunheim, a professor at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, found that a frozen grass field was the hardest of all surfaces.
FieldTurf is apparently most favored in the NFL and by the Nebraska Cornhuskers.
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August 25, 2005
Posted by Nick
Steve Sailer is someone with whom I disagree on several things, but he's smart and serious and honest and so he's always worth reading. (I've found it's much more enjoyable reading political writing I disagree with when it's executed well... it's a shame so much political writing is so lame these days).
Here's an interesting post from Steve speculating on what Barry Bonds will do if/when he comes back to baseball:
Secretly, Bonds will go off steroids, but will use Human Growth Hormone, which is officially banned, but for which baseball doesn't test. (It requires a blood test rather than a urine test, and blood tests aren't in the players' union's contract.)
Publicly, Bonds will announce that his knee is now too delicate to support all that upper body mass he innocently built up through his dedicated pumping of iron, so he's switching to a lighter, more flexibility-oriented exercise regimen. He'll talk a lot about how how his weakened knee can't let him drive his lower body through the ball anymore, so he's relying more on his wrists, etc. etc. so don't expect tape measure homeruns from him anymore.
RTWT
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Posted by Nick
I've been getting a ton of interesting feedback on the discussion about Lance and PE-drugs. I see Lance will be on Larry King tonight to defend himself so we'll hear more from him. But I'd like to clear up a few misconceptions about something I wrote. Given some of the criticism, you would think I had claimed I saw needles sticking out of Lance's butt on the l'Alp D'Huez.
Lance won six Tours under the tighter testing regime. The question of this first Tour is opened by this report. Fine. No one will ever truly know his guilt or innocence. Ever. But the same goes for Raffy Palmeiro, who still says he never knowingly took any banned substance and hardly anyone believes him anymore.
And this gets at the larger point. To think more clearly about these issues, I think it's helpful to imagine that Lance is guilty. His guilt, if he is guilty, does nothing to diminish his greatness in my view. I am a maniacal Lance fan. It's in part because of this that I feel so strongly it helps to assume he's guilty. Because doing so helps demonstrate the preposterousness of how we currently view PE-drugs.
It's plainly evident that lots of PE-drugs can be used by athletes under doctor supervision safely and effectively without jeopardizing their health. We can't wish away that fact. Lance used EPO under doctor's orders for chemo. The skiing giant Herman Maier claims that he has training techniques that mimic the effect of EPO, without taking EPO. Given these facts, maybe we should rethink how we view PE-drugs: not all PE-drugs are alike.
The problem for athletes, as I've pointed out in earlier posts, is the prisoner's dilemma. Under the current state of affairs, no athlete can be perfectly sure other athletes aren't taking banned drugs, so even if they don't want to, they might be tempted to take drugs. In my view, there's only one way around this, and that's for the athletes to take control of matters. The athletes are in the best position to decide what's OK to take and what's not OK. As such, the athletes should determine which PE-drugs and substances are OK to use and which PE-drugs aren't. Once that list is determined, insist on rigorous random testing. One violation means banishment... for life.
The virtue of this approach is two-fold: the potential for greater honesty and effectiveness. It's more honest in the sense that it appreciates some substances are safe to use under doctor's supervision and some aren't. It holds greater potential for effectiveness in that athletes become the arbiters of what's OK to take, and then they have no choice but to be comfortable with a strict enforcement regime since they've made the detemination of what's OK and what's not.
My problem with the current state of affairs is that it screws Lance. Since the current state of affairs is so out of synch with a realistic cost-benefit analysis, no one will ever enjoy the presumption of innocence. So I'd prefer we imagine he's guilty, change how we think about PE-drugs, and make sensible changes to PE-drug policy.
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August 24, 2005
Posted by Nick
By now everyone knows Lance Armstrong has been accused -- again -- of doping, this time using EPO during his 1999 Tour win, the first of his seven straight. Obviously more details could come out, but this strikes me as much ado about nothing. It's based on a 'b' urine* sample, and the paper breaking the story has a history of questionable allegations about Lance.
But did he do it? TG is inclined to think he did. For starters, during that season there was no reliable test for EPO, and it appears lots of cyclists were using it. Lance had used the substance before during his chemo under doctors' orders. So it seems to me, despite his denial, he might well have used it at the time. Sorry, Lance, call it the Raffy monkey on your -- and every jock's -- back.
My willingness to think Lance is lying points to a larger problem of how we presently view PE-drugs and sports. A substance like EPO has legitimate medical uses, as Lance knows from his chemo. Steroids have other legitimate uses, from helping AIDS patients to helping folks like my brother who recently took 'the clear' to treat poison ivy. When jocks know they can use something safely and effectively in another capacity, it's difficult to believe they won't use it for a competitive edge in sports when they know they can use it without compromising their health.
One thing this debate over PE-drugs has lacked from the beginning is any serious weighing of costs and benefits of various substances. Until that happens -- and don't expect it to with Dick Pound and others on the hunt -- you can expect these gotcha games to continue across the sports world. And the denials, and suspicion, to pile up.
*(Ed. note: An earlier version of this post said 'blood' sample where it was a urine sample).
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August 19, 2005
Posted by Nick
Here's some interesting history of the evolution of the wedge.
Modern wedges are products of a 70-year evolution. They originated in the 1930s, when Gene Sarazen added strips of metal to a high-lofted iron and created bounce in the club's sole. (Before then, players chipped their balls from bunkers and awkward lies).
He was first to benefit from "scooping" balls out of trouble, a more reliable method than risking the perfect contact required to make clean picks on half-buried balls.
Sole bounce is what prevents a wedge's leading edge from digging into the turf. More bounce is good for heavy lies and bunker play, simply put, where it's important to keep the club head moving forward rather than downward through a thicker medium. Reducing bounce increases the premium on ball contact.
In addition to bounce, early wedge-makers explored the advantage of spin.
As the cool kids say, RTWT.
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Golf
Posted by Nick
The Baltimore Oriole Brian Roberts has made tinted contact lenses a hot commodity this year. And now Nike and B and L are in on the act.
The Nike Maxsight sport-tinted soft contact lenses, hitting the market this month, are designed with special technology that allow athletes and outdoor enthusiasts to see sports action with greater clarity.
I wonder if there's a big market for this outside of athletics. Wearers of eye glasses understand the problem. You either need prescription sunglasses outside or you need those glasses that tint outside but untint when you are inside. The problem is, they don't always fully untint so you end up looking like one of those Eastern European dictators from the 70s. Either way, if you go inside with these contacts on, you have to take them out. And that's not terribly convenient.
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Equipment
Posted by Nick
My colleague Matt May has a good idea for a way technology can help the NHL:
The NHL is going to need a full-court press to get and keep the fans' attention and interest. OLN will also need to increase its exposure, as it treats its NHL content as a draw for its other programming. And Comcast, which owns OLN, is heavily invested in digital cable and broadband Internet. Comcast will be pushing NHL content on its on-demand cable services as well as online.
So, we're most of the way there: a sports league and a television network both with a vested interest in reaching people more people than they currently have access to. This is a great situation for podcasting, and even better for video in RSS enclosures. I don't think we're quite ready for full-game feeds, and we may never need them, given the real-time nature of sporting events. But OLN will be creating hockey-related content around their coverage, and that's no good to them if nobody is watching it at 11pm. They will already be offering it on demand. Why not serve an MPEG for download on their own broadband network?
Hockey is not my favorite sport, but big time hockey is far and away the most thrilling major sport -- much more so than baseketball or footbal, which have their charms but do not have the primal intensity that hockey can generate, especially in the playoffs. The key is to figure out ways to translate this intensity to podcasts. I think it's possible.
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Posted by Nick
I must be missing something. Here's an article about a laser gun that gives a golfer precise distance to the pin.
Laser Link Golf, produces a hand-held device that gives golfers that information. Golfers aim a gun-like device at the flagstick, push a button and a laser is shot at the pin.
About a second later, the beam bounces back off of a reflective prism either attached to or built into the flagstick and the golfer learns the distance to the flag. Instead of having to pace off the yardage from sprinkler head or "eyeball" it from the 150-yard stake in the middle of the fairway, golfers can instantly receive accurate information.
On a shot-by-shot basis, the amount of time saved can probably only be measured in seconds. But those seconds can multiply quickly for four golfers over an 18-hole round.
I'll have to try this out to know better, but I see several problems with this. First of all, busting out a gun and pointing it at the stick everytime you set up for a shot is just plain awkward. Second, at the better courses now now, most carts have GPS readers on them to tell you roughly how far you are from the pin. I think these will trickle down and be ubiquitous before long, thus making these guns redundant. Lastly, my sense is the problem this is being addressed -- slow pace of play -- won't be helped much by this. Why? Golf play is slower than it was a generation ago because there are more golfers playing today, and thus more bad golfers on the links. A device like this won't help bad golfers make much better shots. The only thing that will help that is for them to learn how to play better.
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August 17, 2005
Posted by Nick
Here's an interesting observation:
All this worry and hand-wringing over advancing technology in golf equipment strikes me as a little hysterical.
It reminds me of that era when basketball fans were clamoring to have the basket moved higher than 10 feet, when it seemed like everyone and his brother was dunking. Thank god the basketball gods never did, because it would have changed the game, making it different from the one you and I play.
Do others see it this way? I must admit, I'm inclined for the moment to agree.
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Posted by Nick
Forbes explains why there aren't caddies on golf courses much anymore -- and how recreational golf has suffered as a result.
Over the past two decades, though, caddies in America have tracked the downwardly mobile career path of milkmen and typewriter repairmen. Management and golf pros discovered carts were engines of profit that didn't carry the figurative baggage of tax or labor issues. Carts didn't have attitude and always showed up for work. They were meant to speed up the game, which addressed players' time pressures and would also allow courses to get in more rounds in a day.
Tremendous nuggets and insights in this piece. Read the whole thing.
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August 16, 2005
Posted by Nick
Apparently some folks in rodeo are starting to wear... helmets.
In recent years, rodeo competitors have adopted a few items of protective equipment that give them some measure of safety while taking on saddle broncs and 2,000-pound bulls. Andrews said the best overall piece of protection for competitors, introduced about 12 years ago, is the protective vest, which has prevented numerous major and life-threatening injuries. Mouth guards and helmets are also in use as protective gear.
It's not widely adopted by any means, but what rodeo tough guy has the cajones -- or the lack of them -- to wear a helmet in front of his peers? Am I missing something, or is this not completely preposterous?
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Posted by Nick
Selena Roberts says things in this piece for which there is no evidence. She says golfers would rather bang the heck out of it because they're not afraid of errant tee shots:
A 330-yard drive into the rough, plus a wedge to the green, is far more attractive to a player than a 280-yard poke and a 5-iron to the pin.
Well, duh. But what is she talking about here? This is not what's at issue in golf, something Baltusrol proved -- Lefty was hitting 3 woods off the tee a bunch, not always bombing it as far as he could. Besides, guys are hitting accurate 330 yard drives, that's the issue.
But then she raises a provocative question. What else are players using? Power cravings in any sport can lead to boundary pushing of the chemical kind. There is no whisper of a steroid problem inside the P.G.A., but there is also no drug testing. So how does anyone truly know surges in distance are all about technology and not about the designer steroid THG?
Why no steroid use in golf? It's a good question. If true, it's partly cultural. But I could see it helping some duffers, so maybe we'll see more of it in the future.
Then she says something goofy again.
The long ball's allure creates a slippery slope. Baseball heard the siren song of power and sold its soul for magic pills. Hitters bulked up to keep up. Pitchers juiced up to spike their endurance. The game was rewarded with money and fame until Balco revealed the secret behind the long-ball success.
The fallout from Balco also revealed how the power obsession was just a mirage. In truth, fans longed for a return to nuance, to the beauty of a stolen base, to the grace of a diving catch, to the roots of the game. Fans, as it turns out, truly loved the game without the homer hype.
What is the evidence for this? He's not on roids, presumably, but people love what Derek Lee is doing. That's not homer hype?
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Posted by Nick
According to the Straits Times, Nike is introducing more sports apparel based on tricked out new fabric technologies:
A Nike Fall 2005 Innovation Session for the Press was recently held by Nike Malaysia to show its latest technology. Seated at tables prepared with swatches of three types of Nike Sphere React materials — Nike Sphere React Dry, Nike Sphere React Cool and Nike Sphere React Pro — we were invited to dab them with water and observe how each fabric responded. Each is built around proprietary materials engineered for a specific purpose.
Nike Sphere Dry reduces cling to help keep the athlete dry. Nike Sphere React Cool promotes increased airflow to help keep the athlete cool. Nike Sphere React Pro releases moisture vapour while repelling water, to help protect the athlete from the outside environment.
Each technology incorporates bio-mimicry, drawing on principles in nature to help solve a human problem — keeping cool, warm and protected through the various stages of a workout.
The apparel companies are trying to develop gear that will fit goldilocks consumers looking for something that's not too hot, too cold, but is just right.
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Clothing/Uniforms
Posted by Nick
Here's a good look at the coming sneaker wars:
"When manufacturers come out with a new shoe, technology is where they begin," says Dan Kasen, manager of information services at the National Sporting Goods Association. "It is a critical consideration."
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August 14, 2005
Posted by Nick
There's a pill to measure your core body temperature to make sure you and your coaches know when you are overheating.
A small plaque lies before a tree planted in Korey Stringer's memory at Minnesota Vikings training camp. "In Memory of Big K," it reads, honoring the beloved right tackle who died four years ago from heatstroke. There was no way for trainers to monitor players' core temperatures on that sweltering July day when Stringer collapsed, no definitive way to tell that his massive body was overheating beyond its threshold.
But now there is, in the form of a swallowed capsule that measures core body temperature as it passes through the digestive system, and the Vikings -- along with a few other NFL teams -- are using it.
Cool.
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August 11, 2005
Posted by Nick
Could the course backlash against technology gains be going too far? Depends on the venue, but Monty thinks so:
The Baltusrol course where the USPGA will be played is 7392 yards long, helped by the par-five 17th which measures 650 yards.
Colin Montgomerie has never been a massive hitter and is not a fan of the fad that to make a course more of a test, tournament organisers have to put back tees...
...He said: 'Length is becoming a big issue. Every course we go back to seems to be lengthened. We haven't been here at Baltusrol for 12 years and I don't remember this course being as long as it is.
'I do think the length is outdoing technology. Over 18 holes I'm probably 100 yards longer than I used to be but this is course is 300 yards longer than it was so I've lost 200 yards somewhere.
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August 10, 2005
Posted by Nick
Interesting look at the technology development behind the new Nike Free, which is designed to feel like you're running barefoot, on grass:
Nike researchers brought in 10 men and 10 women to run barefoot on grass to see exactly how the body reacts without shoes on. They were videotaped with high-speed cameras to capture their movements, they had reflective markers attached to their joints to allow easy calculation of joint angles during their stride, and they even had wafer-thin pressure sensors attached to the bottoms of their feet to measure their impact with the earth.
At the end of the experiment, Nike had the most comprehensive picture of the biomechanics of barefoot running ever developed.
There's tons more interesting stuff in an outstanding piece so, as the kids say, RTWT.
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August 09, 2005
Posted by Nick
Soccer is moving toward putting chips in balls that will let you know if the ball crossed the goal line.
“I think we can use technology, maybe with a chip in the ball, like in tennis, I think this is okay,” said Pele, now 64.
The world soccer body, FIFA, will experiment with such ‘smart’ balls at the world under-17 championship in Peru in September, with a view to using them in the 2006 World Cup.
FIFA president Sepp Blatter has welcomed the idea of a microchip sensor in a ball sending a signal to the referee when it crosses the line.
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Posted by Nick
Here's another voice that says don't use technology to help with offside calls in soccer:
Technology — in the form of 3-D mapping grids and microchips inside shinpads — exists to make the offside call foolproof, but it's expensive and bloodless. Soccer should not become more like Tron.
The only short-term, obvious fix is a strong edict urging linesmen to start favouring attackers over defenders. That will liven up the game and punish stingy teams. Because, in the end, soccer needs more Barcelonas and Brazils and fewer ... well, let's leave that one a mystery as well.
The author also suggests dropping the rule altogether, which is something I favor (I think).
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Posted by Nick
According to this press release, a new product is designed to help you find golf balls by blocking out anything not white.
The product is patented Canadian scientific technology based on physics. The special lenses in the glasses block out all colours except the colour white. A white golf ball will "glow" making it much easier to find.
For a golfer, finding their lost golf ball means fewer penalty strokes which will automatically lower their score. The glasses will not only save them money in replacement golf balls but they have also been found to speed up the game by an average of 12 minutes per round.
There are all sorts of other bad race jokes one could do but I have a serious question: I wonder if this would help you hit a baseball better?
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Golf
August 08, 2005
Posted by Nick
A new British medical journal article says detecting offsides in soccer is impossible -- literally.
A new study published in the British Medical Journal suggests that the human eye is unable to detect an offside position during a football match.
The study conducted by Dr Francisco Belda Maruenda analysed the physiology of the human eye to clarify if it is able to process all the visual information needed to apply the rule.
To apply the offside rule correctly, the referee must be able to keep at least five moving objects in his visual field at the same time (two players of the attacking team, the last two players of the defending team, and the ball).
But this is beyond the capacity of the human eye, especially as these five objects can be anywhere within the defenders' half of the pitch, an area of at least 3200m2.
A lot of folks want technology to handle this 'problem'. But what some see as a bug, I see as a feature. The difficulty -- nay, impossibility -- of being sure of an offsides call (except in the most blatant instances) opens up all sorts of creative space for strikers and defenders to take risks and gambles. It's one of the cool things about soccer, in my view.
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Soccer
Posted by Nick
Andrew Zimbalist with a devastating review of the new Howard Bryant book on 'roids.
In "Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power, and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball," Howard Bryant suggests that Selig and his lieutenants were well aware that these players were taking steroids, but they refused to rain on baseball's parade. Baseball's recovery was too fragile and the excitement was too intoxicating.
That's an outline of the argument in Bryant's 400-page book. The story of steroids and baseball is certainly worth telling, and Bryant has told much of it reasonably well. In the end, though, Bryant tells a meandering, incomplete, distorted and tendentious tale.
One basic problem is Bryant plays fast and loose with his numbers and sources. ...
Bryant ends his book in a messianic tone. Not only does the steroid issue lose all ambiguity, it undoes all the gains baseball has made since 1995. He writes: "The speed with which Selig and his unassailable decade have come completely undone is stunning." Again, Bryant lacks evidence. In 2005, baseball is setting all-time attendance records.
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Baseball
Posted by Nick
Want to know a sport technology that can really hurt you? Blades in rugby.
Wigan coach Ian Millward has called for a ban on "razor-blade studs" after young star Harrison Hansen suffered "a great big hole in his leg" during Friday night's convincing win over Salford.
Hansen, a strong contender for the Young Player of the Year award after a fine campaign, was helped from the field in obvious pain during the first half of the clash at the JJB Stadium which Wigan won 40-12.
And Millward revealed after the game that the damage was caused by an opposition boot which sliced into the 19-year-old's leg as he was involved in a tackle.
"Harrison's got a great big hole in his leg," Millward admitted. "It's been caused by those blades players use now on the soles of their boots - they should all be banned.
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Posted by Nick
After the British Open, tons of folks were complaining that technology is ruining great courses. The folks at PGA think Baltusrol, site of the week's PGS, may be immune.
"We are proud of this championship, and we are so proud to be back in New Jersey and to have this event at a storied, traditional, historic golf course like Baltusrol," said Roger Warren, president of the PGA of America. "We look forward to the support of the people from New Jersey for this event. We know that we have the longest par 5 in major championship history at 650 yards. We will be at 7,400 yards. I don't think the technology issue of golf will be an issue. I think these players will be challenged."
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Golf
Posted by Nick
Here's an interesting look at the lengths the Tampa Bay Bucs go to keep players hydrated:
Terry and other sweaters on the team hit the IV trailer after more than two hours on the football field to replenish fluids lost during practice. It's one of the many benefits and technological advances Bucs players enjoy while trying to beat the heat during the rigorous two-a-day practices of training camp.
Bucs coach Jon Gruden recently bragged about the team's efforts in keeping guys hydrated and cool, saying the Bucs are on the ``cutting edge of technology.'' They have to be, considering temperatures soared with heat indexes above 100 degrees during the first week of training camp at Disney's Wide World of Sports Complex.
``It's not just the temperatures. It's the pace at which we practice at, combined with the environmental challenge,'' said Bucs head athletic trainer Todd Toriscelli. ``What Coach [Gruden] has allowed me to do is basically, without any concerns over budget or logistics, he told me to develop what we have to do here, and we've done it.''
During practice, players take a break in the ``cool-down tent,'' a trailer filled with benches and a room temperature in the low 60s. On the field, misting fans, which the Bucs had designed specifically, blow constantly.
Early in camp, Gatorade scientists spent a couple of days monitoring the players. They attached sensory patches to study the sodium and potassium levels in an effort to determine why some players cramp up at practice and others do not.
The ``cool-down tent'' is among the players' favorites.
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Posted by Nick
Boy, I go away for a week and Raffy is caught on the juice. Too bad. I've always liked him, and while his juice use doesn't bother me too much, his bald-faced lying is tough to stomach. Unlike President Bush, I don't believe him (unless some information comes out to exonerate him, which it hasn't yet, which is odd).
I disagree with most of what Art Caplan has to say here
It is easy to condemn steroid use. The drugs, while effective, are dangerous. But what if they were not? How are professional and amateur sports going to deal with the impending explosion in performance-enhancing drugs and bioengineering tricks that can boost performance with little or no risk for the user?
For example, at my school, the University of Pennsylvania, physiologist Lee Sweeney is hard at work trying to find ways to tweak genes to make muscles grow bigger and more dense. This research holds out real hope for those with muscular dystrophy and other debilitating muscle diseases.
But the gene transfer technology he is working on will also allow normal muscles to be made bigger and stronger. Figuring out who may or may not have engaged in "gene-doping" will prove next to impossible. And it is likely that there will be little risk associated with genetically altering muscle cells.
Similarly, scientists around the world are busy making pills that enhance our performance a bit by letting us sleep better, fight fatigue, slow the loss of memory, speed up learning, recover more quickly from hard exertion and calm anxieties. Some of us already are benefiting from drugs like these when we use Ambien, Provigil, Ritalin, Prozac or Effexor.
So what are we going to say when the archer, the chess master, the competitive marksman, the Nascar driver or the women's professional golfer says, "If I take these same drugs I just might get enough of an edge to move ahead of my competition"?
One problem with this is Caplan skips over any serious consideration of the relative dangers of steroids, which are not what are commonly believed. This is one reason so many athletes have been taking them. Until we have a more honest assessment of the relative risks involved, our public debate over this will be totally incoherent.
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