Be it doping in sport, hot topics like Caster Semenya or Oscar Pistorius, or the dehydration myth, we try to translate the science behind sports and sports performance. Consider a donation if you like what you see here!
What is the global standing of the Commonwealth Games? How do nations and sports compare, within an Olympic-focused strategy? A look at how Commonwealth Games success, and our response to it, might be calibrated against the bigger, global picture
As promised, today begins a short series which also serves as our summary of the year’s sports science news. I’ll be looking at the Top 8 stories of 2008, with a sports science spin (in case you were wondering, eight is the lucky number of the year – just ask the Chinese who started the Games on 8/8/08, […]
The Beijing Olympic Games have come and gone. And with them, aided by technology including a uniformly deeper pool, improved wash-off areas, and high-tech swimsuits, so have 70 world swimming records this year. In fact, swimming now suffers from such a dramatic credibility crisis that a race in which a world record is NOT broken is a […]
Last week saw the curtain call of the Olympic cycle for four years, and the Paralympic Games came to an end amidst a spectacular closing ceremony. It brought to an end the biggest Paralympic Games to date – in terms of atheltes, support staff, media coverage, and financial incentives (both direct and indirect for athletes), […]
Yesterday, the news wires were buzzing with the news that scientists in Oslo predicted that Usain Bolt, Jamaica’s triple Olympic champ, would have run 9.55 seconds had he not celebrated prematurely in his 100m final in Beijing. It was on the radios, internet, TV news, all over. A while back, just after that race, we […]
Apologies for the break, it’s been a busy time at work and the world of sport has taken a backseat, unfortunately. Only in our pages, because it’s actually been a very busy time in the world of sport. Athletics – Golden delight and heartache in the fallout from Beijing The world’s best athletes headed straight […]
302 gold medals were handed out in Beijing. Add to that 303 silvers, and 353 bronze medals, and you get a total of 958 medals won during the 16-days of Olympic competition. When you consider that 10,500 athletes were in Beijing, then it’s actually quite interesting to calculate that on average, one in 11 athletes […]
Yesterday we did the first our Olympic recap “awards” post, which we continue today, in our look back on the Games and some of the stories we might not have covered during the actual Games. The distance award Since we have a preference for the distance events, we can’t let this go without giving special […]
It’s been one week since the Olympics, and a slow week here at The Science of Sport (as I try to catch up on time lost to the Games, mostly!). For today, though, to begin a Post-Olympic wrap, I thought I’d do a “Best of” (and worst of) list from Beijing. So here are the […]