It’s official, ladies and gentlemen: There’s nothing that athletes won’t try.
Here in the United States we’re inundated with stories of athletes doping with steroids and human growth hormone, as well as resorting to more… unusual forms of physical treatment, like when former Chicago Cubs outfielder Moises Alou once mentioned that he urinated on his hands to toughen them up. Europe, however, has some equally bizarre treatments and alternative medicine that have yet to enter the American sporting zeitgeist. Take Arsenal striker Robin Van Persie’s new hope of returning quickly from a recent injury: placenta massage.
The Dutch footballer tore ankle ligaments in a recent match against Italy. In hopes of returning in less than the standard six-week recovery period, Van Persie is off to Serbia for a procedure about which he knows almost no particulars. “She is vague about her methods but I know she massages you using fluid from a placenta,” he said. “I am going to try. It cannot hurt and, if it helps, it helps.”
Despite the lack of detail, Arsenal’s physicians consented to Van Persie receiving the placenta procedure. Why not? BBC News reports that there are health benefits associated with placenta, and besides, there’s no talking athletes out of something that has even the slimmest chances of improving recovery or performance:
England footballer Wayne Rooney used an oxygen tent prior to the 2006 World Cup to help him recover from a broken foot and six years ago runner Paula Radcliffe rubbed oil from the belly of an emu to ease injuries sustained in a collision with a cyclist.
No word yet, however, on whether Major League Baseball is considering a ban on placenta and emu oil.
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A Formula 3 car that’s compost-able? Probably not completely, but if it’s made from potatoes and soybean foam, it must be pretty close!
The ecoF3, developed in Britain, has a steering wheel made from carrots, outer bodywork made from potatoes, and an interior seat made from soybeans. The biodiesel engine runs on chocolate extracts and vegetable oil, and plant-based lubricants grease the car’s moving parts.
The car will not be permitted to compete in championships since the fuel prevents it from meeting regulations, but its developer says it would deliver the same performance as a more conventional race car—and probably be more fun to watch! (Especially if any loose parts fall off along the way—carrot sticks on the racetrack?)
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Chances are you’ve received an invitation to enter a pool for the NCAA tournament. If so, be warned: Bracket picking is no simple game. If everyone else in your pool picks the top seeds, then you’ll end up smack in the middle, because those who predict upsets will score higher. With a 9,000,000,000,000,000,000-to-1 long shot at making perfect picks, the odds aren’t great for anyone.
Enter Bracketscience.com, a site that takes years of stats and uses it to analyze your March Madness picks for just $20.
The website’s founder, Pete Tiernan, has gathered game programs from the “pre-digital, short-shorts age” in an effort to build a database of the entire history of March Madness stats. He uses it to run a regression analysis of the stats against the official seed rankings to find out which teams tend to do better than expected. One portion of the site allows you to enter the factors you’re interested in, such as the year, seed, school, and conference, so you can use custom-made stats to fill in your bracket. If that’s not enough, bracketscience.com also provides 10 statistical models such as “from the gut” or “upset special,” and offers team analysis to forecast a team’s 2009 performance.
Tiernan shared some pointers for picking upsets:
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Golf might seem like a relatively safe sport, but a new report in the British Medical Journal suggests there’s a hidden danger: hearing loss. Turns out, the loud thwaak! of the new thin-faced titanium drivers is about as loud as a gunshot or firecracker—loud enough to cause permanent hearing damage.
British doctors first tuned in to the problem after a 55-year-old male patient sought treatment for mysterious tinnitus and reduced hearing in his right ear. The doctors confirmed that his symptoms matched those of noise-induced hearing loss, although the man’s occupation didn’t involve loud noises. The puzzle finally came together when the man revealed that for the past 18 months, he’d been teeing off with a King Cobra LD titanium driver three times a week. But the sound from the club had become so irritating that he’d already ditched the club. The doctors also found other golfers online who’d had similar complaints about the “sonic boom” created by the new drivers.
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Watch out rugby players and sumo wrestlers: The unsightly, cold sore-causing skin disease known as “scrumpox” or herpes gladiatorum—or, as athletes call it, “mat herpes”— is easily spread through close contact with broken skin, and may be coming to a field or mat near you.
A strain of mat herpes has already invaded the U.S.: As many as 20 to 40 percent of wrestlers in Division I of the National Collegiate Athletic Association have been infected with herpes gladiatorum.
Now, researchers at Tokyo University have studied how the virus spread in sumo wrestlers in Japan, and found that the virus is likely more pathogenic than previously thought, according to the October issue of the Journal of General Virology.
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Earlier this week, this blogger’s beloved Milwaukee Brewers fired their manager, Ned Yost, with less than a month remaining in a pennant race. It’s pretty common in pro sports to cut the coach loose when things go south; it’s easier than firing all the players. But a study out of Sweden says that frankly, it doesn’t do any good.
Leif Arnesson at Mid Sweden University led a team that studied the Swedish Elite Series of hockey all the way back to the 1975/76 season. Sweden’s league is another bastion of mid-season coach firing—five were fired last season. But after studying the data, Arnesson says that firing the coach in mid-season has basically no effect: A good team is still a good team, and a bad team is still a bad team.
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The talk about air pollution at the Beijing Olympics last month apparently didn’t bother Usain Bolt, the insanely fast Jamaican sprinter who broke his own world record in the hundred meters, 9.72 seconds, by running a cool 9.69. But scientists reviewing the tape now say that if Bolt hadn’t let up early when it was clear he had the race in the bag, his time could’ve been 9.55.
A research team led by Hans Eriksen at the University of Oslo studied footage of the race, concentrating on the positions of Bolt and the runner-up, Richard Thompson. Both runners slowed down at the end, and if Bolt had decelerated at the same rate that Thompson did, he would’ve finished at 9.61. However, Bolt slowed down even faster than Thompson as he pounded his chest in celebration. As a result, Eriksen says, Bolt’s hot-dogging cost him even more time; if he’d run all-out across the finish line, he could have finished in as fast as 9.55.
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The Chinese government has been scrambling to cut down on air pollution before the world’s best athletes compete in the Olympics next month; they’ve closed down factories near Beijing and allowed people to drive their cars only every other day.
But according to researchers from Northwestern University, athletes aren’t the only ones who need to be wary of dirty air. Even spectators, they say, could suffer serious health problems from traveling to China for the games.
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Anyone who has watched their fair share of baseball games has heard TV analysts, and probably other fans, wax ad naseum about strategic match-ups between righties and lefties. No truly complete lineup, they say, lacks at least one left-handed power hitter. No bullpen is complete without at least one left-handed relief pitcher to oppose those left-handed hitters.
But why are there so many lefties in baseball in the first place? Twenty-five percent of baseball players are left-handed, as opposed to only 10 percent of the general public. Are lefties naturally more athletic?
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Some say athletic success is more mental than physical, and cheating in sports might be, too.
Along with steroids, growth hormone has become one of the hot-button banned substances in professional sports. The Mitchell Report, released in December, outed 86 Major League Baseball players as steroids or growth hormone users. But according to Jennifer Hansen, a researcher at Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, Australia, the edge athletes receive by taking growth hormone might be mostly in their minds.
Hansen’s study gathered 64 young volunteers who played recreational sports, and in an eight-week double-blind experiment, researchers gave some of the athletes growth hormone and gave others a placebo. Male subjects, she says, were especially likely to believe they’d received growth hormone even if they hadn’t. But the athletes of both sexes who were wrong—who thought they were on growth hormone but had actually taken the placebo—believed that the substance had helped their performance, and they showed slight improvements in several athletic tests.
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