Blogs / Discoblog

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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Picture trying to hit a 95 mile-per-hour fastball. Now picture trying to do it with jet lag. Don’t worry—it gets even harder for the pros, too.

In a study funded by Major League Baseball, Christopher Winter of Martha Jefferson Hospital Sleep Medicine Center in Charlottesville, Virginia, studied the circadian sleep rhythms of professional ball clubs traveling around the country over a decade. He said today at the Associated Professional Sleep Societies meeting that he found whichever team was better adjusted to the time zone they played in won more often.

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A baseball can’t curve without its laces, a tennis ball’s fuzz helps it travel further, and the dimples on a golf ball reduce drag, just like the ridges on a shark. These tidbits of trivia introduced a capacity crowd packed into the purple bleachers of New York University’s Cole Sports Center to the World Science Festival’s “Science of Sports” event Saturday afternoon. Former U.S. Olympic Committee director of coaching Tom Crawford led the event.

The presenters opened with nutrition science, especially important for the young athletes and their families who packed the gym. Three professional basketball players, Leilani Mitchell and Lisa Willis from the WNBA’s New York Liberty and Brevin Knight of the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers, helped about 10 elementary school-aged participants pick healthy food from a table. (Here’s a tip: After a workout, drink chocolate milk. Besides refueling you with proteins and carbohydrates, it’s delicious.)

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