There is a similar beauty and grace in both sports and the arts, but comparing the performance of a violin concerto to a successful three-point shot is a deeply flawed argument.Intellectual and emotional truths in sport? Hmm, let me think ...
Although perfection of technique is necessary in both, the arts operate in a different sphere by communicating profound intellectual and emotional truths.
ESPN has more details. The conclusion of the UW report is mistaken in important respects and is compromised by a clear institutional conflict of interest. This post explains.A University of Washington review committee has cleared Dr. Richard Ellenbogen, the pediatric neurosurgeon and co-chairman of the NFL’s Head, Neck and Spine Committee, who was harshly criticized in a congressional report in May over alleged attempts to influence a grant selection process.In a letter to the UW medical school’s dean, members of the committee wrote they concluded Ellenbogen “did not attempt in any improper way to influence the selection or award process for the NIH (National Institutes of Health) research grant to be funded by the NFL” or violate any other ethical boundaries in advocating for additional funding.
The mission of the College of Music at CU Boulder is excellence in music through distinguished instruction in performance, composition, musicology, theory and teacher preparation for our graduate and undergraduate students, and to provide opportunities for performance, creative activities, research and scholarship and teaching experiences.Let me edit it by changing just a few words, so that it focuses on athletics rather than music:
The college is dedicated to:
- Providing music majors and non-majors the opportunity to develop their knowledge, understanding and ability in the various aspects of music at a level appropriate to their needs and interests
- Preparing students for careers as performers, composers, scholars, teachers, administrators and other professionals in the field of music
- Broadening and deepening the knowledge and understanding of music through research, teaching, creative activities, and publication
The College of Music is an academic community committed to maintaining a climate of mutual respect and collegiality. The members of this community:
- Enriching the lives of students and faculty as well as the community, state, nation and the world with performances of a wide variety of music presentations and publications
- Share a spirit of cooperation and helpful, constructive, and friendly consideration for each other’s activities
- Maintain open communication in both formal and informal contexts
- Defend academic freedom
- Encourage an environment of safety and well-being
- Show respect for a diversity of musical cultures and individual backgrounds
The mission of the College of Athletics at Big-Time U is excellence in athletics through distinguished instruction in performance, coaching, management, governance and teacher preparation for our graduate and undergraduate students, and to provide opportunities for competition, research and scholarship and teaching experiences.OK, the question that follows is, why would such a mission statement be OK for a Music program but not for an Athletics program?
The college is dedicated to:
- Providing athletics majors and non-majors the opportunity to develop their knowledge, understanding and ability in the various aspects of athletics at a level appropriate to their needs and interests
- Preparing students for careers as professional athletes, coaches, scholars, teachers, administrators and other professionals in the field of athletics
- Broadening and deepening the knowledge and understanding of athletics through research, teaching, creative activities, and publication
The College of Athletics sis an academic community committed to maintaining a climate of mutual respect and collegiality. The members of this community:
- Enriching the lives of students and faculty as well as the community, state, nation and the world with performances of a wide variety of athletic competition and publications
- Share a spirit of cooperation and helpful, constructive, and friendly consideration for each other’s activities
- Maintain open communication in both formal and informal contexts
- Defend academic freedom
- Encourage an environment of safety and well-being
- Show respect for a diversity of cultures and individual backgrounds
A new influx of money into big-time college sports is likely to reinvigorate debate over whether student athletes should be paid as if they were professionals, with colleges running semipro teams as side projects to their research and teaching missions.
But one question that gets little attention is how schools can keep big-time athletics connected to their academic objectives. Perhaps one way is for universities to award degrees in athletics.
U.S. swimming star Katie Ledecky’s performance at the Rio Olympics netted her a total of $355,000 in medal awards that she will be able to keep while remaining eligible to compete for Stanford, USA TODAY Sports has learned.Overall, 17 US swimmers enrolled in NCAA programs took home about $1.5 million in prize money.
Three other incoming or current college swimmers also ended up with six-figure amounts: California’s Ryan Murphy ($234,375) and Stanford’s Simone Manuel (nearly $200,000) and Indiana’s Lilly King ($134,375).
Concerning the claims expressed in their resignation letter, FINA would like to clarify that the Olympic Games are an IOC event. For Rio 2016, the decision on the participation of the Russian athletes has been made by the CAS and the IOC. FINA fully respected and implemented their decisions.This statement is patently false. After the IAAF developed its emergency criteria for the inclusion of Russian athletes in Rio, the IOC supported the IAAF procedure noting (emphasis added):
In this very complex process, FINA did express the DCRB position but our International Federation was not the body ultimately deciding the outcome on this matter.
The IOC Executive Board, in a telephone conference today, emphasized that it fully respects the IAAF position. The eligibility of athletes in any international competition including the Olympic Games is a matter for the respective International Federation.FINA is simply wrong in its response to the resignations.
Goodman, B. T. (1995). Sports Broadcasting Act: As Anachronistic as the Dumont Network, The Seton Hall Journal of Sport Law, 5:469-507.Details on the Saturday/Sunday gerrymandering are explained in a post at the Tulane Sports Law program:
In 1960, the American Football League, a rival to the NFL, was formed, and its eight teams
immediately pooled their television rights and entered into a contract with NBC, thus ensuring each club annual television revenues of approximately $212,000. In response to the AFL-NBC deal, and in an attempt to rectify the disparity in television revenues among themselves, the 14 NFL clubs agreed to pool their television rights and share the profits.' The resulting $4.6 million deal with CBS would have produced $332,000 annually for each team, but Judge Grim held that the contract - a "basic change" in the NFL's television policy - violated the earlier 1953 judgment. Since the deal gave CBS "the right to determine, entirely within its own discretion without consulting the Commissioner or any club... which games shall be telecast and where such games be televised," Judge Grim ruled that it unfairly restricted the rights of the individual clubs.'
The NFL, immediately ran to Congress, which lent a sympathetic ear. Acknowledging an "apparent inequity," - the AFL and other non-football leagues were free to package their television rights but the NFL was under court order not to do so' - Congress passed the Sports Broadcasting Act, which exempted from federal antitrust laws agreements among member clubs of professional sports leagues to pool and sell as a package the rights to televise their games.
The SBA prevents NFL broadcasts from competing with college football attendance by removing the antitrust exemption granted in section 1291 when the NFL broadcasts games at times when college games are typically played. If the NFL and its broadcast partners were to televise any of the games sold in the pooled packages during the prohibited time frame, they would risk treble damages in the event those pooled packages are held to be in violation of antitrust laws.In the movie Concussion, starring Will Smith as Dr. Bennet Omalu, there is a dramatic passage where Omalu is warned of taking on the NFL. The NFL, Omalu is told, is the only corporation that owns a day of the week.
Specifically, the antitrust exemption granted in section 1291 does not apply to any professional football game televised (1) between the hours of 6 pm Friday and 12 am Sunday, (2) beginning on the second Friday in September and ending on the second Saturday in December.
On Twitter, Dr. Michael Joyner asks the question above. Are oft-repeated stories of an epidemic of EPO-related deaths just urban legend or is there some substance to them?Were the rumored deaths of pro cyclists in early 9Os ever verified? Or was it an urban legend on steroids or Epo or whatever?— Michael Joyner (@DrMJoyner) August 29, 2016
The available evidence rather suggests that this series of deaths has been artificially concocted and even inflated in absolute terms and, most importantly, that it is highly improbable that EPO had anything to do with these cases, principally because there is very little, if any, scientific evidence that EPO causes sudden death. It should therefore be considered more of a myth or an invention than a historical fact. A myth which in the last years has played a central role in the ‘scaremongering tactics’ of the anti-doping campaigners, who until the early 1990s were rather short of casualties that might be attributed to doping ‘abuse’. In this sense, EPO could be labelled as the drug of mass destruction in the war on doping.What is going on here? The pattern appear to be an example of what Norwegian researcher Ole Bjørn Rekdal calls an "academic urban legend." He writes:
A total of 61 academic and journalistic texts have been reviewed that mention these deaths. My own research has recorded 17 sudden deaths among cyclists being reported in the six years between 1987 and 1992, including 9 Dutch and 6 Belgians. I have argued that, given the lack of statistical reliability of these data and the ‘Dutch and Belgian’ bias resulting from the news focus of the time and the search premises themselves, it cannot be reasonably said that they constitute a ‘suspicious statistical aberration’. But even if awarded credibility, this idea can be refuted after a comparison with data from other, statistically-based studies on sudden death in athletes.
Arguably, then, what has really been going on here is a double process of invention. One invention concerns the achievement of a ‘suspicious’ statistical series of deaths through the aggregation of isolated cases from two different countries during an elastic time span. The second one consists in isolating EPO as a ‘key suspect’ on the basis that it began to be released by the time this ‘spate of deaths’ was taking place. No further evidence is brought forward other than this coincidence and the common-sense-based contention that if EPO thickens the blood, too much thick blood ‘will kill you’. When going into more detail, most of the experts sustaining these theories explain that EPO abuse might cause blood clotting, hyperviscosity and hypertension, which would provoke fatal heart strokes or embolisms. But the truly scientific literature, the one based on experimental case studies, reviewed in this research does not support these claims.
López, B. (2011). The invention of a ‘drug of mass destruction’: Deconstructing the EPO myth. Sport in history, 31(1), 84-109.
Many of the messages presented in respectable scientific publications are, in fact, based on various forms of rumors. Some of these rumors appear so frequently, and in such complex, colorful, and entertaining ways that we can think of them as academic urban legends. The explanation for this phenomenon is usually that authors have lazily, sloppily, or fraudulently employed sources, and peer reviewers and editors have not discovered these weaknesses in the manuscripts during evaluation.López suggests that the EPO myth is also a convenient one for anti-doping agencies. However, as Paul Dimeo has written about the myth of Knud Jensen:
WADA holds itself out as being a bastion of ethics, promoting health and fair play, protecting athletes, and tackling unethical behaviour. The way in which Knud Enemark Jensen has been treated since 1960 and the contemporary refusal to redress that mistake (now that we have a revisionist perspective) undermine the essential qualities about humanity and sport that the anti-doping movement claims to uphold and promote.In anti-doping, evidence matters.
It casts a shadow over WADA’s reputation, and that of the previous generation of anti-doping doctors, authors and academics. Any movement becomes compromised if its acolytes come to imagine the cause to be greater than the individuals and when they are prepared to undermine their own ideals in order to make a point.
The University of Washington has formed a special committee to investigate claims made in a congressional report that Dr. Richard Ellenbogen, chairman of UW’s Department of Neurological Surgery, tried to influence a major research study on football and brain injuries.I discussed this situation back in May. The only thing really surprising about this case is that it took so long for the university to look into it. Lots of money at issue here, and UW is not without its own conflicts.
Ellenbogen also serves as chairman of the NFL’s Head, Neck and Spine Committee, and Congress named him one of the NFL’s “primary advocates” in an effort to strip a $16 million grant from a Boston University researcher who had been critical of the NFL, according to ESPN.
Ellenbogen had been part of a different group that made a failed bid for the $16 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, according to the congressional report.
“Dr. Ellenbogen is a primary example of the conflicts of interest between his role as a researcher and his role as an NFL advisor,” the report read.
That was soon followed by this Tweet from British MP, Heather Wheeler of the Conservative Party.Huge congratulations to all the European winners and participants at #Rio2016, you did brilliantly! 🎖 pic.twitter.com/vPTjkedjXD— European Parliament (@Europarl_EN) August 22, 2016
Wheeler's Tweet prompted a lot of reaction, summarized by the BBC.Now that's what I call winning!!! Well done Team GB & all our Commonwealth friends, now for the Trade Agreements.... pic.twitter.com/Qg9qkYxWHp— Heather Wheeler MP (@HeatherWheeler) August 22, 2016
NO - Ross Tucker - Professor of Exercise PhysiologyAnd mine:
Protecting the line dividing sportspeople into men's and women's competitions is essential for the integrity of women's sport.
Doing so using testosterone is logical and scientifically valid and should be reinstated. As it stands, Caster Semenya and other 'intersex' athletes benefit from an unfair advantage.
Testosterone has a profound effect on athletic performance and thus cannot be compared to any other physiological advantage elite athletes must possess to win.
Categories in sport exist for fairness and must be defended for competitive integrity. Consider boxing. In Rio, male boxers will compete in 10 weight categories. They 'protect' smaller boxers — and competitive equality.
This does not mean size is the only factor influencing performance, just that it is significant. Now consider women's sport and the enormous performance gap between elite men and women.
At least 8,000 men have run faster than every women's track athletics world record. Without the 'protection' of a women's category, women would disappear from most elite sport.
Why do men have this advantage? Testosterone. It directs development of the reproductive system, increases muscle mass and strength and reduces fat.
Testosterone is why boys and girls can play physical sports together at the age of 11 but cannot by 13. This is why, in seeking to defend the women's category for fairness, authorities identified testosterone as a measurable marker and set an upper limit for women with conditions that would elevate it.
It was to ensure fairness with a limit that was still three-fold higher than 99 per cent of women's testosterone levels. The defence of the category remains imperative for fairness for the majority of female athletes.
Ross Tucker is Professor of Exercise Physiology at the University of the Free State, South Africa. He has followed Semenya's career and studies limits to exercise performance.
YES - Roger Pielke Jr, directs the Sports Governance Center at the University of ColoradoBoth Ross and I, and many others, will have plenty more to say on this topic in the coming weeks.
Caster Semenya looks strong. She runs fast. She is a woman. She has followed the rules. Of course she should run with women.
Here's why: For more than half a century sports officials have asked scientists to come up with a simple way to identify women for purposes of eligibility in competitions.
We've seen the use of visual inspections, chromosomal tests and, most recently, testosterone levels.
But it turns out human sexuality is not readily distinguished into two categories.
Instead, there is a spectrum, coloured in shades of grey. Distinguishing men's from women's categories means drawing a bright line across that spectrum.
Testosterone levels are associated with greater performance of most men over women and overlap almost completely with the male and female genders. Almost. And that is the problem.
Testosterone does not successfully distinguish in all cases. Because an individual's testosterone levels are not always readily available, athletics officials have provided criteria to help identify women who might be in violation of regulations.
These include physical characteristics associated with conventional notions of femininity. What was supposed to be a rule on biology became about judging female athletes on how men expect a woman to look.
If people want sport to be divided into high- and low-testosterone groups, that would be a practical way to divide sport by biological characteristics. But sport is divided into men's and women's categories.
And so long as being a man or woman is not entirely characterised by biology, sport must accept that biology alone will not always work to identify who fits where.
Roger Pielke Jr directs the Sports Governance Center at the University of Colorado. He is the author of The Edge: The War Against Cheating and Corruption in the Cutthroat World of Elite Sports.
