Sport

76 cards about Sport, with explanations, methods and source links.

Cards about Sport

• Does an ice bath after training actually speed up recovery?

  An ice bath after a hard session feels like treatment, which is a good reason to be suspicious of it. A review pooled dozens of trials against plain rest and kept explosive power, maximal strength, soreness and how recovered people felt as four separate questions. Which of them moves?

  Source: Moore et al., Sports Medicine

• A player has scored three in a row. Is it really worth passing to him again?

  For years it was taught that the hot hand is an illusion, and that a previous score does not raise the chance of the next one. Except that the way shots after a streak get selected hides a mathematical bias, so researchers corrected it and reanalyzed three-point contests. What came out of the correction?

  Source: Miller & Sanjurjo, European Economic Review

• Why does a curling stone turning right also drift right?

  You would expect a stone spinning right to drift left, like a spinning ball in the air. In curling the opposite happens: the stone drifts the way it is turning. The stone rests on nothing but a narrow ring. What is going on down there?

  Source: Honkanen et al., Scientific Reports

• How can a birth month help a child make the youth team?

  Sort children by year group and a January child can be stronger, taller and nearly a year more developed than a December child, though both are in the same age category. That difference disappears by adulthood. What does it manage to do before then?

  Source: Wattie, Schorer & Baker, Sports Medicine

• How much time does a marathon runner save by staying inside a pack?

  At speed, air resistance carries a real energy cost in running too, and not only on a bicycle. To put a number on it, researchers measured runners in a laboratory and an energetic model worked out how much force somebody saves by running sheltered behind others. What is it worth?

  Source: da Silva, Kram & Hoogkamer, Journal of Applied Physiology

• Coffee before lifting: real strength, or just a feeling of alertness?

  Caffeine blocks receptors for adenosine, the substance that signals tiredness to the brain, which is why it feels like fuel before a workout. But a feeling of alertness is not strength. A review of controlled trials separated the different measures of strength. What moved in each?

  Source: Grgic et al., Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition

• Does the menstrual cycle really decide when you will train best?

  Hormone levels change across the menstrual cycle, so it is tempting to expect a training schedule fitted to its phases. Whole apps are built on that assumption. A review of dozens of studies examined how large the difference actually is. What was found?

  Source: McNulty et al., Sports Medicine

• What changed when basketball players tried to sleep ten hours?

  It is easy to assume a competitive player already sleeps enough, and that one more hour would change nothing. To find out, a basketball team’s ordinary routine was recorded first, and then the players were asked to spend up to ten hours a night in bed for several weeks. What moved?

  Source: Mah et al., Sleep

• Where do the eyes go when you take a penalty under pressure?

  Anxiety is not only a feeling; it can pull attention toward the threat itself. To find out whether that happens with the feet too, fourteen experienced players took penalties under low and high pressure while an eye tracker recorded their eyes. Where did the eyes go?

  Source: Wilson et al., Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology

• Why do so many marathon runners finish just before a round hour?

  A round number has no physical meaning at all: the body does not know the difference between three fifty-nine and four oh-one. And yet, looking at millions of marathon finishing times, they do not spread out evenly. Where do they pile up?

  Source: Allen et al., Management Science

• How much physical performance is lost after a short night?

  Missing sleep does not damage every kind of training in the same way, so one number will not do here. Hundreds of performance measures were pooled, from strength and sprinting to endurance and skill, together with the time of day and the hours spent awake before the test. What came out?

  Source: Craven et al., Sports Medicine

• Which goal helps an athlete more: to win, or to execute correctly?

  An outcome goal describes the end: to win, to reach the podium, to beat a rival. A process goal describes an action within the athlete’s control: a breathing rhythm, a body position, a technical sequence. A review gathered dozens of studies and compared the two kinds of goal. Which worked better?

  Source: Williamson et al., International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology

• Does a foam roller really speed up recovery?

  Rolling on a foam roller feels extremely significant, which makes it hard to believe it does not do much. To check, measurements before training and after it were separated, and flexibility, sprinting, strength, jumping and soreness were each examined. What came out of each?

  Source: Wiewelhove et al., Frontiers in Physiology

• Does every athlete need exactly nine hours of sleep?

  Athletes face morning training, evening competition, travel and pressure, and all of these shorten sleep. That is where the familiar number comes from, the one saying an athlete must have nine hours. An expert review examined what actually stands behind that recommendation. What did it find?

  Source: Walsh et al., British Journal of Sports Medicine

• Is the crowd really the twelfth player?

  The nickname “the twelfth player” implies the supporters are what creates home advantage. Until the pandemic there was no way at all to separate the crowd from the pitch, the travel and the routine. Then the stands emptied. How much of the advantage stayed?

  Source: Bilalić et al., Scientific Reports

• Can a regular warm-up prevent almost four in every ten injuries?

  FIFA 11+ is not one stretch but a sequence of running, strength, balance and movement control done before training. Its older version, FIFA 11, showed no reduction in injuries. What did the new one do?

  Source: Thorborg et al., British Journal of Sports Medicine

• Does tightening a pressure cuff before training really improve performance?

  Some athletes fit a pressure cuff to an arm or a leg before effort, briefly stopping the blood flow and then releasing it, so that the body is better prepared. A review of dozens of studies compared that with a cuff at low pressure and with no intervention at all. What was left?

  Source: Souza et al., Journal of Sport and Health Science

• Can a tiring day in your head spoil a pass on the pitch?

  Mental fatigue appears after a long task demanding concentration, before you have started running at all, with the muscles still entirely fresh. To find out whether it reaches the pitch, experiments in football, basketball, cricket and Australian rules were reviewed. What suffered?

  Source: Yuan et al., Frontiers in Psychology

• Does climbing chalk really help you hold on to rock?

  Climbers spread white magnesium powder on their palms so they slip less, and everybody does it without checking. To measure it, experienced climbers gripped a rig whose angle rose gradually until the hand slipped, on limestone and on sandstone. What came out?

  Source: Amca et al., Sports Biomechanics

• Why do wheelchair basketball players shoot in different ways?

  The hoop is at the same height for everyone, and wheelchair basketball players reach it from very different body positions, and not all of them can stabilize the upper body to the same degree. A review analyzed free throws by functional classification. What did it find?

  Source: de Oliveira Silva et al., PLOS ONE

• Why does a swimmer work less behind another swimmer?

  Whoever swims behind another swimmer enters water that has already been moved by them, which sounds like a clear advantage. To measure it, swimmers did three front crawl trials at the same pace: alone, beside a leader, or behind one. What was measured in the muscles?

  Source: Puce et al., Frontiers in Physiology

• What changed in football when the stands emptied?

  A referee is supposed to judge what they see, and for years football has shown a slight bias that usually tilts toward the home team. When the pandemic closed the stands a natural experiment appeared: tens of thousands of professional matches in Europe were compared, more than a thousand of them played with no spectators. What happened to fouls and cards?

  Source: Wunderlich et al., PLOS ONE

• Are experienced football referees always more accurate?

  The obvious assumption is that a more experienced referee is also more accurate. To test it, national-level referees and less experienced ones were shown the same match clips with possible fouls, while a device tracked their eye movements. What was found?

  Source: Zhou et al., Frontiers in Psychology

• Can an advertisement sliding behind the goal move a penalty kick as well?

  A player taking a penalty kick is trying to watch the goal and the goalkeeper, and right behind the goal an advertising screen slides across their field of view. To test whether that does anything, players took kicks with no advertisement, with a still one, and with one traveling left or right. What happened to the gaze and to the kick?

  Source: Frontiers in Sports and Active Living

• Does climbing a wall begin while you are still standing below it, looking?

  Climbers scan the holds and rehearse a route in their heads before they start, and it is hard to tell whether that buys them anything. To check, 18 climbers previewed a route wearing a portable eye tracker, which recorded exactly where they looked. Then they climbed it. What was the relation?

  Source: Frontiers in Psychology

• Does a hard workout leave the immune system weaker for a while?

  Athletes are often told that a hard session opens a window in which the immune system is down and an infection catches easily. Natural killer cells are the immune cells that spot an infected or abnormal cell and destroy it. A meta-analysis pooled measurements of how well they kill, before exercise, right after it, and through the first two hours of recovery. What happened to them?

  Source: Rumpf et al., Sports Medicine

• Should a goalkeeper facing a penalty really just stay in the middle?

  Every coach says a keeper has to dive, and a famous paper said the coaches were wrong. Staying put would have saved more penalties, and keepers dive because conceding without moving feels worse than conceding while trying. That was action bias, published in 2007. A replication appeared in 2026. What did it find?

  Source: Replication, Journal of Economic Psychology

• How little air does a rider buried inside the bunch actually feel?

  Every rider knows that sitting on a wheel saves air, and studies of small lines of riders had put the saving at somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of an isolated rider. A real bunch is nothing like a small line, since shelter arrives from several rows and from the sides. So researchers simulated two pelotons of 121 cyclists. What is left in the middle?

  Source: Blocken et al., Journal of Wind Engineering and Industrial Aerodynamics

• What does it cost to change your mind at the last instant of a penalty kick?

  A penalty taker can pick a corner in advance and ignore the goalkeeper, or watch which way the keeper moves and switch late. The second sounds better, since it uses more information. In a field experiment, players were told to change target at varying moments before contact. What did the switch cost?

  Source: Van der Kamp, Journal of Sports Sciences

• What do the eyes do in the instant before an accurate shot?

  The quiet eye is not a motionless eye. It is the final fixation on the target, held just before a precise action begins, and scientists studying the gaze of athletes have found that skilled performers hold it longer than less-skilled ones do. A review asked what that duration is actually doing. How much can be concluded from it?

  Source: Gonzalez et al., European Journal of Sport Science

• Why did jumping backwards change the high jump?

  Before 1968 almost every high jumper crossed the bar face down or sideways, in the straddle, and it looked like the sensible way to do it. Dick Fosbury turned his back to the bar instead and went over head first, arching as he passed. He was an average jumper. What did the turn give him?

  Source: Olympedia

• Does stretching before training cost you strength?

  Pre-exercise stretching came under question once studies reported losses of force and power right afterward, and the advice flipped from mandatory to forbidden. Methodological problems and conflicting results kept a consensus out of reach. A systematic review went through the whole literature. What decides it?

  Source: Kay and Blazevich, Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise

• What is the human body unusually good at?

  Walking upright is the behavior that defines hominids, and running is usually left out of the story, because humans are poor sprinters next to most four-legged animals. Being slow over a short distance is not the only way to be judged. What happens if you judge us over a long one?

  Source: Bramble and Lieberman, Nature

• How much of the Vaporfly advantage is the shoe?

  The shoe is named after a 4 percent claim, and the comparison behind such numbers is usually against a runner’s own training shoes. A lightweight racing flat is a different benchmark, because it is also light and also stiff. Eighteen recreational runners ran against both.

  Source: Hébert-Losier et al., Journal of Sport and Health Science

• Does an ice bath actually help you recover?

  Cold-water immersion after hard training is routine in sport, and studies of it have reported mixed results for performance, for how people feel, and for the muscle-damage marker creatine kinase. Mixed results are what a meta-analysis is for. Fifty-two studies went in.

  Source: Moore et al., Sports Medicine

• Do compression garments help muscles recover?

  Athletes wear compression clothing after hard sessions to speed recovery from exercise-induced muscle damage. The claim covers several different things at once: how damaged the muscle is, how it feels, and what it can do. A meta-analysis separated them.

  Source: Marqués-Jiménez et al., Physiology and Behavior

• What decides how much a pitch breaks?

  A spinning ball curves because of the Magnus effect, with the lift force acting perpendicular to the axis of rotation. That much is textbook. What it does not tell a pitcher is which combination of spin rate and spin axis produces the most break, and that question needs cameras.

  Source: Jinji and Sakurai, Sports Biomechanics

• How much of expert performance does practice explain?

  More than twenty years ago, researchers proposed that individual differences in performance in music, sports and games largely reflect differences in the amount of deliberate practice, meaning structured activity designed specifically to improve performance. Popular science writing repeats it constantly. The question is whether the evidence carries it.

  Source: Macnamara, Hambrick and Oswald, Psychological Science

• Is the runner’s high really made of endorphins?

  A runner’s high is a sense of well-being during endurance exercise, marked by euphoria and reduced anxiety, and endorphins have been the popular explanation for decades. Exercise releases two classes of rewarding molecules, opioids and endocannabinoids, so the belief was never the only option. In mice, cannabinoid receptors carried the effect.

  Source: Siebers et al., Psychoneuroendocrinology

• Does beetroot juice actually make you faster?

  Nitrate from vegetables such as beetroot is thought to improve performance in endurance sports, and plenty of athletes drink it on that basis. Individual trials are small and point in several directions. Pooling them is the only way to see whether anything survives.

  Source: Gao et al., Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition

• Which part of a warm-up actually prevents injuries?

  Athletes stretch, balance, run through proprioception drills and lift, and every one of those has been sold as injury prevention. Randomized trials exist for several of them. Comparing what they deliver, and whether more of it delivers more, is a different exercise from running one more trial.

  Source: Lauersen et al., British Journal of Sports Medicine

• Is the cool-down stretch doing anything for your recovery?

  Post-exercise stretching is commonly prescribed for recovering strength and range of motion and for reducing muscle soreness the next day. Coaches have taught it for generations. The question the trials can settle is not whether it does something, but whether it beats simply resting.

  Source: Afonso et al., Frontiers in Physiology

• When should a goalkeeper stop watching the run-up?

  A keeper facing a penalty has to commit before the ball is struck, and the run-up is full of things to read. Most of what we know comes from players watching video clips and saying what they expect, which is not the same as diving. Whether the early information helps or hurts is what that gap hides.

  Source: Dicks et al., Perception

• Does a tennis grunt distract you or mislead you?

  Grunting in tennis is widespread, and whether it affects an opponent’s prediction of the ball has been argued for years. Two accounts compete. Distraction says the grunt steals attention; multisensory integration says the sound is folded into the judgement itself, and they predict different errors.

  Source: Müller et al., PLOS ONE

• Is playing a sport different from simply getting the exercise?

  Physical activity is good for mental health, which is settled enough to be on a prescription pad. Sport is a subset of physical activity with something extra attached: other people, a club, a fixture list, a role. If that extra matters, sport should show social outcomes alongside the mental health ones. So a systematic review searched nine databases and pulled the studies on adults. What did the evidence support?

  Source: Eather et al., Systematic Reviews

• Does the direction you flew in from change how you play at home?

  Elite athletes cross time zones constantly, and jet lag is not symmetrical: flying east shortens the day and is harder on the body clock than flying west. If that physiology reaches performance, the direction of travel should matter and not just the distance. So ten seasons of NBA data, 11,481 games, were analyzed with home and away games separated and circadian resynchronization accounted for.

  Source: Leota et al., Frontiers in Physiology

• How much of home advantage is the crowd?

  Home advantage is real and its causes are disputed: familiarity, travel, referees, the crowd. The pandemic removed one of those variables from every fixture at once, in games played without spectators that acquired the name ghost games. Most of the research that followed looked at soccer. Indoor arenas should show a larger crowd effect, so ten European basketball leagues were analyzed instead.

  Source: De Angelis and Reade, Annals of Operations Research

• Does the month you were born in decide whether you turn professional?

  Youth sport sorts children into age groups by a cut-off date, which means a child born just after it competes against children up to a year older. The relative age effect is the resulting skew in who gets selected. It is well documented in elite male soccer and the female evidence has been thin and contradictory. So the birthdates of 680 female and 1,083 male players in top German leagues were checked.

  Source: Götze and Hoppe, Frontiers in Psychology

• Does practice in a simulator make you better at the real game?

  Virtual environments are spreading fast through sports training, and the question underneath them has barely been asked. Getting better inside a simulator is easy to measure and proves nothing by itself. So eighty baseball players were split four ways: adaptive hitting training in a virtual environment, extra batting practice in that environment, extra real batting practice, and no additional training. Then they were tested on a real field.

  Source: Gray, Frontiers in Psychology

• What does the evidence actually say about managing jet lag in athletes?

  Teams fly across time zones constantly and the advice they follow is plentiful: light exposure, melatonin, nap schedules, meal timing, sedatives, stimulants. A systematic review set out to evaluate all of it, pharmacological and non-pharmacological alike, in athlete populations after long-haul travel or laboratory phase shifts. The interesting result is not which intervention won. It is how much evidence turned up.

  Source: Janse van Rensburg et al., British Journal of Sports Medicine

• Do referees call fewer penalties against the home team because of the crowd?

  Home advantage has an uncomfortable candidate explanation: the officials. Testing it requires removing the crowd while leaving everything else, which no league would ever agree to. The pandemic did it anyway, forcing the National Hockey League to play its 2020 playoffs in empty arenas. So penalty counts from those games were compared against the previous five years of playoffs. What did the referees do?

  Source: Guérette et al., PLOS ONE

• Which of the things athletes do before training actually prevents injury?

  Physical activity prevents and treats a long list of diseases, and injuries are the obvious cost against it. Several exercise measures are recommended to reduce that cost: strength training, stretching, proprioception work, and combinations of them. A systematic review and meta-analysis searched four databases, screened 3,462 results, and pooled 25 randomized controlled trials covering 26,610 participants with 3,464 injuries.

  Source: Lauersen et al., British Journal of Sports Medicine

• Should an endurance athlete train at altitude or only sleep there?

  Altitude training rests on a trade. Thin air raises red cell mass, which should help, and it also slows every training session down, which should hurt. If both are true then the ideal arrangement is to take one and refuse the other. A 1997 trial tested that directly, randomizing 39 competitive runners between living high and training low, living and training high, and staying near sea level.

  Source: Levine et al., Journal of Applied Physiology

• Does a muscle remember training it did months ago?

  Muscle memory is usually talked about as a feeling, that getting back into shape is easier the second time. There is a molecular version of the claim: human muscle shows an epigenetic memory of resistance training. Whether interval training leaves the same trace was unknown. So twenty people did two months of high-intensity interval training, stopped for three months, and did it again, with biopsies throughout.

  Source: Pilotto et al., American Journal of Physiology: Cell Physiology

• At what age does an athlete peak, and what does it depend on?

  Peak age gets quoted as a single number for sport in general, which cannot be right given how different sports are. A systematic review gathered published estimates of peak performance age for top international athletes this century. It sorted them by what each event mainly demands, then plotted them against how long the event lasts. The pattern that came out runs in two directions at once.

  Source: Allen et al., Sports Medicine

• Which part of home advantage did the empty stadiums take away?

  Pandemic football was played in front of nobody, which handed researchers an experiment no league would have agreed to run. Dozens of papers followed, each on its own league with its own method, and they do not all say the same thing. A systematic review pulled them together to ask three separate questions: whether home advantage shrank, whether team performance suffered, and what the referees did.

  Source: Wang and Qin, PLOS ONE

• What is an expert doing when they read a serve before it is struck?

  Table tennis gives a receiver a fraction of a second, which means the good players are not reacting to the ball so much as predicting it. Where that prediction happens in the brain has produced inconsistent imaging results. So experts and non-experts watched serve videos cut off at the moment of racket-ball contact and guessed the trajectory, with scanning throughout and a pattern-based analysis rather than a region-by-region one.

  Source: Ji et al., Neuroscience

• Does the color of a competitor’s kit affect who wins?

  Red coloration in males is a sexually selected, testosterone-dependent signal of quality across a range of animals, and in some species a male’s dominance can be raised experimentally just by attaching artificial red to him. If that response survives in humans, it should show up somewhere measurable. Sport assigns colors and records outcomes, which makes it the obvious place to look.

  Source: Hill and Barton, Nature

• Is the sprint false-start rule set at the wrong number?

  The false-start rule assumes nobody can react to the gun in under a hundred milliseconds. That assumption had never been checked properly. Seven national-level Finnish sprinters were put on the blocks with force sensors and muscle recordings, and auditory reactions as fast as eighty milliseconds turned up, below the legal floor. The recommendation was to lower the limit to eighty or eighty-five.

  Source: World Athletics

• Are exercise cramps really about dehydration and salt?

  The evidence says no. Nelson and Churilla reviewed the research on exercise-associated muscle cramps and concluded they stem from an imbalance in the nervous system rather than from dehydration or electrolyte deficits. Excitatory signals from muscle spindles overwhelm inhibitory signals from Golgi tendon organs, and the motor neurons fire when they should be quiet.

  Source: Nelson and Churilla, Muscle & Nerve

• Are the yips a nerve problem rather than a nerves problem?

  Possibly. Dhungana and Jankovic reviewed the literature and their own clinical experience on golfer’s yips, an intermittent tremor, jerk or spasm that appears mainly when a player tries to chip or putt. Recent work suggests it may be a form of task-specific focal dystonia in the hand and arm, which would make it a movement disorder rather than a failure of composure.

  Source: Dhungana and Jankovic, Movement Disorders

• Are there two different ways of choking under pressure?

  Sport psychology works with two models of it. Distraction says attention goes to the wrong things; self-focus says attention goes to the movement itself, which a well-learned skill does not want. Gröpel and Mesagno gathered forty-seven studies testing interventions against choking, and found that remedies built on either model help, along with a third kind nobody had named.

  Source: Gröpel and Mesagno, International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology

• Do the fastest marathon runners also run the steadiest race?

  Yes, and the gap is large. Ristanović and colleagues took the official splits of two hundred and eight thousand finishers at the Vienna City Marathon and half-marathon between 2006 and 2018. Everyone slowed over the course of the race. But the slowest quartile of men changed speed by about 7.9 percent in the marathon, against 4.14 percent for the fastest quartile.

  Source: Ristanović et al., Frontiers in Psychology

• What actually changes how far footballers run in a match?

  Not the things people argue about. Trewin and colleagues reviewed twenty-eight studies of tracking data and found only trivial changes in match-running with possession, formation, or whether a team was winning or losing. Temperature and altitude were a different matter. Heat from as little as twenty degrees Celsius cut high-speed running by about 8.5 percent.

  Source: Trewin et al., Science and Medicine in Football

• Do chess players really burn six thousand calories in a day?

  The figure was inferred, not measured. Robert Sapolsky’s claim that tournament players can burn up to six thousand calories a day, three times the daily average, came from breathing rates, blood pressure and muscle contractions. Neuroscientist Petra Ritter points out that those can run as high in a chess player as in an exercising athlete without the same energy being used.

  Source: CORDIS, European Commission

• What was the race where the four-minute mile fell?

  A university fixture, on a windy evening. Oxford University Athletics Club against the Amateur Athletic Association, at the Iffley Road ground on 6 May 1954, gun at six in the evening. Roger Bannister ran 3:59.4 and became the first man to cover a mile in under four minutes. The BBC at the time called it the Everest of athletic achievement.

  Source: World Athletics

• What exactly was swimming’s governing body trying to ban?

  Trapped air. The FINA executive met in Lausanne in June 2009 to decide which suits to approve, and the criterion at issue was whether a suit’s construction or material created air trapping effects. Manufacturers re-presented modified suits and argued their designs did not. The executive then admitted something unusual about its own test.

  Source: FINA

• Where was snooker invented, and by whom?

  In Jubbulpore, in India, by members of the British Army, in 1875. The sport’s own governing body puts it that plainly at the head of its history timeline. What follows on that timeline is a slower story than the invention date suggests, because the game took decades to acquire settled rules and another half century to acquire an audience.

  Source: World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association

• What are the twisties, and why are they dangerous?

  A gymnast loses track of where they are in the air. Simone Biles launched a vault in Tokyo meaning to do two and a half twists, lost her bearings once airborne, and completed one and a half. She knew immediately. The danger is not the lost twist but the landing that follows one.

  Source: Time

• Why does swimming time to a hundredth and no further?

  Because a hundredth is the smallest margin the sport will separate. In Beijing in 2008 the electronic timing system determined, and high-speed cameras confirmed, that Michael Phelps out-touched Milorad Cavic by exactly that. Below it, swimming declines to choose: at the 2022 World Championships two relay teams touched together and both were given the world record.

  Source: World Aquatics

• Why is a marathon that particular awkward distance?

  Because of where the organizers wanted it to start and finish. Up to 1908 the Olympic marathon had been run at distances ranging from forty to forty-two kilometers. For the London Games the organizers wanted a start on the East Lawn at Windsor Castle and a finish in the White City Stadium directly in front of the Royal box.

  Source: IOC Olympic Studies Centre

• Is the marginal gains idea actually new?

  No, and the paper saying so is written by management researchers rather than coaches. Marginal gains came to public attention when British cycling won a record eight gold medals at London 2012. The ethos of aggregating small improvements across many areas had been central there since National Lottery funding arrived in 1997. Hall and colleagues point out the concept predates all of that.

  Source: Hall et al., HR Bulletin: Research and Practice

• What did one Belgian footballer’s court case change?

  Two things, both struck down on the same article of the EEC Treaty. On 15 December 1995 the Court of Justice ruled on players out of contract. A club in another member state may not be barred from signing one because it has not paid a transfer fee to the old club. It also struck down limits on how many players from other member states a club may field.

  Source: Court of Justice of the European Union

• How far out of reach is DiMaggio’s hitting streak?

  Twelve games clear of everyone else, for eighty-five years. DiMaggio hit safely in fifty-six consecutive games between the middle of May and the middle of July 1941. The previous record was forty-four games, set in 1897, when foul balls did not count as strikes. With the exception of DiMaggio’s streak, no player has hit in more than forty-four consecutive games since.

  Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica

• How fast does a smashed shuttlecock actually slow down?

  It halves its speed every 3.35 meters. Filming elite and international players with high-speed cameras on a badminton court, researchers found that feather shuttlecock trajectories show an exponential decay in velocity and an exponential rise in time of flight with distance. Initial speeds can exceed five hundred kilometers an hour, and almost none of that survives the length of a court.

  Source: Shuttlecock velocity decay after smash and slice shots in badminton

• What is the thirty-kilometer walk the monks of Mount Hiei make?

  A prescribed circuit, repeated. The kaihōgyō is a form of Tendai mountain asceticism carried on at Enryaku-ji on Mount Hiei, the sect’s headquarter temple. The practitioner walks a set nineteen-mile route, about thirty kilometers, around the mountain and its environs, stopping to offer prayers at the various halls, shrines and other holy sites along the way.

  Source: Rhodes, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies

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