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Showing posts with label sports. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sports. Show all posts
Unbelievable: Obama and Congress wants to tell College Football how to run playoffs

Unbelievable: Obama and Congress wants to tell College Football how to run playoffs

This is too bizarre. Are they next going to start running other sports?

House lawmakers are gearing up for a vote as soon as next week on a bill aimed at forcing a national college-football playoff.

Approval of the legislation by an Energy and Commerce subcommittee would represent the most significant action yet by Congress in its oversight of college football. The plans for a markup next week – still tentative as of late Friday – appeared to signal growing congressional support for the idea, which President Barack Obama also backed during the 2008 campaign.

For the last decade or so, the process of picking a national champion has been run by the Bowl Championship Series, a group that began with six major college conferences and has since expanded somewhat. The BCS runs a complex ranking system that picks the two teams that play for the national championship each year.

Prior to the BCS, the national champion was effectively chosen by polls following year-end bowl games. The BCS was designed to eliminate some of the controversy that inevitably swirled around that process.

But the BCS system's congressional critics charge that the system frequently is unfair to college teams that aren't traditional powerhouses. . . .
Drugs and sports for the elderly

Drugs and sports for the elderly

Given all the discussion about drugs in sports, this seems like the perfect counterpoint. I especially like the line: “Who’s 75 years old and not taking medications?” The NY Times has this piece.

In his apartment outside Philadelphia, Frank Levine pulled a list of prescription medications from his refrigerator, his hands shaking slightly. There was metformin HCl and glipizide for his diabetes; lisinopril for his blood pressure; and Viagra.

“I need it,” he said recently.

Mr. Levine, who is 95 and has had operations on both knees, in June set the American record in the 400-meter dash for men ages 95 to 99, only to see it broken at the U.S.A. Masters Outdoor Track & Field Championships a few weeks later. “Nothing counts unless you’re first,” he said.

Mr. Levine belongs to a generation of track and field athletes who are breaking records for speed, distance and endurance at ages once considered too old for competition. In a sport tarnished by doping scandals, the older athletes raise anew the question of what constitutes a natural body for people who are at an age when drugs are a part of life.

“Who’s 75 years old and not taking medications?” asked Gary Snyder, national chairman of U.S.A. Track & Field’s masters committee, which will oversee more than 100 competitions this year for athletes over age 30. . . . .
Should Students be encouraged to take brainpower boosting drugs?

Should Students be encouraged to take brainpower boosting drugs?

I have a lot of pieces on this issue here. It seems to me like a simple cost benefit analysis. There is no more a moral question than whether people should drink coffee to wake up or have surgery to repair joints. This article below is from the Times of London:

Students should be allowed to take “smart drugs”, such as Ritalin, to help boost their academic performance, a leading academic has suggested.

John Harris, professor of bioethics and director of the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation at the University of Manchester, said the government and medical profession should “seriously consider” making cognition-enhancing drugs available to students without prescription, or allowing them to be prescribed for non-therapeutic purposes, such as studying.

Students have long used drugs to boost their study performance. Caffeine and ginseng are traditional favourites. But recently the use of more powerful, restricted drugs, particularly the anti-hyperactivity medicine Ritalin, has spread from campuses in the US.

Currently such drugs are available only on prescription. Although many students buy them on the internet, their use without a prescription is a criminal offence.

But Professor Harris, joint Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Medical Ethics, said that serious consideration should now be given to making some of them available on prescription for non-medical reasons, specifically for the purpose of enhancing cognitive performance.

There was now a sizeable body of evidence to show that stimulants such as Ritalin, Provigil and Adderall significantly improve concentration and performance and their side effects were proportional to their benefits, he said. . . . .
Even the NY Times recognizes that Women will never run as fast as Men

Even the NY Times recognizes that Women will never run as fast as Men

Testosterone is apparently the key difference.

BEIJING — No matter what happens in the men’s marathon here Sunday, one thing is all but certain. The winner will run the 26.2-mile course faster than the winner of the women’s marathon last Sunday.

The woman who won, Constantina Tomescu of Romania, was fast, of course, finishing the race in 2 hours 26 minutes 44 seconds — more than a minute ahead of the second-place finisher. But for a variety of intrinsic biological reasons, the best women can never run as fast as the best men, exercise researchers say.

Women are slower than men in running, in swimming, in cycling. Whether it is a 100-meter race on the track or a marathon, a 200-meter butterfly swim or a 10-kilometer marathon swim, the pattern holds.

And even though some scientists once predicted that women would eventually close the gender gap in elite performances — it was proposed that all they needed was more experience, better training and stronger coaching — that idea is now largely discredited, at least for Olympic events. Researchers say there is no one physiological reason for the gap, although there is a common biological thread.

“To a large extent, it’s a matter of testosterone,” said Dr. Benjamin Levine, director of the Institute for Exercise and Environmental Medicine at Presbyterian Hospital and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. “That’s why systematic doping of women is even more effective than systematic doping of men. That’s why the East German women were so much more successful than the East German men.”

The hormone affects everything from muscle size and strength to the size of the heart to the amount of oxygen-carrying blood cells in the body to the percentage of fat on an athlete’s body. Every one of those effects gives men a performance advantage.

Testosterone, Levine said, gives men what he calls a bigger and better-fueled engine. Their skeletal muscles, which do the work during exercise, are bigger. And their hearts, which provide fuel for the work, are bigger, too.

It is not that every man is inherently better than every woman.

“A very lean, well-trained woman will be faster than a less lean, less fit man,” he said. But that is not the issue in the Olympics, where the men and women are among the world’s best. . . .
Did Mitchell Steroid Report Tarnish Other Players' Images to Protect Barry Bonds?

Did Mitchell Steroid Report Tarnish Other Players' Images to Protect Barry Bonds?

By putting together a long list of players who had used steroids, the Mitchell Report made it difficult for MLB to do anything to Barry Bonds. The vast majority of the 80 names listed were essentially unknowns, but there were enough names a few well known ones to make punishing people seem impossible. Many of those attacked where attacked based on virtually no evidence. Simply having one person mention their name was enough to get them included in the list. Well, some are fighting back.

NEW YORK — Roger Clemens posted a video Sunday repeating his denials of the steroids use alleged against him in the Mitchell Report and plans to be interviewed for a future episode of "60 Minutes."

The seven-time Cy Young Award winner was accused in the report of using steroids, an allegation made by his former trainer.

In October last year, the Los Angeles Times reported Clemens was linked to steroids in the May 2006 sworn statement of a federal agent who cited former big league pitcher Jason Grimsley. At the time, the names of players in the public version had been blacked out. When the full affidavit was unsealed Thursday, Clemens' name was not in it, and the paper issued a correction and an apology.

"I faced this last year when the L.A. Times reported that I used steroids. I said it was not true then, and now the whole world knows it's not true, now that that's come out," Clemens said in the video, which was posted Sunday on the Web site of his foundation and on You Tube.


His youtube response can be seen here.
Steroids for the brain?

Steroids for the brain?

If we are going to ban steroids from sports, when are we going to begin banning treatments that improve people's performance in school? Of course, you might also have to ban caffeine and other drugs. But why is it worse for people to do well in sports by taking steroids than someone to do better on the SATs and thus beating out someone else for a place at a top school?

A rise in healthy people popping pills to boost performance in exams or work, raises long-term ethical and safety concerns about the effects of such treatments, British doctors said on Thursday.

The British Medical Association (BMA) wants a public debate about the risks and benefits of using drugs to improve memory and concentration, sometimes called "cognitive enhancement". . . . .
Even amphetamines banned from baseball. Is coffee next?

Even amphetamines banned from baseball. Is coffee next?

The military gives amphetamines to pilots, people in a huge number of jobs rely on them, but no longer are they allowed in baseball. Why is this so bad? Selig's statement that he doesn't hope that it has any effect on the quality of the game seems like wishful thinking.

Last week, the baseball season passed the three-quarters pole in its grueling schedule of 162 games spread out over 183 days. With the late-summer heat and the accumulated fatigue taking their toll on players' bodies, it is the time of year when in past seasons the use of amphetamines, long considered an integral part of the major league experience, would typically be at its peak.

However, this being the first year of baseball's ban on amphetamines -- also known as "greenies," "beans" and several other nicknames -- players no longer have that option, a reality that some observers believe has had a subtle effect on the game.

"I definitely know there are some guys who get to a Sunday day game, after a Saturday night game, and say, 'Man, I wish I had a greenie.' I've heard guys say that," Cincinnati Reds pitcher Bronson Arroyo said. "So there's probably been some small effect. But I don't think it's been as noticeable as people thought it would be."

Baseball's steroid-testing program is now in its fourth season and its third incarnation, having been strengthened twice under pressure from the federal government. However, until last November baseball had resisted banning amphetamines, synthetic stimulants that, some within the game argued, were not true performance-enhancers -- an assertion that is contradicted by leading authorities on the use of drugs in sports.. . . .

Commissioner of Baseball Bud Selig was asked during the all-star break last month about the belief that the quality of play would decline this summer because of the amphetamine ban. "I know there are some people who feel that way," he said. "I hope the quality of play does not change. You can do a lot of other things -- [such as] get a good night's rest." . . . .


A history of amphetamines is provided here. The interesting note is the use of amphetamines in mountain climbing (may be auto racing also) where I would think that there is a strong argument that amphetamines are possible life saving drugs. For that matter, this could be true for more than a few of the sports that they list.
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