England Survive Altitude and Mexico / The Doctor's Dilemma in Elite Sport - When Is Enough? / How Women Out "Pace" Men in Marathons

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Show notes

In this week's Spotlight, Ross and Gareth take on the news:

• (00:02:00) Football World Cup: England survived altitude and Mexico, and Ross's numbers explain how — less total running, fewer sprints, the game deliberately slowed down. It's a collective pacing strategy dictated by physiology, not just tactics. Plus VAR is amplifying the chaos rather than ending it (Argentina's late smash-and-grab over Egypt, a sensor in the ball denying Croatia), and six African teams knocked out in the dying minutes.
• (00:28:00) Tour de France: our first read on the opening stages, and why the new team time trial format, where the rider's individual time counted, added genuine tactical intrigue.
• (00:31:00) The story that troubled us most: riders starting stages very sick in 40°C heat. After De Lie and Uijtdebroeks pushed on while ill, we discuss the incentives in elite high performance sport that put team doctors is unenviable and often compromised positions, and whether, as with concussion in rugby, sports governing bodies should step in to alleviate the conflicts faced by medics?
• (00:39:00) The science of pre-cooling: why INEOS sat in a row with their forearms in cold water. Ross explains the AVAs, the skin's heat-dumping shortcut, and why the water mustn't be too cold or you shut the whole thing down.
• (00:53:00) Record watch: Josh Kerr's unusual race-free build-up and his 3:42 fixation, Keely Hodgkinson's choppy season, and Faith Kipyegon's first 1500m/mile defeat in five years.
• (00:58:00) A cracking paper spotted by listener Steve O'Hale: 870,000 Berlin finishers show men are twice as likely to hit the wall as women. And, counter-intuitively, the faster the men, the more likely they are to blow up, relative to women. Ego or physiology? We dig in.
• (01:08:00) And finally: a 10-year-old tennis prodigy, homeschooled and training seven days a week. A feel-good story, or early specialisation and survivorship bias dressed up as one? Plus Wimbledon heads for it's 9th straight first time winner on the women's side.

Links

• Our football World Cup thread, for Supporters Club members, containing all the Mexico-England analysis and more discussion on the tournament
• Movistar under fire as Uijtdebroeks races on while ill
• The Stanford Glove - researchers thought they'd found a way to 'hack' cooling with a Zoolander like vacuum glove
• BBC article on Josh Kerr's 3:42 target preparations
• Kerr on the importance of psychology in his preparation
• The Nature paper on men vs women pacing strategies in the marathon

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