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Chariots of Silicon
ToddML writes "I just spotted this article at wired.com which talks about the current deficiencies of the U.S. long-distance running program, and more importantly, what is being done about it. An interesting story from both a gadget perspective, and for the source of the program -- private industry."
Soccer. Once the Americans dominate that sport by creating a team of ubermenchen they can finally tell the rest of the World to stop calling it 'football', too.
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Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
The core feature of this (apart from all the bio-monitoring) seems to be the idea of keeping a whole house at equivalent air pressure to 12,000 feet. This lets the athletes train at sea level, while resting at altitude (which is seen as a 'good thing').
But doesn't it open the athletes up to altitude sickness? Granted, 12,000 feet is low to get this, but it's generally caused as much by the change in altitude as the absolute altitude (So generally if you take a week climbing to 16,000 feet you're much less likely to be afflicted than if you do it in a couple of days). Oddly enough, it affects fit people as much as (or often more than) the unfit, so I do wonder whether they have any problem with this.
Incidentally, I know that 20,000 feet is about half an atmosphere, so I guess they're talking about 2/3 (sea-level) atmosphere at 12,000 feet.
I don't understand why americans are so concerned about winning at every damn sports competition in the bloody planet.
Let it go! Go... go play with your silly oblongated ball.
jocks... an entire country of them.
MoitaCarrasco "Everyday I beat my own previous record for the number of consecutive days I've stayed alive." - CARLIN
And here is the thing that you cannot do in football. Out tech them! There is no tech to football. You could give a team more endurance, but at the end of the day it relies on the individual, team and trainer.
Otherwise Brazil would not dominate the way it does. Brazil has no tech, just cut throat competition and the football lifestyle. I watched how Brazilian players are trained and it starts when they are seven or eight. It is in their "blood". The truly elite players in football, live, breath and eat football. And more often than not they come from poor areas, eg Zidane...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
There are some real aggregate genetic differences between people of different ethnic backgrounds. People of European descent never have sickle-cell anemia. This is because the genes that cause this disease are never beneficial in the European climate. Having one copy of the allele that causes sickle cell anemia provides better resistance to malaria, while two makes you deathly ill - so many people of African origin have inherited one allele from their ancestors because of the prevalence of malaria in their ancestral environment.
Many genetic disorders are far more common in a particular ethnic group, sickle cell anemia is just the most striking example. There's a genetic disorder that almost exclusively affects people who are ethnically Jewish and are born to two ethnically Jewish parents. The name escapes me.
On the whole, Kenyans appear to blessed with an extraordinarily high slow fast twitch/fast twitch muscle ratio. You cannot take someone with a lot of fast twitch muscle and turn them into a good marathoner; it just can't be done. Try this at home: jump as high as you can without bending your knees substantially. If you can't get more than six inches off the ground, your genes will never let you be a great sprinter, even if you started training at six and had all the training in the world. The colder you ancestors' climate, the more likely you are flunk, which makes the Kenya thing kind of weird.
But except in these corner cases, this stuff doesn't matter. A white person can be a great athlete, and a black person can be a brilliant scholar. Sadly, some people seize on these relatively trivial differences to make a case that are ancestry is far more important than it really is. Just because a particular group of people can or can't jump very high (on average) doesn't mean they should be treated any differently.