The Real Science of Sport Podcast

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Show notes

This week our headline topic is a "concussion sensor" being trialled by some teams at the Tour de France, and why it is a welcome innovation, but one that, for now, invites potentially dangerous false hope. We also take a spin through the rest of the week in sport, covering football, cycling, tennis and track and field. Oh, and hotdogs.

(00:00:20) The World Cup nears its finale, and Spain utterly outplayed France to reach the final, making fools of our predictions after Gareth handed France to Ross. We get into why the France-Spain dynamic flipped so completely, the scarcity of penalty shootouts this tournament, the mooted expansion to 64 teams, hydration-break ad money paying for the broadcast rights, the ref cam, and the goal-line technology row over the England-Norway "wire" incident.
(00:16:18) Following our David Bailey podcast, we ask whether the peloton is simply scared of Tadej Pogačar, whose dominance at the Tour has riders like Ben Healy and Florian Lipowitz shaking their heads in bewilderment. We also unpack why "marginal gains" and sports science only ever matter as a point of difference, borrowing points-of-parity and points-of-difference thinking from marketing.
(00:24:16) Our headline piece. A "concussion" sensor sitting behind the helmet's BOA dial is being trialled by some teams the Tour, and we explain why the name is a dangerous misnomer. A helmet-mounted device measures helmet acceleration, not the brain, may be triggered off by cobbles, and can never be diagnostic. We explain that it could be used as a triage tool, not a diagnostic one that replaces road-side assessments. Drawing on rugby's mouthguard data, hundreds of thousands of head-acceleration events with poor sensitivity and predictive value, and the case of Torstein Traen, who passed a roadside check yet was later diagnosed with concussion, Ross explains that this is a genuine safety opportunity, but only if cycling gets the framing and the use of it right.
(00:40:06) A wrap of the Wimbledon finals, with remarkable mental resilience from the new women's champion Linda Noskova, and Jannik Sinner's dominant serve. We look at Sinner's serve speed and placement, and how Zverev manages type 1 diabetes on court.
(00:45:53) A rush of track action from the Monaco Diamond League, including Emmanuel Wanyonyi's 1000m world record and a brave but doomed attempt at the 3000m WR by Birke Haylom, who paid for what ended up being a pacing error by coming last. We also look ahead to the London Diamond League, headlined by Josh Kerr's much-hyped mile world record attempt, the women's 800m with Hodgkinson and Bol, and a stacked men's 800m.
(00:57:50) Does South African rugby have a doping problem? A new positive for junior Springbok prop Kai Pratt, SAIDS rejecting the "witch hunt" framing, and Ross digs into the numbers: testing down more than six-fold in a decade, South Africa accounting for one in five rugby doping cases worldwide, and an anti-doping body whose budget has flatlined. We argue why "sour grapes" is no defence, and why the answer is to test more, not deflect.
(01:04:57) And Finally, Joey Chestnut wins another July 4th hot dog title, with the Kobayashi method as competitive eating's "super shoes", and an Ironman in Swansea sends us down the rabbit hole of how organisers conjure those economic-impact and "media value" figures, plus the leader who rode straight into a stationary ambulance.
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Team NSN Cycling is one of the most exciting teams in the World Tour peloton, and Lausanne-based Briton David Bailey is its Head of Sport Science. Amid the pressures of being at the cutting edge of athletic performance, Bailey talks us through the current trends in pro cycling, including nutrition, training, health, tech, and even the role of AI and data management. Bailey has over 20 years of experience in elite sport as a coach, scientist, and performance director, I has supported world-class athletes, including multiple Olympic and World Champions. Bailey has also worked for the BMC and Bahrain Victorius pro cycling teams and comes with a wealth of knowledge and experience.

SHOW NOTES
Team NSN website
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Show notes

Most of us watch football and follow the ball. Football journalist Michael Cox watches the spaces, the shapes and the patterns that few others understand. As we build towards the FIFA World Cup Quarter-finals, Ross and Gareth sit down with one of the sharpest tactical analysts in football writing, and perhaps the best at explaining it. Whatever your level of interest, you'll come away seeing the game completely differently.

Cox runs the rule over all the major teams and players at this year's World Cup, dissecting and explaining their strengths, their weaknesses, and what will decide each tie. Along the way he unpacks the tactical questions casual fans never quite get answered: how France's individual brilliance differs from Spain's possession and shape, why Messi and Haaland barely run and how whole systems are built to let them save their bursts, the shift from man-marking to zonal defending, the risk-and-reward of a full-back charging forward the instant his team loses the ball, what "shape" even means, and why he's the most data-sceptical "data nerd" you'll meet.

Then the harder ground. What's holding back the development of African, South American and Asian football, and is the European academy machine now so dominant that its cast-offs are better than the players other nations produce at home? As for VAR, he explains what he'd change, why he thinks it's stripped the joy from celebrating a goal, and how one fan-owned league in Europe refuses to touch it.

Whether you live for football, or only watch the biggest games, this wide-ranging interview will change how you watch football.

Today's Guest: Michael Cox

Michael Cox founded the influential tactics site Zonal Marking in 2010 and is now a regular contributor to The Athletic. He's the author of two books — The Mixer, on the history of Premier League tactics, and Zonal Marking: The Making of Modern European Football.

He is a keen supporter of @KingstonianFC. You can follow him on X: @Zonal_Marking and BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/zonal-marking.bsky.social

Links

Michael's bio page with The New York Times, containing links to all his articles (paywalled articles, unfortunately - selected articles to read for Members on Discourse)
Michael's first book, The Mixer
Zonal Marking: The Making of Modern European Football, his second book
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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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Show notes

Formula 1 is one sport we've never properly tackled, so who better to guide us through it than a man who spent 25 years on the inside? Dom Riefstahl is a mechanical engineer who went straight from graduation into BMW's F1 programme, later moving to the Sauber F1 team and then to the Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 outfit, where he worked with seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton. Riefstahl now keeps his eye on the ball as an F1 pundit for Luxembourg public broadcaster RTL.

In this interview, Riefstahl takes us inside the world's most sophisticated sport, and, in particular, the fascinating triangle among driver, engineer, and car. He explains how a driver's feel for the car is translated into action by engineers armed with 400 sensors and 40 000 channels of data, why the great drivers are the ones who can tell whether a problem comes from their own driving or from the car itself, and how a top driver sometimes feels things the technology can't yet measure. Along the way, we learn what it costs to develop a driver from karting to an F1 seat, why reaction time can quietly end a career, why the truly great champions are hypersensitive about everything from tyre temperatures to wafts of garlic, and why the driver you're most likely to have a pint with will probably never be world champion.
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