A They play hard, they play often, and they play to win. Australian
sports teams win more than their
fair share of titles, demolishing rivals with seeming ease. How do they do it?
A big part of the secret is
an extensive and expensive network of sporting academies underpinned by science and medicine. At the
Australian Institute of Sport (AIS), hundreds of youngsters and pros live and
train under the eyes of coaches. Another body, the Australian Sports Commission
(ASC), finances programmes
of excellence in a total of 96 sports for thousands of sportsmen and women. Both provide intensive coaching, training facilities and
nutritional advice.
B Inside the academies, science takes
centre stage. The AIS employs more than 100 sports scientists and doctors, and collaborates with
scores of others in universities and research centres. AIS scientists work across a number of
sports, applying skills learned in one – such as building muscle strength in
golfers – to others, such as swimming and squash. They are backed up by technicians who design
instruments to collect data from athletes. They all focus on one aim: winning.
‘We can't waste our time looking at ethereal scientific questions that don't
help the coach work with an
athlete and improve performance,' says Peter Fricker, chief of science at AIS.
C A lot of
their work comes down to measurement – everything from the exact angle of a swimmer's dive to the second-by-second power
output of a cyclist. This data is used to wring improvements out of athletes. The focus is on individuals,
tweaking performances to squeeze an extra
hundredth of a second here, an extra millimetre there. No gain is too slight to
bother with. It's the tiny, gradual
improvements that add up to world-beating results. To demonstrate how the
system works, Bruce Mason at AIS shows off the prototype of a 3D analysis tool
for studying swimmers. A wire-frame model of a champion swimmer slices through
the water, her arms moving in slow
motion. Looking side-on, Mason measures the distance between strokes. From above, he analyses how her spine swivels.
When fully developed, this system will enable him to build a biomechanical profile for coaches to use to help budding
swimmers. Mason's contribution to sport also includes the development of
the SWAN (SWimming ANalysis) system now
used in Australian national competitions. It collects images from digital
cameras running at 50 frames a second and breaks down each part of a swimmer's
performance into factors that can be analysed individually – stroke
length, stroke frequency, average duration of each stroke, velocity, start, lap
and finish times, and so on. At the end of each race, SWAN spits out data on each swimmer.
D 'Take a look,’ says Mason, pulling out a sheet
of data. He points out the data on the swimmers in second and third place, which shows that the one
who finished
third actually swam
faster. So why did he finish 35 hundredths of a second down?
'His turn times were 44 hundredths of a second behind the other guy,' says Masonlf he can
improve on his turns, he can do much better: This is the kind of accuracy that AIS scientists' research is
bringing to a range of sports. With the Cooperative Research Centre for Micro Technology in Melbourne,
they are developing
unobtrusive sensors that will be embedded in an athlete's clothes or running
shoes to monitor heart
rate, sweating, heat production or any other factor that might have an impact on an athlete's ability to run. There's
more to it than simply measuring performance. Fricker gives the example of athletes who may be
down with coughs and colds 11 or 12 times a year. After years of experimentation, AIS and the University of Newcastle in New
South Wales developed a test that measures
how much of the immune-system protein immunoglobulin A is present in athletes' saliva. If IgA levels suddenly fall
below a certain level, training is eased or dropped altogether. Soon, IgA levels start rising again,
and the danger passes. Since the tests were introduced, AIS athletes in
all sports have been remarkably successful at staying healthy.
E Using data is a complex business. Well before
a championship, sports scientists and coaches start to prepare the athlete by
developing a 'competition
model', based on what
they expect will be the winning times. 'You design
the model to make that time,' says Mason. 'A start of this much, each free-swimming period has to
be this fast, with a certain stroke frequency and stroke length, with turns done in these times:
All the training is then geared towards making the athlete hit those targets, both overall and
for each segment of the race. Techniques like these have transformed Australia into arguably the world's most successful
sporting nation.
F Of course, there's nothing to stop other
countries copying – and many have tried. Some years ago, the AIS unveiled coolant-lined jackets for endurance
athletes.
At
the Atlanta Olympic Games in 1996,
these sliced as much as two per cent off cyclists' and rowers' times. Now everyone uses them. The same has happened to the
'altitude tent', developed by AIS to replicate the effect of altitude training at sea level. But Australia's success
story is about more than easily copied technological fixes, and up to now no
nation has replicated its all-encompassing system.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
1 a reference to the exchange of
expertise between different sports
2 a reason for narrowing the scope of
research activity
3 an explanation of how
visual imaging is employed in investigations
4
how some AIS ideas have been reproduced
5 an overview of the funded support of
athletes
6 how performance requirements are calculated before
an event
7 how obstacles to optimum achievement can be
investigated
Classify the following techniques
according to whether the writer states they
8 cameras
9 sensors
10 protein
tests
11 altitude tents
Answer the questions below.
Choose no more than three words and/or a number from the passage for each answer.
12
What is produced to help an athlete plan their
performance in an event?
13 By how much
did some cyclists' performance improve at the 1996 Olympic Games?
