Steven Broglio on Concussions, Football and Informed Choice - Manifold Podcast #31

Steve and Corey talk with Steven Broglio, Director of the Michigan Concussion Center, about concussion risk, prevention and treatment. Broglio describes how the NCAA emerged from the deaths that almost led Theodore Roosevelt to outlaw college football. He also explains recent findings on CTE, why females may be at greater concussion risk, and why sleep is critical to avoiding long-term brain injury. They discuss how new rules probably make football safer and debate why New England is so down on kids playing football. Steve wonders whether skills are in decline now that some schools have eliminated “contact” in practices.

Steven Broglio (Faculty Profile)

Michigan Concussion Center

NeuroTrauma Research Laboratory

NCAA-DoD Grand Alliance: Concussion Assessment, Research, and Education (CARE)


man·i·fold /ˈmanəˌfōld/ many and various.

In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point.

Steve Hsu and Corey Washington have been friends for almost 30 years, and between them hold PhDs in Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Theoretical Physics. Join them for wide ranging and unfiltered conversations with leading writers, scientists, technologists, academics, entrepreneurs, investors, and more.

Steve Hsu is VP for Research and Professor of Theoretical Physics at Michigan State University. He is also a researcher in computational genomics and founder of several Silicon Valley startups, ranging from information security to biotech. Educated at Caltech and Berkeley, he was a Harvard Junior Fellow and held faculty positions at Yale and the University of Oregon before joining MSU.

Corey Washington is Director of Analytics in the Office of Research and Innovation at Michigan State University. He was educated at Amherst College and MIT before receiving a PhD in Philosophy from Stanford and a PhD in a Neuroscience from Columbia. He held faculty positions at the University Washington and the University of Maryland. Prior to MSU, Corey worked as a biotech consultant and is founder of a medical diagnostics startup.

We Are Nowhere Close to the Limits of Athletic Performance (Nautilus Magazine)

This is in the special Sports issue -- just in time for Rio :-)

We Are Nowhere Close to the Limits of Athletic Performance

For many years I lived in Eugene, Oregon, also known as “track-town USA” for its long tradition in track and field. Each summer high-profile meets like the United States National Championships or Olympic Trials would bring world-class competitors to the University of Oregon’s Hayward Field. It was exciting to bump into great athletes at the local cafe or ice cream shop, or even find myself lifting weights or running on a track next to them. One morning I was shocked to be passed as if standing still by a woman running 400-meter repeats. Her training pace was as fast as I could run a flat out sprint over a much shorter distance.

The simple fact was that she was an extreme outlier, and I wasn’t. Athletic performance follows a normal distribution, like many other quantities in nature. That means that the number of people capable of exceptional performance falls off exponentially as performance levels increase. While an 11-second 100-meter can win a high school student the league or district championship, a good state champion runs sub-11, and among 100 state champions only a few have any hope of running near 10 seconds.

... Freeman Dyson speculated that, one day, humans would use genetic technologies to modify themselves for space exploration—making themselves more resistant to radiation, vacuum, and zero gravity, perhaps even able to extract energy directly from sunlight. Insertion of genes from entirely different species, like photosynthetic plant genes, brings a whole new meaning to the term GMO: Speciation seems a definite possibility.

Human athletic ability might follow a similar trajectory. The nature of athletes, and the sports they compete in, are going to change due to new genomic technology. Will ordinary people lose interest? History suggests that they won’t: We love to marvel at exceptional, unimaginable ability. Lebron and Kobe and Shaq and Bolt all stimulated interest in their sports. The most popular spectator sport of 2100 might be cage fights between 8-foot-tall titans capable of balletic spinning head kicks and intricate jiu-jitsu moves. Or, just a really, really fast 100m sprint. No doping required.

The work is behind the scenes

... competition is the easy part.

The ten second barrier

Pei Meng Zhang -- 10.00 in the 100m in the semis at the IAAF World Championships 2013. Same time as Christophe Lemaitre, who was allowed to advance ahead of Zhang. At 6"1 190 Zhang is pretty big for a sprinter. With his skinny upper body I'm guessing he's clean ;-)

Given the wind reading Zhang has the best performance yet for an Asian, slightly ahead of Koji Ito (also 10.00, 1998). On the world all-time list this is around 100th best among all individuals. Lemaitre is the fastest European, with PR 9.92 (about 35th best). He's a very unusual 6"4 160 (at least according to Wikipedia).

Training days: Nathan Adrian

I've been teaching my kids how to swim, and started showing them some technique and training videos from YouTube. Eventually I came across these Nathan Adrian videos. Yikes -- 6,000 to 8,000 calories a day!

Go Bears!  :-)

On doping

All dopers? Or just a minority? I had friends in high school who took steroids. At the time, many coaches, doctors and "sports scientists" claimed the drugs didn't work (placebo effect, they said). But it was obvious that they did. I distinctly remember this as the point at which I became very suspicious of statements by medical and "scientific" authorities. If they were wrong about something as simple as this, what else could they be wrong about?

Der Spiegel: Angel Heredia, once a doping dealer and now a chief witness for the U.S. Justice Department, talks about the powerlessness of the investigators, the motives of athletes who cheat and the drugs of the future. 

He had been in hiding under an assumed name in a hotel in Laredo, Texas, for two years when the FBI finally caught up with him. The agents wanted to know from Angel Heredia if he knew a coach by the name of Trevor Graham, whether he carried the nickname “Memo”, and what he knew about doping. "No", "no", "nothing" – those were his replies. But then the agents laid the transcripts of 160 wiretapped telephone conversations on the table, as well as the e-mails and the bank statements. That’s when Angel "Memo" Heredia knew that he had lost. He decided to cooperate, and he also knew that he would only have a chance if he didn’t lie – not a single time. “He’s telling the truth,” the investigators say about Heredia today. 

SPIEGEL: Mr. Heredia, will you watch the 100 meter final in Beijing? 

Heredia: Of course. But the winner will not be clean. Not even any of the contestants will be clean. 

SPIEGEL: Of eight runners ... Heredia: ... eight will be doped. ... 

Heredia: Yes. When the season ended in October, we waited for a couple of weeks for the body to cleanse itself. Then in November, we loaded growth hormone and epo, and twice a week we examined the body to make sure that no lumps were forming in the blood. Then we gave testosterone shots. This first program lasted eight to ten weeks, then we took a break. 

SPIEGEL: And then the goals for the season were established? 

Heredia: Yes, that depended on the athlete. Some wanted to run a good time in April to win contracts for the tournaments. Others focused on nothing but the trials, the U.S. qualification for international championships. Others cared only about the Olympics. Then we set the countdown for the goal in question, and the next cycle began. I had to know my athletes well and have an overview of what federation tested with which methods. 

SPIEGEL: Where does one get this information? 

Heredia: Vigilance. Informers. ... 

SPIEGEL: What trainers have you worked together with? Heredia: Particularly with Trevor Graham. 

SPIEGEL: Graham has a lifetime ban because he purportedly helped Marion Jones, Tim Montgomery, Justin Gatlin and many others to cheat. Who else? 

Heredia: With Winthrop Graham, his cousin. With John Smith, Maurice Greene’s coach. With Raymond Stewart, the Jamaican. With Dennis Mitchell ... 

SPIEGEL: ... who won gold in the 4 x 100 meters in 1992 and today is a coach. How did the collaboration work? 

Heredia: It’s a small world. It gets around who can provide you with something how quickly and at what price, who is discreet. The coaches approached me and asked if I could help them, and I said: yes. Then they gave me money, $15,000 or thereabouts, we got a first shipment and then we did business. At some point it led to one-on-one cooperation with the athletes. 

SPIEGEL: Was there a regimen of sorts? 

Heredia: Yes. I always combined several things. For example, I had one substance called actovison that increased blood circulation – not detectable. That was good from a health standpoint and even better from a competitive standpoint. Then we had the growth factors IGF-1 and IGF-2. And epo. Epo increases the number of red blood cells and thus the transportation of oxygen, which is the key for every athlete: the athlete wants to recover quickly, keep the load at a constantly high level and achieve a constant performance. 

SPIEGEL: Once again: a constant performance at the world-class level is unthinkable without doping? 

Heredia: Correct. 400 meters in 44 seconds? Unthinkable. 71 meters with a discus? No way. You might be able to run 100 meters in 9.8 seconds once with a tailwind. But ten times a year under 10 seconds, in the rain or heat? Only with doping. Part III: “If he maintains he is clean, I can only answer that that is a lie.” 

SPIEGEL: Testosterone, growth hormone, epo – that was your combination? 

Heredia: Yes, with individual variations. And then amazing things are possible. In 2002 Jerome Young was ranked number 38 in the 400 meters. Then we began to work together, and in 2003 he won almost every big race. 

SPIEGEL: How were you paid? 

Heredia: I had an annual wage. For big wins I got a $40,000 bonus. ...

The greatest of all time

Bolt becomes the first man to repeat in the 100m and 200m, holding the world and Olympic records in both. As I said in my earlier post, he is a 1 in a billion (or more) talent.

“If he wins, that should end the debate about who is the greatest sprinter in history,” Ato Boldon of Trinidad and Tobago, who won bronze medals in the 200 at the 1996 Atlanta Games and the 2000 Sydney Games, said before the race. “Anyone saying it is not Bolt would be doing it without objectivity.”

In other news, as I predicted years ago, former UO competitor Ashton Eaton is the Olympic champion and world record holder in the decathlon.

Bolt, again!

From 2008: Phelps, shmelps -- Bolt is the man!

That was a pretty impressive final: 9.63, 9.75, 9.79, 9.80

Phelps may be a 1 in 100 million talent (maybe not), but Bolt is 1 in a billion and possibly 1 in 10 billion.


 

12.87 110H in Eugene

The Nike Prefontaine Classic was in Eugene yesterday. The wife and kids went but I'm not that big on live sports. We'll have the Olympic trials here later in the summer.

Liu Xiang tied the world record at 12.87, but it was ruled wind-aided at +2.4m/s. This field was world class, only missing current world record holder Dayron Robles of Cuba. David Oliver, the US record holder, was a WR at Howard and is huge for a hurdler at around 200 lbs. Ashton Eaton, in lane 1, is a top decathlete who competed at U Oregon as a collegian. My kids got to play dodgeball with him a few years ago :-)

At the end of his victory lap Liu ends up among women competitors preparing for the start of the 3000m. He looks gigantic in comparison.


 


 I often run at Hayward Field, but not as fast :-(

Superhumans

Eugene ("Track Town USA") has a long history in running (for instance, Nike was founded here) and hosts a number of high profile track meets during the spring and summer. One of the things I enjoy about these meets is that while they are here I often bump into superhumans (world class athletes) around town, like at the cafe or ice cream shop :-)

Speaking of superhumans, below is a picture of decathlete Ashton Eaton, who may soon have a claim on the title World's Greatest Athlete. The last time (2009) the USATF National Championships were here in Eugene, I predicted great things ahead for him. Eaton, then only a junior, placed second in the US championships. This year (competition completed yesterday) he won by a huge margin, with a total that is the 5th best all-time US score and 13th best in the world. Eaton has incredible times in the sprints (PRs around 10.3, 13.3, 46, IIRC) and is still just learning the technical aspects of the high jump and the throws. In the next few years he could break the world record.



Two winters ago UO had a family day at the rec center, and invited some prominent athletes to spend time with the kids. My twins got to play dodgeball with Eaton for about half an hour -- there were no other families on the court. Eaton took it easy on them :-) When they get older I'll remind them about their time with the World's Greatest Athlete!

Breakin' ankles

A beautiful video on the crossover dribble.

Swoosh!

How the athletic shoe was born in Eugene, Oregon. Bill Bowerman was Phil Knight's track coach at U Oregon. Together, they founded Nike.

William Jay "Bill" Bowerman (February 19, 1911 – December 24, 1999) was an American track and field coach and co-founder of Nike, Inc. Over his career, he trained 31 Olympic athletes, 51 All-Americans, 12 American record-holders, 24 NCAA champions and 16 sub-4 minute milers. During his 24 years as coach at the University of Oregon, the Ducks track and field team had a winning season every season but one, attained 4 NCAA titles, and finished in the top 10 in the nation 16 times.

Oregonian: ... Phil Knight is Nike's well-known business and marketing brain, but Bowerman was its mad scientist. His eureka moment came one Sunday morning in 1971 in that house overlooking the McKenzie River.

Bill and Barbara were fixing breakfast -- Barbara wasn't at church, a common mis-telling -- as Bill raised a familiar topic: how to make shoes lighter and faster. Oregon's Hayward Field was transitioning from a cinder to an artificial-surface track, and Bill wanted a sole without spikes that could grip equally well on grass or bark dust.

"It was one of the few (footwear-related) things he ever talked to me about, so it was kind of fun for me," Barbara told Reames in an interview he conducted for Nike in 2006. "I picked out a couple pieces of jewelry and things that had stars on them, or things that we thought would indent or make a pattern on the soles. We were making the waffles that morning and talking about (the track).

"As one of the waffles came out, he said, 'You know, by turning it upside down -- where the waffle part would come in contact with the track -- I think that might work.'

"So he got up from the table and went tearing into his lab and got two cans of whatever it is you pour together to make the urethane, and poured them into the waffle iron."

Bill's breakthrough spawned Nike's Waffle Trainer, released in 1974, the first innovation in a company that became known for them. Before it, most athletic soles were flat with shallow patterns. The waffle had nubs that protruded like the tread on a motorcycle tire.

The distinctive shoe took off, Nike's "air" technology used in Air Jordan basketball shoes soon followed, and the Swoosh was on its way to becoming the top-selling athletic brand in the world.

Future champions at Hayward Field:

Caltech basketball

Looks like they finally broke their losing streak :-) Covered by the NYTimes, no less!

I was on the swimming, waterpolo and football teams (the football team no longer exists). The swimming and waterpolo teams (competing in somewhat geekier sports) were more successful than the basketball team. The football team would have probably had a similar losing streak if we played regular SCIAC competition, although we did have a superstar running back (Div I quality) who was scouted for the USFL as a senior.

Coincidentally, I picked up this t-shirt at the bookstore last week when I was visiting. The shirts were on clearance, so I got mine for 50 percent off. Now I bet they're a hot item. Go Beavers!

On the mat

Title IX is killing a lot of non-revenue men's college sports, like swimming, gymnastics and wrestling. Oregon, which produced a number of NCAA individual champions (and UFC fighter Chael Sonnen), eliminated its wrestling program a few years ago.

An indication of the overall weakness of collegiate wrestling programs is that Cornell is the preseason #1 ranked team this year!

NYTimes: ... every N.C.A.A. wrestling championship since 1989 has been won by teams from Iowa, Oklahoma or Minnesota — with only 4 of 80 N.C.A.A. championships won from outside those states in history — this season, Cornell is the unanimous preseason No. 1.

It is the first time a team from the Ivy League, which prohibits athletic scholarships, has had the top ranking in wrestling and is one of the rare times an Ivy team has been ranked No. 1 outside sports like lacrosse, fencing, squash, and ice or field hockey.

But Cornell is carrying a flag for more than the Ivys. Cornell, which finished second to Iowa in last season’s N.C.A.A. championships, is seeking to become just the second Eastern-based team to win the national wrestling title. Penn State won it in 1953.

I grew up in Iowa, a wrestling hotbed. Both Dan Gable and Cael Sanderson, perhaps the greatest American wrestlers of all time, competed for Iowa State University, in my hometown. I never competed in wrestling, but I remember learning the techniques in gym class and on the playground. In HS it seemed like at every keg party you had to be ready to grapple because some drunk wrestler might grab you and want to roll around on the living room floor or in the back yard! Guys in other sports would try to get out of it by calling the wrestlers gay ("get off me, you homo!"), but in reality they (even football players) wanted nothing to do with close contact with a wrestler. (Note there are no wrestlers in this picture, although wimpier Ivy sports like swimming, cross country and tennis are well represented ;-)

The last actual fight I had (a long time ago!) was with a kid who went on to wrestle for ISU! It started with me hitting a single leg on him and tossing him into a locker. Then we hit each other in the face for what seemed like a long time before a teacher broke it up. One thing I learned from the fight is that two untrained guys can trade shots to the head for a long time before anyone goes down (this is also evident from early UFC fights). I was initially reluctant to hit the other kid in the face (I had never really had to do it before), but he showed no similar reluctance :-)

I did do Judo as a kid (my parents wouldn't let me do Karate or Tae Kwon Do) and later competed in both Judo and BJJ as an adult. I noticed that my Iowa background meant I could usually wrestle better than anyone who hadn't actually competed in wrestling (i.e., at a high school level or higher). If I wanted to get any judoka or jiujitsu player to the ground I could pretty much do it. Judokas would always complain that I was using leg attacks and not nice nagewaza (upper body throws), but this is basically just a convention and wrestling takedowns are all legal in Judo. In any first randori with another judoka I could always get a takedown by faking coming to grips and instead shooting for a leg.

I sometimes worked out at the ISU weight room in Beyer Hall, where the wrestlers trained. The summer between my junior and senior year of HS my schedule (I think determined by some math class I was taking) coincided with that of 1981 World Champion Chris Campbell, an ISU assistant coach. One of my wrestler friends had an amazing poster of Campbell hitting a souffle (suplex) on a Russian en route to winning his world title. Campbell and the Russian are both flying through the air and only the tip of Campbell's toe is touching the mat. He was by far the most amazing physical specimen I had seen at that point in my life. Campbell usually ran in the sweltering heat before lifting weights. He would warm up by doing hyperextensions with a 45 pound plate behind his head. You can see his exceptional lower back musculature in this video (yes, that bulge is his erector spinae), showing him competing in the 1992 Olympics at age 37 (he won the bronze -- see picture below)! But he was much more impressive as a younger man in the early 1980s. Unlike a lot of the Iowa kids, who had wrestling rooms in their basements and competed in tournaments while still in grade school, Campbell started wrestling fairly late. But his physical powers were such that he reached the highest levels of the sport. Somehow it was obvious to me even then that no matter how hard I trained I would never have strength, stamina or quickness like his.

They got (some) game

Will Jeremy Lin become the first (full) Asian-American and first Harvard grad to play in the modern NBA?

NYTimes: ... A little-known 6-foot-3 point guard, Lin wowed an N.B.A. summer league crowd by upstaging the league’s No. 1 draft choice. He signed a two-year contract with the Golden State Warriors and is edging toward becoming Harvard’s first N.B.A. player in more than 50 years.

... There was a time when Lin was on the junior varsity that Diepenbrock marveled that a 13-year-old would implore teammates, “There’s a double screen!” There was the state championship game against powerful Mater Dei when, in the waning seconds, Lin dribbled toward a screen, calmly retreated and restarted a play that ended in his clinching layup. There was the state tournament game when his Palo Alto teammates looked listless, so Lin uncharacteristically scored 35 points.

My cousin Richard Chang had a shot at it 20 years ago. A 6 foot 7 forward, he was heavily recruited out of Edison high school in Los Angeles, and played at Cal. If it weren't for a knee injury the summer after a freshman season where he saw a lot of playing time, I think he could have made the NBA. A torn ACL back then was a big deal -- he has a scar the length of his lower leg from the surgery. Richard was cut by the Warriors before the beginning of the season (could still happen to Lin), back in the late 80s. When I was a grad student at Berkeley I overlapped with Richard on campus, and undergraduates were always amazed to learn he was my cousin. "RICHARD CHANG is your cousin?!?" they'd ask. I learned a lot about big time sports culture and the sense of entitlement that athletes have. When I visited him in Huntington Beach the ushers would let us into the local movie theaters for free!

Anyone remember Harvard running back Eion Hu (all-time Harvard rushing leader in 1996)? I think he's a doctor now ;-)

Bolt: 19.19 200m!!!

Shocking! I never expected to see 19.19 in my lifetime, but then I expected Michael Johnson's 19.32 WR to last for decades, like Bob Beamon's long jump WR. (Bolt is such a mutant that I won't be surprised if no one else comes close to MJ's 19.32 for a long time.)

During the Beijing Olympics some readers objected to my stating flat out that Bolt is a more exceptional and impressive athlete than Michael Phelps. Does anyone (who knows something about both track and swimming) still disagree?

Superman Bolt: 9.58 100m!

Far behind in second was Tyson Gay, whose 9.71 would be the fastest ever were it not for Bolt. Teammate Asafa Powell (who has run 9.72, third fastest of all time) came in behind Gay. So in this race Bolt smashed his own record from Beijing and destroyed the #2 and #3 fastest sprinters of all time. Bolt is the greatest of all time!

US Track and Field Championships in Eugene

The USATF championships were held here again last week and over the weekend. I run on the same track as these guys, only much slower :-)

The photo below is of Eugenian Nick Symmonds (Oregon Track Club Elite) winning the 800m. See also this panorama shot, which shows the 800m finish and all of Hayward Field.



If you're a track fan, keep your eye on Ashton Eaton, who placed second in the decathalon despite being only a junior at UO (he won the NCAAs earlier in the spring).



Complete results from USATF web site.

BJ Penn -- GSP

The biggest fight in MMA history will take place tomorrow, between BJ Penn and Georges St. Pierre. Penn, the 155 champ, is moving up to take on GSP at 170. The weigh-ins are today, but by fight time GSP will be around 180+ and Penn will be 170.

GSP is probably the best pure athlete in MMA. The strongest part of his game is his wrestling, which he has developed over only the last few years. He trains with the Canadian Olympic team and outwrestled former NCAA champions/All-Americans in his last fights. Penn is a freakishly gifted jiujitsu player (world championship 3.5 years after starting to train; his nickname is "the prodigy") and striker.

Visit the UFC site to see the weigh-ins today.

Here is some prefight hype footage of the Penn and GSP training camps. More training footage of GSP. A Penn highlight video.

Beijing ballers

[I'm delayed at EUG waiting for my flight to SFO. Thank god for wifi...]

Check out this awesome video about a Nike 3 on 3 basketball tournament held in the Forbidden City, called Bejing Young Masters.