50 Fun Facts About Sports Science

Dick Fosbury's back-first 'flop', seen by the world at the 1968 Olympics, transformed which athletics event?

High jump has been ruled by the flop ever since: arching backwards over the bar can let a jumper's centre of mass pass beneath it while the body clears.

The hundreds of dimples covering a golf ball help it fly much farther mainly by doing what?

Reducing air drag is the trick: dimples make the thin layer of air around the ball turbulent, so it clings on longer and leaves a narrower wake behind.

Which sports drink did University of Florida scientists create in 1965 for the school's own athletes?

Gatorade is named after the Florida Gators, whose players drank it to replace the carbohydrates they burned and the water and electrolytes they sweated out.

Tommy John surgery, first performed on a baseball pitcher in 1974, rebuilds a ligament in which joint?

Elbow ligament reconstruction was devised by Dodgers team doctor Frank Jobe, who put the odds of the first operation succeeding at one in 100.

Which phenomenon, named after a German physicist, makes a spinning football or baseball curve through the air?

The Magnus effect puts a sideways lift force on a spinning ball and bends its flight, and the same physics has been used to propel rotor ships.

Muscle soreness that peaks a day or two after hard exercise was long wrongly blamed on which substance?

Lactic acid returns to normal levels within an hour of exercise, so it cannot cause an ache that arrives a day later; tiny tears in muscle fibres are the likelier culprit.

Which class of heart drugs has been used in archery and shooting to slow the pulse and steady the hands?

Beta blockers lower the heart rate and reduce tremor, which is why some precision sports ban them; musicians have taken them for stage fright too.

Whey protein, a staple of gym shakes, is a by-product of making which everyday food?

Cheese production leaves whey as the liquid that remains once milk has curdled, turning a dairy leftover into a major ingredient of recovery drinks.

Anders Ericsson's study of which musicians inspired the '10,000-hour rule' of practice popularised by Malcolm Gladwell?

Violinists in his study had averaged 10,000 hours of deliberate practice by age 20, yet Ericsson himself later called the rule wrong in several ways.

Which English athlete, later a neurologist, ran the first mile in under four minutes in 1954?

Roger Bannister did it on minimal training while working as a junior doctor, and later said he was prouder of his research on the nervous system.

A common rule of thumb estimates a person's maximum heart rate as 220 minus which figure?

Age in years gives only a loose estimate: Olympic rowers in their twenties have shown maximum heart rates anywhere from 160 to 220 beats a minute.

Marathon runners 'hit the wall' when the liver and muscles run out of which stored carbohydrate?

Glycogen is stored mainly in the liver and skeletal muscle, and cyclists call the sudden fatigue of running out of it 'the bonk'.

Which molecule, often called the energy currency of the cell, directly powers every muscle contraction?

ATP drives nerve impulses and chemical synthesis as well as muscle contraction, and it is found in all known forms of life.

Which gym supplement, stored in muscle with a phosphate attached, fuels the first seconds of a sprint?

Creatine in its phosphate form can rebuild the muscle's energy supply during the first five to eight seconds of an all-out effort.

Which muscle fibres, red with myoglobin and hard to tire, suit endurance events such as distance running?

Slow-twitch fibres make their energy aerobically and keep going, whereas fast fibres contract two to three times as quickly but tire far sooner.

Which hormone, made mainly in the kidneys and abused by endurance cheats, triggers the making of red blood cells?

EPO, short for erythropoietin, is released when the kidneys sense low oxygen; the Festina cycling scandal exposed its use before any test for it existed.

Which metal sits at the core of haemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen to working muscles?

Iron lets each haemoglobin molecule bind and carry up to four oxygen molecules at a time from the lungs to the tissues.

Drinking far too much water during a marathon can dangerously dilute which mineral in the blood?

Sodium levels fall when runners drink more fluid than their kidneys can excrete, a disorder that can show up as late as 24 hours after the race.

Which sheet of muscle, separating the chest from the abdomen, does most of the work of breathing?

The diaphragm contracts to enlarge the chest cavity, and the resulting drop in pressure is what draws air into the lungs.

Which running workout, devised in the 1930s by Gösta Holmér, has a Swedish name meaning 'speed play'?

Fartlek alternates faster and slower running, often over natural hilly terrain, blending steady distance work with interval training.

The four-minute 'Tabata' interval workout began as a training routine for Japan's national team in which sport?

Speed skating coach Kouichi Irisawa used the routine with Japan's team, and Izumi Tabata's 1996 study found its four-minute sessions matched the aerobic gains of hour-long steady rides.

Which training method of explosive jumps, pioneered by Soviet athletes, was given its name by American coach Fred Wilt?

Plyometrics began as the 'shock method' of Soviet scientist Yuri Verkhoshansky; Wilt coined the word after watching Soviet athletes prepare for their events.

Holding a plank, in which muscles strain without changing length, is which kind of exercise?

Isometric comes from Greek words for 'equal' and 'measuring', because the muscle's length and the joint's angle stay the same throughout the effort.

Which knee ligament do female athletes rupture two to eight times as often as men in jumping sports?

The ACL, or anterior cruciate ligament, tears most often in sports with cutting and jumping, and a complete tear raises the odds of knee arthritis later.

Which tendon, the thickest in the human body, anchors the calf muscles at the back of the ankle?

The Achilles tendon is first recorded under that name in 1693, by Flemish anatomist Philip Verheyen; earlier anatomists had called it the cord of Hippocrates.

Which brain disease, tied to repeated head blows, did Bennet Omalu identify in former NFL player Mike Webster?

CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, was known in the 1920s as 'punch drunk syndrome' because it was first studied in boxers.

In the RICE formula for treating sprains, introduced by Gabe Mirkin in 1978, what does the C stand for?

Compression sits beside rest, ice and elevation, yet Mirkin himself later warned that prolonged icing and complete rest could delay recovery.

Which muscle, the largest in the human body, is the main one straightening the hip in running?

The gluteus maximus gives the human hip its shape; other primates have much flatter hips and cannot stay standing upright.

Which group of three muscles at the back of the thigh is a classic site of strains in sprinters?

Hamstrings bend the knee and extend the hip, and they tend to tear late in a sprinter's leg swing, while the muscle is lengthening under load.

Which tactic lets a cyclist in the peloton save energy by riding closely behind another rider's wheel?

Drafting cuts wind resistance for the rider behind and, at high speed, can even slightly reduce the effort of the leader in front.

Speedo's LZR Racer swimsuit, worn for 23 world records at the 2008 Olympics, was developed with which US agency?

NASA lent its wind tunnels and fluid-analysis software to the design, and full-body suits of this kind were later banned from competition.

Hawk-Eye ball tracking, now used for line calls in tennis, made its 2001 television debut in which sport?

Cricket broadcasts first used it to analyse leg-before-wicket decisions, and tennis adopted it for player challenges in 2006.

A spinning figure skater speeds up by pulling the arms in because which physical quantity is conserved?

Angular momentum is the product of moment of inertia and rate of spin, so when tucked arms shrink the first, the second has to rise.

Which throwing implement was redesigned in 1986, after Uwe Hohn's 104.80 m world record, to fly shorter distances?

The javelin had its centre of gravity moved four centimetres forward, because throws beyond 100 metres were becoming hard to stage safely inside a stadium.

Running 'super shoes', first produced by Nike in 2016, pair thick foam soles with a stiff plate of which material?

Carbon fibre plates led to charges of 'technology doping' and new shoe rules; the top three men in the 2016 Olympic marathon all wore Nike's version.

Which everyday stimulant sat on the World Anti-Doping Agency's banned list until January 2004?

Caffeine is now a legal performance aid that can reduce tiredness and sharpen reaction time, and one study found it even improved results at chess.

Which sense, fed by receptors in muscles, tendons and joints, tells an athlete where each limb is without looking?

Proprioception is checked by asking someone to touch their nose with eyes closed, a test that alcohol makes much harder to pass.

The 1968 Olympics, where a string of sprint world records fell, were held 2,240 metres above sea level in which capital?

Mexico City is the only Summer Games host at such an elevation, and its 1968 track was also the first synthetic all-weather surface used at an Olympics.

Regular endurance exercise makes muscle fibres develop more of which energy-producing cell structures?

Mitochondria were nicknamed the 'powerhouse of the cell' in a 1957 Scientific American article by Philip Siekevitz.

Which mental state, known to athletes as being 'in the zone', did psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi name in 1975?

Flow got its name because several people he interviewed compared the feeling to being carried along by a current of water.

The 'hot hand', the belief that a player on a scoring streak will keep scoring, comes from which sport?

Basketball shooting was the subject of a 1985 paper that called the belief a fallacy, though later research has questioned that verdict.

Anabolic steroids, the muscle-building drugs banned across sport, are structurally related to which natural hormone?

Testosterone, the main male sex hormone, was discovered and first synthesised in the 1930s, and doctors soon began using its chemical relatives.

Which health measure, based on the work of Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet, can mislead for very muscular people?

Body mass index got that name only in 1972 from Ancel Keys, and Quetelet himself never meant his formula to be used for medical assessment.

Norman Triplett's 1898 finding that cyclists ride faster beside rivals than alone began research into which effect?

Social facilitation research began with that study, which Gordon Allport called the first experiment in social psychology.

Which muscle-limiting protein is missing in 'mighty mice', which grow about twice the normal amount of muscle?

Myostatin normally holds muscle growth back, and natural faults in its gene explain the heavy muscling of Belgian Blue cattle and some whippets.

Which British physiologist, his own running test subject, shared the 1922 Nobel Prize for work on muscle heat?

Archibald Hill ran every morning to show that a sprint draws on energy stores which the body afterwards repays by taking in extra oxygen.

Coleman Griffith, often called the founder of American sport psychology, joined which baseball team in the 1930s?

The Chicago Cubs' owner Philip K. Wrigley hired him for a psychological edge, after Griffith's athletics research laboratory at Illinois had closed for lack of money.

The Borg scale, introduced in the 1960s and running oddly from 6 to 20, asks athletes to rate what?

Perceived exertion on the scale starts at 6 because the numbers roughly track a tenth of heart rate, and a resting pulse is about 60 beats a minute.

Which Canadian sprinter was stripped of the 1988 Olympic 100 metres gold after testing positive for stanozolol?

Ben Johnson had lowered his own world record to 9.79 seconds in the Seoul final, and was disqualified three days after the race.

Which fitness assessment has runners shuttle back and forth over 20 metres in time with ever-quicker recorded signals?

The beep test estimates aerobic capacity, and a score is logged as a level and a shuttle count, such as 9.5.