Women
fromwww.theguardian.com
2 days agoThe Joy of Six: moments of unbridled joy in sport
Failure often leads to self-blame and internal conflict despite external factors influencing success.
The record nearly got beaten this week by Max and records are there to be broken. How he took his goal was quite amazing - the balance, the feet, the composure and the strength. So, I may have the record, but he's going be some player.
Inge Simonsen, a 27-year-old Norwegian, officially won the first London marathon in 2 hours 11 minutes 48 seconds yesterday, the fastest time recorded in Britain for 11 years, watched by an estimated 100,000 people.
I have evolved from someone who didn't think much of the bar except for resting my legs to thinking of it as an obvious life-saving precaution. Dr. Bourne shared several examples from Mammoth in which the bar could have saved lives, including the death of her former ski coach, who fell from a chairlift to his death, most likely from a medical event which may have been treatable.
Sprawled prone in the dirt, the cold metal of a baseball bat cracking against his skull, spine and down to the legs that had once propelled him to glory, Luvo Manyonga experienced an epiphany. This existence could not continue; he must change his life or die.
Those of us who watch the Olympics as bystanders tend to smugly judge athletes for succumbing to pressure without understanding what we even mean by the term. The first thing to know about pressure is that it has actual physical properties. Feeling it is not a sign of a too-thin veneer of character. Pressure might as well be a snakebite, given its very real qualities in the bloodstream and how it can paralyze even the strongest legs. The way to deal with pressure, and become
When you see a pull-up bar, there's one physical activity that likely comes to mind: pull-ups. While they've lent this piece of equipment its name, they aren't the only physical feat that an athlete can accomplish using them. In 2022, for instance, Japan's Kenta Adachi set a new world record for hanging from a pull-up bar for well over an hour.
On Sunday evening, she performed like an athlete insistent on leaving no room for doubt. Kok leveraged two years of total sprint dominance into the first Olympic gold medal of her career. She blew away the field in the women's 500m in an Olympic-record time of 36.49sec with the kind of controlled, furious circuit that has made her a three-time world champion at the distance at 25 years old.
It's just what it looks like: I time my planks then file them away, determined to last a little longer tomorrow. And sometimes I do, for several days in a row, then one day I'll collapse nearly a minute short of my personal best. I'll pound the mat like Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes, then I'll get myself together - you've got to stay cool at Equinox - and move on with my day.
If you're watching the Olympics this year, or have watched in the past, you've probably wondered how the top athletes in the world bolster themselves emotionally for high- stress situations, being exposed and visible to millions of viewers in difficult moments, and how they deal with failure and defeat and become resilient. Dr. Cindra Kamphoff, whose MD-level background in sports psychology, two decades of work with professional and Olympic athletics, and The High Performance Mindset podcast, has developed techniques that are helpful to people inside or outside of the sports arena.
"We have a golden retriever, and so I walk her three or four miles a day, and I do a weight training class twice a week," says Brown, 62, of Arlington, Va. She knows muscle mass will decline without regular strength training. "We have a fun group with a personal trainer and we call ourselves the Beastie Girls," she says, describing how her group helps her stick with it. She also plays tennis and golf.
Jadin O'Brien thought she was being scammed. The Milan Cortina Olympics and the sport of bobsled, for that matter were not anywhere near O'Brien's radar a couple years ago, when the Notre Dame track and field star saw that someone sent her a direct message on Instagram. The message was ignored. Several months later, the same person slid into O'Brien's DMs again.
Dual moguls is new to the Olympics this year. It's head-to-head heats, with skiers facing moguls, gates, and jumps-and being judged, head-to-head, on each element for a combined score. In the men's medal rounds today, Japan's Ikuma Horishima (pictured above, sort of) had a disastrous run in his round-of-16 showdown, and somehow ended up facing the wrong way. That's an odd and very specific sort of adversity to overcome, but he did it.
But after a pair of blowouts to get them to the championship, the finale put a bright spotlight on their ability of execute in the clutch. Just one dumb slip-up could have cost them their fairytale ending, but everything went right in the big moments, all the way through to the Carson Beck interception that sealed the win.
Elite ski jumpers are aware of the advantage and have already crotch-rocketed to scandal with related schemes. Last year, two Norwegian Olympic medalists, Marius Lindvik and Johann Andre Forfang, and three of their team officials were charged with cheating after an anonymous video showed the head coach and suit technician illegally restitching the crotch area of the two jumpers' suits to make them larger. The jumpers received a three-month suspension, while the head coach, an assistant coach, and the technician faced a harsher 18-month ban.
The older I get, the more profoundly I appreciate that, when I'm writing about sport, I'm also writing about love. This makes perfect sense given these are mankind's two greatest inventions and the stuff we can least do without, but there's more to it than that: sport and love are both expressions of identity, creativity and devotion, pursued because they are right but also because it's impossible not to.