Ross Tucker – The Science of Sport

Quick fire thoughts this Friday morning…! Top 1. Doping raid in Austria. Three quick thoughts If you missed it, there is a potentially big anti-doping story from the Nordic Skiing Championships in Austria, where a collaboration between German and Austrian police resulted in a number of raids, ... read more

I’m back! Apologies for going AWOL over the last two weeks, but hopefully you’ll understand the reason – I was in Europe, between London and Lausanne, at the CAS proceedings where Caster Semenya was challenging the IAAF’s hyperandrogenism regulation. It was an insanely stimulating, challenging, fascinating and enjoyable two ... read more

Real quick-fire today, with some links and things I found interesting this week: Top 1. The elite athlete and age: Follow up on my last post On Wednesday, I wrote a short thought on whether the conventional wisdom around how elite athletes “expire” and fade with age ... read more

Yesterday, I was sent this link. It says that Dwain Chambers, he of THG and a doping ban in 2004 (!), is making a comeback, hoping to qualify for Team GB at the European Indoor Championships. At the age of 40. Well, almost 41. My first thought was “Of course ... read more

This is an extract from an editorial written by one of the great exercise physiology researchers, Carl Foster, in the most recent International Journal of Sports Performance and Physiology: There’s a lot to that highlighted sentence alone. For one thing, it raises the main reason why I find the marginal ... read more

The Six Natons starts on Friday night. Best rugby tournament in the world, hands down. I really cannot wait to watch it. However, I now work in player welfare for rugby, and so I view the sport through one lens called ‘excitement’, and another called ‘welfare’. In my attempt to ... read more

The 2016 Olympic Marathon champion got handed an extra four years on her doping ban last week. The story broke on Friday, and you can read the summary from Sean Ingle here. My brief recap – Sumgong wins the Olympic gold in Rio in 2016, then fails an EPO test ... read more

Ok so let’s recap the week, and some stuff I missed. It was a busy one, so I didn’t write much, but what I did do was: I did a talk for Arsenal Football club’s HP team, and spoke about the role of sports science in the elite environment. I ... read more

I’ve spent the last three days in Paris, for two rugby related meetings. The first was with the French Rugby Federation (FFR) and the LNR, which is the body that runs the professional competition in France (Top 14). That meeting was to discuss injury data, player welfare and future collaboration ... read more

Last Friday I spent the day at Arsenal FC’s training facility in the north of London. I gave a presentation to their Sports Science/HP department (research, S&C, medical, youth coaches, nutrition, physiotherapy and data analysts) In today’s Short Thought on Sport, I wanted to share that presentation with you. Because ... read more