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The Science of Sports: An eBook Goes for the Gold, Gets A Bronze

The Science of Sports: Winning in the Olympics. Scientific American $3.99   Kindle, iBook, Nook,  Sony Reader

Guest review by Jaime Green

I love the Olympics, although I'm not sure why. Maybe it's the special-occasion feel, or the every-two-years anticipation--a longer wait than for next Christmas. (I do remember when both summer and winter games were held in the same year, though not well enough to recall whether the four-year wait heightened the thrill or if the crush of excitement was too much, gymnastics and archery only six months from figure luge and ski jump.)

The exotic sports at the Olympics also add to its thrill. Sure, people will snark about the two weeks a year we care about synchronized diving --“Where were you during world championships last year!?”--but for those two weeks we do care! We cram our brains with obscure knowledge. Every four winters we learn about triple axels and the salchow--how the heck to spell salchow--and then we let it all go dormant for the next four years, until we can debate the finer points of fencing again.

It's this thrill of the unusual, and of learning its finer points, that I was looking for in Scientific American's ebook, The Science of Sports: Winning in the Olympics. And coming into it looking for that angle, I was disappointed that the book stayed so true to the first part of its title: the science of sports. That's what this ebook is full of. What it is not full of, and what I missed, was the science of the Olympics.

This first ebook from the editors of Scientific American reads much more like a collection of articles than a single work, and as such it is a perfectly serviceable survey on the science of sports. Pieces are divided into eight sections: The Psychology of Winning, Pushing Human Limits, Drugs and Doping, Concussions, Comeback from Injury, Gear that Gives an Edge, Fitness: Expert Advice for You, and Closing Ceremonies. The pieces, written especially for this ebook by individual Scientific American editors and contributors, explore the physiology, biochemistry, and neurobiology of sports. They also examine recent incidents, such as doping scandals, that bring science and sports together in less savory ways.

Although the lack of unity was sometimes frustrating on a straight-through read--back-to-back articles sometimes retread each other's ground, re-explaining a concept or re-defining a blood protein--it still makes for a nice collection to pick your way through. There's no need to read in order, so you can follow your interests, from the mental acuity of an elite athlete to the most common Olympic injuries and then over to how playing sports can boost children's brain power. You'll learn something cool whichever path you take. And there's a lot to learn. Even if you didn't need this ebook to teach you that the ACL isn't the Achilles tendon but is actually in the knee, there is satisfyingly deep discussion of topics ranging from psychology to blood doping to the physics of prosthetic legs.

The questions tackled in this ebook go beyond the science of sports, too, in several cases engaging with the ethical questions that scientific advances raise. Do steroids make better athletes, or do they make cheaters? How many restrictions should be put on young athletes to protect their brains from concussions? Where does an athlete find the balance between improved performance and dangerously low body fat? These questions make interesting food for thought, and perhaps also foundations for important decisions. The ramifications extend far beyond the Olympic arenas.

Yet I still wished this ebook spent more time within those Olympic arenas. Many pieces focus surprisingly squarely on the topic of the ebook's subtitle: winning. It's as if the ebook's authors decided that Olympic equals elite, and then just wrote about how elite athletes win. But I don't care if Michael Phelps gets the gold. I care that he is stunning to watch. (In the pool, I mean.) And I want to know the science behind his performance--of something that feels specifically, uniquely Olympic. Articles that focused on baseball and American football felt similarly dissatisfying. They're sports, yes, but hardly what we think of as Olympic sports. (In fact, now that baseball's been dropped from the games, neither is an Olympic sport.) For readers drawn to this ebook for the Olympics and not for the sports, this may be a disappointment.

Also potentially disappointing--or virulently frustrating, depending on your level of investment--are some gaps in the scientific and athletic arguments. Jesse Bering's piece, “Why We Love Sports: Success of the Fittest,” proposes that sports compel us as fans and spectators because they serve as a demonstration of reproductive prowess. (Think of football as the peacock tail-feathers of our species.) This argument itself is a stretch. Sports audiences are so dramatically weighted toward men who are not looking to the field for mates. Bering doesn't even give the plausible counterarguments lip service. What about the primal need for play? Tribal affiliations and the strengthening power of us vs. them? The evolution and ritualization of hunting and combat practice? Heck, maybe even mirror neurons, who knows?

In a piece called “Does Exercise Really Make You Stronger?” Coco Ballantyne asserts that “the longer, harder and more often you exercise, the greater the health benefits.” She fails to offer the important caveat against overtraining, which plagues professional and devoted amateur athletes alike, with increased risk of injuries and often dramatic negative effects from overstressing the body. An article on preventing shin splints was similarly narrow-sighted, failing to mention the calf-strengthening exercises that have saved the shins of every new runner I know. 

The highlights of the book examined the subjects that I, and most readers, have no experience with. The articles on top-level cyclists and swimmers, on Olympic runner Oscar Pistorious' prosthetic legs, drew me in much more and carried that charge of the slightly esoteric that make me love the Olympics. Even an article on advanced swim gear brought a little frisson of elite, advanced technology. And “Who Wins the 40-Yard Dash: Squirrel, Elephant, Pig, Human?” armed me for some fun small-talk to fill the breaks between track and field events over the next two weeks.

For the most part, though, the science here is decidedly pedestrian. Readers who want to learn about the geometry of a rhythmic gymnast's twirling ribbon or how a pentathlete slows her heart rate before she shoots will have to wait. Maybe there will be something for us in another four years.

 

Jaime Green is a graduate student in Columbia's MFA writing program. Her work has appeared in The Awl, Spezzatino, The Hairpin, and Parabasis. She is writing a book about the possibility of life in the universe.

Doomsday Deflected

Planet Killers:  A Spine-Tingling Look at Near Earth Objects, Mass Extinctions, and the Controversial Science of Planetary Defense, by Tad Friend, Byliner Originals, 2011. ($0.99: iTunes, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Google, Sony, Kobo)

            One of the joys of borrowing a stranger’s cabin comes from the serendipity of someone else’s taste in books.  Years ago, in a corner of the hills east of Lake Winnipesaukee, I picked up a Stephen King anthology.  I’ve long since forgotten most of what I read there, but King’s introduction stuck in my mind.  The novella, he wrote, (I paraphrase from battered memory) was not so much a literary form as a kind of writer’s banana republic, a treacherous, alien territory into which innocents pass, never to escape unscathed.  How and when to turn the plot; the number of characters one can develop; the pace; the amount of exposition the piece can tolerate – all these tasks shift as the writer moves from either the expansive canvas of a full book or the utter economy short stories demand.  And until you’ve actually entered into that strange country, Novella, King warned, you have no idea how twisted are its paths.

            Tad Friend dares such dangers in what amounts to a non-fiction novella, Planet Killers, published in the Byliner Originals series.    It tells of the threat posed by crud from space that could strike the earth, and of attempts by a few scientists and engineers to figure out how to dodge such bullets.  That'’s a fine premise, certainly, and of course anything that brings together dinosaurs, great balls of fire, and wild but plausible schemes with names like “gravity tractors” has got all the elements of a riveting read. 

There's a bit of a wobble right at the start, though, as Friend recalls a tequila-fueled milliennial New Year’s Eve spent waiting for sunrise on the Yucatan Peninsula before leaping, abruptly, to the scene  65 million years ago, when it was a skosh more exciting in those parts, what with the dinosaur-destoying asteroid splashing down just offshore. From that rather jolting beginning, we settle into a story built on two pillars: a character sketch of the always enjoyable Rusty Schweikart, the Apollo astronaut, as Friend reports, most likely to show up at a New Age conference; and a loose narrative of a two day meeting by a NASA advisory committee debating strategies for “planetary defense” – basically how to avoid getting whacked by a major earth-crossing asteroid in the future.

Those two threads unreel rather calmly, given that our spines are supposed to be tingled.  Schweickart and his co-conspirators fear that most decisions makers (and everyone else) are simply unaware of the existential threat posed by a major impact, and of the probabilities involved.  Friend detours briefly into a natural history of asteroids and impacts.  We get hints of the science involved – a mention of complex orbits; brief discussions of the technologies that might deflect really big rocks – that gravity tractor, for one, a spaceship that comes to rest close enough to a dangerous rock long enough before any predicted collision to permit the probe’s gravity to nudge the object onto a safe trajectory.  In his best set piece, Friend manages to get inside his hero’s head– capturing Schweickart’s evolution from fighter pilot to save-the-earth crusader, in a process that began on his untethered space walk, when he suddenly felt the fragility of “pale blue dot” below him.  Such anecdotes ornament Friend's reporting on the NASA committee deliberations, which culminate in a modest plan for planetary defense:  spend 3 billion dollars over the next decade; launch a new space telescope designed to detection of potentially dangerous asteroids, and test the most promising couple of non-nuclear deflection technologies. 

That recommendation comes as something of an anti-climax, but that’s par for the course for apocalyptic non-fiction, honestly told:  what can be done is often less thrilling than what may happen if we do nothing.  But the deeper disappointment with Planet Killers comes its own uncertainty about what it wants to be -- and that literary neurosis, in turn, derives from one of the less obvious challenges that come with writing into  e-media.

    That is: Planet Killers is an example of one of the two distinct species of works evolving in the midst of the e-book transformation.  The gaudier one comes with the application of computing to the text.  Think iPad apps, which allow creators to construct works that offer readers the ability to perform actions on and through the words and images of conventional tales.  See, for example, Deborah Blum’s review of The Elements, something of a type-specimen of the form.  From the scribbler’s point of view, app books also entail new models of working that move towards the ways movies are made, in which the writer is only one, and not always the central creative authority.

The other enabling e-technology preserves the author’s pride and power.  Digitization and the ‘net combine to provide plain e-texts with a new channel for publication and distribution of what remain conventional works made up of words and plain images.  The cost of such distribution is effectively zero – and while that’s so obvious it hardly bears noting, it still adds up to a genuinely new opportunity for writers. You may remember that dim, distant past of, say, six or seven years ago, when the length at which a writer could tell a story was fixed by the venue, a few thousand words for a magazine, many more for a book, with almost nothing possible in between.  If you wanted to treat a subject that might not sustain between hard covers, yet offered more richness than could fit into two-pages-plus-the-jump of a magazine…too bad.  

 Now?  The ‘net doesn’t care if it has to gulp down 5,000 words, 10,000, 25,000 -- whatever it takes to do justice to the material at hand. But there’s a catch.  A 15,000 word piece is not simply a magazine feature at three or four times the usual length.  It’s not a baby book either.  Rather, such works demand formal structures of their own, with particular demands of organization, of narrative depth, of pace, and so on.  Before you know it, you’ve drifted across the border that King warned about.  You’ve entered (non-fiction) Novella, and, if you are unwary, it’s terribly easy to wander down the wrong path.

            Which, by the long road home, brings us back to Planet Killers.  The problem?  There just isn’t that much there, there.  Stripped to its narrative scaffold, all you really get are three steps on a short journey:  the book begins with the threat of a big rock falling from the sky.  We learn that some folks are working on it, without gaining any real depth on what those characters actually did to come up with their ideas.  And then we are baldly told that there’s some agreement on an, incomplete response to the challenge. No great obstacles face any of Friend’s people; no event happens within the story that provides any sense of risk or danger; there are no ideas sufficiently developed within the text that yield some thrill, an Aha! that lingers for more than minutes after the last swipe across the screen.  In the end, Planet Hunters reads not like a work written to the length it told its author it needed to be, and much more like a magazine article blown up to the dignity of an independent e-text.

            Thus the fate of the unwary who venture into the Republic of Novella.  The rise of the e-text makes getting there a doddle.  Getting out, though? No easier than it’s ever been.  

Image:  August Müller, The Diary Entry, by 1885.

Tom Levenson writes books (most recently Newton and the Counterfeiter) and makes films, about science, its history, and whatever else catches his magpie's love of shiny bits.  His work has been honored by a Peabody, a National Academies Science Communication and an AAAS Science Journalism Award, among others.  By day he professes at MIT, where he directs the Graduate Program in Science Writing.