Tag: Simmons School of Education & Human Development

HuffPo: Cheating in Sports — Where Do We Go From Here?

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date September 21, 2015

Definitions and standards for what constitutes cheating vs. fairness have never been so needed or consequential. — Weyand

SMU physiologist and biomechanics researcher Peter G. Weyand contributed a piece on cheating in sports to the U.S. online news magazine and blog the Huffington Post.

The piece addresses how modern cheating controversies in sports indicate the need for a new approach to judge fairness that encompasses a broader range of possibilities.

Weyand leads the SMU Locomotor Performance Laboratory and is recognized worldwide as an expert in human running performance.

An expert in the locomotion of humans and other terrestrial animals, Weyand’s broad research interests focus on the relationships between muscle function, metabolic energy expenditure, whole body mechanics and performance.

Weyand’s Huffington Post article, “Cheating in Sports — Where Do We Go From Here?” published Sept. 14, 2015.

EXCERPT:

By Peter Weyand
in the Huffington Post
“I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.” — U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Potter Stewart on pornography in Jacobellis v. Ohio, 1964

Consider some of the current controversies in organized sport: football inflation pressures, “flopping” and “diving” to deceive basketball and soccer officials, performance-enhancing drug (PEDs) cases, possible techno-doping via streamlined suits and artificial limbs, and the potential for genetic doping.

These and other contemporary issues pose unprecedented challenges to the integrity of organized sport. Accordingly, definitions and standards for what constitutes cheating vs. fairness have never been so needed or consequential.

History provides us with clear instances of cheating in sport: Chicago’s “Black Sox” conspiring to intentionally lose baseball games in the 1919 World Series, pitcher Gaylord Perry throwing spitballs in the 1970s, or sprinter Ben Johnson taking banned steroids leading into the 1988 Olympics.

However, many contemporary sport “cheating” controversies simply cannot be evaluated in an equivalently black and white framework.

Consider the ethical dilemmas the following situations pose for modern athletes and athletics: Is it cheating to take a new “designer drug” if: a) it is not banned, b) it enhances performance, and c) many of your competitors take it, and d) you are disadvantaged if you do not?

Is it cheating to fake a fall to induce a referee to call a foul on an opponent?

Is it cheating for an athlete seeking enhanced endurance to sleep in an altitude tent to boost red blood cell production when: a) the practice is not illegal, and b) other athletes do not have the means to do the same.

Is it cheating to use genetic techniques (rather than physical training) to activate dormant portions of one’s DNA to improve muscle performance?

Three of the preceding scenarios presented themselves years ago, the fourth may or may not have yet occurred, but has been a credible threat for some time. All four pose major challenges to the health and integrity of sport.

Yet, while the integrity of sport depends on fairness, the commitment needed to provide it in a viable contemporary form does not seem to be in place. Hence, what is perhaps the greatest threat to both the integrity and health of modern sport – an onslaught of sophisticated techniques to gain advantage by any means possible – is under-recognized, under-resourced and inadequately addressed.

Even a cursory look at the problem makes clear that performance enhancement techniques have raced ahead while standards and policies have not. Athletes and coaches have acknowledged and openly complained that outcomes are unfairly determined by technology rather than ability. Leagues have implemented new policies only to quickly acknowledge they fail to remedy the fairness problems they address (see the NBA’s flopping fines). Instructional videos for inducing foul calls on opponents have been published featuring leading players. “Dirty” athletes, like Lance Armstrong, pass hundreds of doping tests while “clean” athletes are implicated.

Read the full article.

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SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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Wall Street Journal: March’s True Madness — Flopping

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date March 18, 2015

As in the NBA, the art of embellishing contact has become widespread in college basketball

As the 2015 NCAA tournament gets into gear, Wall Street Journal sports reporter Brian Costa quoted SMU locomotor expert Peter Weyand for an article on flopping among college basketball athletes.

The article, “March’s True Madness: Flopping,” quotes Weyand and other experts on the prevalence of flopping in college basketball and the ability of referees to detect it.

The article published March 17, 2015.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Brian Costa
Wall Street Journal
At some point during every NCAA tournament game, a player with the ball will bump into a defender. The defender will fall to the floor, seemingly blown backward by the overwhelming force of his opponent. And referees will be faced with a question that is becoming increasingly difficult to answer: Was it a foul or a flop?

Mimicking the NBA, where the practice has become widespread, college players are becoming ever more proficient in the art of flopping—embellishing or outright faking blows to their bodies to convince referees to call a foul.

The most flagrant histrionics have attracted widespread attention. In February, a video clip of St. John’s swingman Sir’Dominic Pointer flailing his arms in an apocalyptic tumble became a viral hit. But the savviest actors aren’t nearly as obvious about it.

“I’ve had countless games this year where you say, ‘That’s a flop,’ ” ESPN analyst Jay Bilas said. “There’s no way that amount of force caused that amount of physical reaction from the defender. You’d have to be shot in the chest with a bazooka to fall like that.”

Although the frequency of such plays is unclear—the NCAA doesn’t track offensive fouls—the powers that be in college basketball believe there is a problem. Belmont coach Rick Byrd, who chairs the NCAA men’s basketball rules committee, said flopping is becoming prevalent enough that he wants to address it at the committee’s next meeting in May. And it isn’t only happening with players trying to draw a charge. [….]

[….]Part of the issue for any league is the uncertainty surrounding an essential question: what amount of physical reaction should be expected on a given play?

“How much force does it really take in a typical basketball encounter to knock someone off balance?” said Peter Weyand, a physiologist and biomechanist at Southern Methodist University. “That information is not out there.”

With funding from Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, Weyand is leading a study to find out. Using people of various heights and weights, the study simulated typical basketball collisions and measured both the forces involved and the subjects’ natural reactions.

Read the full story.

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The New York Times: The Fast Life of Oscar Pistorius

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date January 19, 2012

The New York Times has written a comprehensive piece on the long-running global controversy surrounding double-amputee runner Oscar Pistorius, the South African vying to compete in the Olympics.

The Jan. 18 article, “The Fast Life of Oscar Pistorius,” cites extensively the work of SMU’s Peter Weyand, an expert in human locomotion. Controversy has swirled around Pistorius as the debate continues over the scientific advantage he enjoys as a result of his high-tech, carbon fiber artificial legs. Weyand helped lead a team of scientists who are experts in biomechanics and physiology in conducting experiments on Pistorius and the mechanics of his racing ability.

Weyand is widely quoted in the press for his expertise on human speed. He is an SMU associate professor of applied physiology and biomechanics in the Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education & Human Development.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Michael Sokolove
The New York Times
Oscar Pistorius trains inside a converted garage at the home of his personal trainer, a former professional rugby player. Iron pull-up bars and a variety of ropes and pulleys are bolted to brick walls. Free weights are lined up on the floor, along with hammered-together wooden boxes that serve as platforms for step-ups and standing jumps. Some of the equipment is clamped to an exterior wall of the garage, opposite an uncovered patio; when it rains, athletes just carry on and get soaked. “It’s old-school,” Pistorius said as we drove up to the place early one morning. “Some of the guys who train here, they bang it so hard, they often get sick in the garden. Nobody judges them.” [ … ]

[ … ] Since the initial paper was published, Weyand has been vocal in stating that Pistorius is at an advantage, a substantial one. The reasons he puts forward were not part of the rationale behind the I.A.A.F.’s disqualification of Pistorius — in effect, not among the “charges” against him — so Pistorius’s legal and scientific team did not have to disprove them at his appeal. The basis of the argument made by Weyand is not hard to follow: The Cheetah blade and its hardware are light, about 5.4 pounds as opposed to the weight of an intact leg and foot for someone of Pistorius’s build, about 12.6 pounds. As a result, his “swing times” — how quickly he can reposition his limbs — are unnaturally fast, “quite literally off the biological charts,” as Weyand (who did not testify in Lausanne) put it in a point-counterpoint debate with Herr in The Journal of Applied Physiology.

Weyand and a colleague, Matthew Bundle of the University of Montana (one of the seven authors listed on the initial journal article), expanded on this last year. “Mr. Pistorius can reposition his lightweight, artificial limbs in 0.28 seconds, and therefore 20 percent more rapidly than most intact-limb athletes,” they wrote. “To appreciate just how artificial Mr. Pistorius’s swing time is, consider that the average limb-repositioning time of five former 100-meter world-record holders (Ben Johnson, Carl Lewis, Maurice Greene, Tim Montgomery and Justin Gatlin) is 0.34 seconds. Mr. Pistorius’s limb-repositioning times are 15.7 percent more brief than five of the fastest male sprinters in recorded human history.”

The most provocative aspect of Weyand and Bundle’s argument — and clearly the biggest affront to Pistorius — is their calculation that the Cheetah blades, over the length of 400 meters, or once around the track, give him an 11.9-second advantage. That would make him no better than an average high school runner. Herr has dismissed this as a “back of the envelope” calculation, and in his contribution to the point-counterpoint, signed by four other authors of the initial paper, asked: “Would Weyand and Bundle predict that the world-record holder, Michael Johnson, would run 31s if he had both legs amputated?” [ … ]

Read the full story.

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Science of Sport: Oscar Pistorius’ controversy continues to bubble

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date January 13, 2012

The popular blog The Science of Sport has posted a year-end piece on the long-running global controversy surrounding double-amputee runner Oscar Pistorius, the South African vying to compete in the Olympics.

The blog article cites extensively the work of SMU’s Peter Weyand, an expert in human locomotion. Controversy has swirled around Pistorius as the debate continues over the scientific advantage he enjoys as a result of the high-tech, carbon fiber artificial legs he relies on. Weyand helped lead a team of scientists who are experts in biomechanics and physiology in conducting experiments on Pistorius and the mechanics of his racing ability.

Read the full blog post.

EXCERPT:

By Ross Tucker
The Science of Sport
[ … ] But 18 months later, an extra-ordinary announcement followed. It was made by Peter Weyand and Matthew Bundle, TWO of the group of six scientists in the Pistorius research team. They came out in November 2009 with the statement that “Pistorius enjoys a large advantage”, and that “we knew it all along”.

This remarkable statement was followed by a point-counterpoint debate in the Journal of Applied Physiology, which revealed a split among those six scientists. It transpired that on the very first day of testing, Weyand (the world’s leading authority on sprint mechanics) and Bundle noted that Pistorius’ mechanics were “off the charts”.

Specifically, his lighter carbon fiber prosthetic blades enabled him to accelerate his limbs so rapidly that he could do what no other runner could in terms of repositioning his limbs.

Weyand had previously established that a limit to sprinting, regardless of speed, was the ability to reposition the limbs, and Pistorius “broke” the limit considerably. That led Weyand to recognize the performance advantage. Weyand and Bundle describe this in their own words:

“Reduced limb repositioning times allow Mr. Pistorius to spend less time in the air between steps. Shorter aerial periods, in turn, substantially reduce how hard Mr. Pistorius must hit the ground during each stance period to lift and move his body forward into the next step.

In this sense, the level of sprinting athleticism required for Mr. Pistorius to achieve world class speeds is dramatically reduced compared to his intact limb competitors. Mr. Pistorius attains world-class sprinting speeds with the ground forces and foot-ground contact times of a slow and relatively uncompetitive runner. Mr. Pistorius’ intact-limb competitors, with natural limb weights and swing times, lack this option, and therefore must achieve their speeds via exclusively biological means. Mr. Pistorius, in contrast, achieves these speeds through the use of technology.”

You can read more about this discovery and the basis for the 12-second advantage they calculated (an overestimate in my opinion) in the detailed article on this site written in August.

Weyand and Bundle speak
The above statements come from a piece that was written by Weyand and Bundle in response to articles I wrote on this site in August. They contacted me to request a one-time post on The Science of Sport, and I was very happy to oblige. However, for various reasons, the posts didn’t happen here, but they were published on the SMU website. I would highly encourage you to read them – they are lucid, to the point, and they clear up many of the misconceptions that you’d have read in the popular media as a result of lies told by Pistorius, Hugh Herr and co.

Read the full blog post

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The Telegraph: The Pistorius problem – how South African blade runner’s artificial legs make him 10 seconds quicker

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date August 11, 2011

Australia’s The Telegraph newspaper quotes SMU’s Peter Weyand, an expert in human locomotion, in an Aug. 11 article “The Pistorius problem – how South African blade runner’s artificial legs make him 10 seconds quicker”

The Telegraph article examines the controversy surrounding double-amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius and his qualification for the 2012 London Olympics. What if the 24-year-old South African — the world’s only sprinter with no legs — comes out a winner? Will their be an outcry against Pistorius controversial carbon-fiber prosthetic legs that attach just below his knees?

Weyand is widely quoted in the press for his expertise on human speed. He led a team of scientists who are experts in biomechanics and physiology in conducting experiments on Oscar Pistorius and the mechanics of his racing ability. Pistorius has made headlines worldwide trying to qualify for races against runners with intact limbs, including the Olympics.

Weyand is an SMU associate professor of applied physiology and biomechanics in the Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education & Human Development.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Mike Hurst
The Telegraph
When it comes to Blade Runner Oscar Pistorius, the athletics world remains split — science isn’t so indecisive.

Oscar Pistorius, that running paradox — a sprinter without legs — advanced one more step towards fulfilling his dream of competing in the Olympic Games when he was named in South Africa’s 26-member team this week to compete later this month at the world athletics championships in Daegu, South Korea.

His official notification comes after he clocked 400m in 45.07sec last month in Italy to better the International Association of Athletics Federations’ tough qualifying standard of 45.25sec — a time no Australian has recorded this year.

In fact, at the previous world champs two years ago in Berlin, Trinidad’s Renny Quow won the bronze medal with 45.02. In a quiet season for the men’s 400m if Pistorius could replicate his 45.07 in consecutive rounds he could well end up on the medals podium.

But then what? Will there be an outcry from those able-bodied sprinters who could not run fast enough to beat Pistorius? Will they campaign to the IAAF against the Pistorius appliances — the carbon-fibre J-shaped blades he wears in place of his legs which were amputated below the knee before his first birthday?

What might the IAAF, the custodians of the major Olympic sport of track and field, do next? Would they dare try again to ban him from competing in London next year?

The IAAF have tried once and failed to ban the technology that enables Pistorius to engage in his flight of fancy to run in the Olympics.

Pistorius took the IAAF to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in 2008. His lawyers cited the opinion of seven scientists (6 American and one French) that the evidentiary basis of the IAAF eligibility ban was not sound. The CAS primarily considered the research conducted on behalf of the IAAF by Professor Peter Bruggemann of Cologne sports university which was used to provide the rationale for the IAAF’s eligibility ban.

In fact both scientific parties found that Pistorius enjoys a big advantage over athletes with biological legs but crucially, in its own narrow terms of reference for the case, CAS questioned whether Prof Bruggemann’s findings adequately supported the IAAF claims and the eligibility ban.

The CAS ruled that the evidence the IAAF offered did not adequately support the eligibility ban on Pistorius and overturned it.

The IAAF could well have restated their case against Pistorius but with public opinion, including the support of many of his fellow sprinters, strongly in favour of the courageous and persistent Paralympian they decided not to go on with the matter.

The IAAF’s decision was at least partly taken in the belief that biology would settle the matter and Pistorius might not attain the tough selection time in the first place.

Two of the physiology professors whose research was sought by Pistorius’s legal team, Peter Weyand and Matthew Bundle, told The Daily Telegraph by email yesterday: “We both admire the inspiring performances of Oscar Pistorius.

“We greatly respect the dedication and persistence he has exhibited in his successful quest to qualify for the World Track and Field Championships and congratulate him on his historic accomplishment.

Read the full story.

SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

Tags Peter Weyand, Simmons School of Education & Human Development

Definitions and standards for what constitutes cheating vs. fairness have never been so needed or consequential. — Weyand

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As in the NBA, the art of embellishing contact has become widespread in college basketball

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