What makes it shine are the behind-the-scenes moments throughout this five-part series. Without getting lost in technical detail or overselling the sport, it leans into what ski racing actually is: long travel days, fragile confidence, and moments where everything - a season, a career - comes down to a few seconds between gates.
Yeah, training's gone really well. I'm very happy with where I am. As you get into an indoor season and you start racing and running faster and the reps get shorter and the recovery gets longer, I think you just naturally come into even more shape, which is obviously really exciting.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Although the 4 a.m. start allowed athletes to avoid the worst of the heat and pollution levels, the air quality index was 178 at the start time, a level that is considered unhealthy, and the temperature hovered near 21 degrees Celsius (70 degrees Fahrenheit). The combination made for challenging conditions from the start.
Super shoes and ultralight gear make a difference, but with new advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) that can look at our running form and compare it to the ideal, analyze our nutrition intake from a simple photo and help us plan our diets, and offer guidance on training and recovery, the interwovenness of technology and running is only set to increase.
In this episode of the On Coaching Podcast, Steve Magness and Jon Marcus discuss the concept of 'fit but flat,' exploring the phenomenon where athletes excel in metabolic fitness but fail to perform competitively due to a lack of neuromuscular coordination. Using examples like middle-distance runner Ingram Brion, the hosts delve into how metabolic training alone can lead to race failures.
I call myself an artist-athlete, because both are really important in how I live my life, though I do put "artist" first in that configuration on purpose! I've been an artist for as long as I can remember, whereas athletics came a little later, and art is a little more reliable in the sense that even when I'm injured, I can focus on my artwork.