The aim of this study was to assess stroke rate variability in elite female swimmers (200-m events, all four techniques) by comparing the semi-finalists at the Athens 2004 Olympic Games (n = 64) and semi-finalists at the French National 2004 Championship (n = 64). Since swimming speed (V) is the product of stroke rate (SR) and stroke length (SL), these three variables and the coefficient of var...

On personal and professional levels, the Marquis de Condorcet did like his fellow Academy member J.C. Borda. It is not clear why; maybe it was the regrettable tension that sometimes exists between abstract and applied mathematicians, or maybe Condorcet harbored jealousy over Borda beating him by over a decade in recognizing the complex and interesting mathematical issues that arise in the socia...

The Russian Academy of Sciences was established on the order of the Emperor Peter I by the Decree of the Ruling Senate dated January 28 (February 8), 1724. The Academy was reinstated by the Decree of the President of the Russian Federation dated November 21, 1991 as the supreme scientific institution of Russia (http://www. ras.ru). The Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) is a civil self-governed ...

PURPOSE The purpose of this project was to determine the incidence of exercise-induced bronchospasm (EIB) among U.S. Olympic winter sport athletes. METHODS Subjects included female and male members of the 1998 U.S. Winter Olympic Team from the following sports: biathlon, cross-country ski, figure skating, ice hockey, Nordic combined, long-track speedskating, and short-track speedskating. Asse...

OBJECTIVE To examine if there is an increased participation in physical or sporting activities following an Olympic or Paralympic games. DESIGN Overview of systematic reviews. METHODS We searched the Medline, Embase, Cochrane, DARE, SportDISCUS and Web of Knowledge databases. In addition, we searched for 'grey literature' in Google, Google scholar and on the International Olympic Committee ...

The European brown bear is one of the continent's most threatened species, being found in low numbers in many of their remaining, fragmented habitats. The largest population, numbering around 160, are found in the Pindus Mountains of northern Greece. But even this population is under increasing pressure from human activity and events such as the extensive forest fires last summer. Conservationi...

The purpose of this study was to identify the characteristics of Olympic medal winners (gold, silver, bronze) who competed in the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and compare these characteristics to those who competed but did not earn medals. We have also descriptively analysed the 2008 data in comparison to the 2004 data (Kazemi et al., 2009), and 2000 data (Kazemi et al., 2006) and summarized chan...

Many of us winter sport enthusiasts will still remember the last Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver 2010: fantastic organisation and weather—a real ‘folk festival’ with street parties up in Whistler and in downtown Vancouver. However, we also remember a high number of injuries and tears of disappointment among athletes in the spectacular snowboard and ski freestyle races at Cypress Mountain spec...

The modern Olympics are not only the largest sports phenomenon to date in the history of human society, but also a great social culture phenomenon in the history of human civilization [1]. A broad sense of Olympic culture is the sum of material and spiritual wealth created by the Olympics in practice. Material wealth, namely material culture, mainly refers to the transformation and development ...

Measuring the performance of participating nations in the Olympic Games is an important application of data envelopment analysis (DEA). Prior literature only considers participating nations’ performance in the Summer Olympic Games. It may be unfair to some nations who are good at the Winter Olympics, but poor at the Summer Olympics. Therefore, we believe it is better to consider the two Olympic...