Sleeping Your Way to More EPO / Grand Slam Chaos / The UCI's Expensive Regulatory Defeat and a Weighing Scandal

Join The Real Science of Sport Supporters club for ad-free listening and our exclusive weekly Applied Science show! A monthly donation is all takes!

This week's Spotlight opens in Paris, where Roland Garros has delivered one of the most chaotic and compelling Grand Slams in recent memory, and ends on a Las Vegas track with a promise of $10 million unlikely to be fulfilled. Along the way, we explore retirements and comebacks, bike weight scandals, regulatory issues and a surprising way to boost your red blood cells.

In today's Show:

• For the first time in the Open era, not a single former Grand Slam champion reached the men's round of 16. Ross and Gareth try to make sense of a tournament turned on its head by epically long five-set matches, multiple two-set-up defeats, and the emergence of potential new stars to challenge the duopoly atop men's tennis
• Sinner is gone, Djokovic is gone, and the heat played a starring role. We revisit our applied show on heat adaptation to explain exactly why Sinner's implosion was both predictable physiologically, but surprising in its speed and persistence
• Serena Williams has accepted a wildcard to play doubles at Queen's at 44. We explore the motivations for her return, and discuss why elite athletes retire in the first place? A thread on Discourse sparked by James gets us exploring the psychology and physiology of retirement, and why the grind we don't see is often the cause
• In cycling, Lorena Wiebes was disqualified from the women's Giro after her bike allegedly weighed in 20 grams under the UCI's 6.8kg minimum. Was the punishment proportionate? Is the UCI's measurement process up to the required standard? Are SD Worx guilty of playing it too close to the limit? We discuss.
• A Belgian court has ruled against the UCI's attempt to impose gear ratio limits on the sport, finding the regulation neither necessary nor proportionate. We explore the implications well beyond cycling, and ponder how the UCI's failure to present a clear justification for the regulation was ultimately its undoing
• Tilting your bed by six degrees could raise your EPO levels by 13% and increase hemoglobin mass by nearly 5%. Ross unpacks a genuinely fascinating new study, explaining why the mechanism is the same as altitude and heat training, whether the effect will be additive in athletes, and whether elite athletes are already quietly propping up their headboards
• A carbohydrate question from supporter Tony ahead of his national canoe championships: does glycogen depletion in one muscle group affect availability elsewhere? Ross explains the elegant logic of local storage and use, the lactate shuttle, and why liver is the unsung hero of endurance fuelling
• And Finally, the Enhanced Games have announced a $10 million bonus for anyone who breaks Usain Bolt's 100m world record at their 2027 event. We discuss whether that will be enough to entice the truly fast man to race, doped or clean, and what it might mean for athlete's participation in the Olympics following an Enhanced Games

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.