Getting faster, higher, stronger, older

Dara Torres posing with her teammates (from left) Natalie Coughlin, Kara Lynn Joyce, Lacey Nymeyer and their silver medals after finishing second in the women's 4x100 meters freestyle relay on Sunday. (Wolfgang Rattay/Reuters )

Getting faster, higher, stronger, older
By Gina Kolata for International Herald Tribune
Published: August 12, 2008

At the age of 41, the American swimmer Dara Torres seems to have broken new ground, showing that it is possible for athletes to continue to compete at the highest levels, even making Olympic teams, at advanced ages.

But, exercise physiologists say, the conventional wisdom about age and sports is more urban legend than fact. Not only were there Dara Torreses in the past, these experts say, but they also predict that stories like hers will be more common in the future. The reasons are an infusion of money into many sports, combined with improvements in sports medicine and training.

Exercise researchers cite athlete after athlete who competed at ages when conventional wisdom said they should have been washed up. Even sprinters, widely believed to reach their peak performances in their early 20s and decline a few years later, have defied expectations. In fact, said José González-Alonso, director of the Center for Sports Medicine and Human Performance at Brunel University, near London, the notion about sprinters' peaking early might have no basis in science.

In the last century, there were sprinters like Donald Finlay of Britain, who came in fourth in the 110-meter hurdles in the 1948 Olympics at the age of 39. More recently, the sprinter Merlene Ottey competed in seven Olympics, including the Athens Games in 2004, and won a total of eight medals. She turned 48 in May.

Of course, it is not easy to keep competing year after year.
"It has to be someone who is very, very driven and injury-free," González-Alonso said. "The hardest thing is to have the motivation to train well."

As years go by, many tire of the discipline, said Michael Joyner, an exercise researcher at the Mayo Clinic. "How much do you want to suffer every day?" he asked.

But in the end, whether an athlete can continue often comes down to money. And one reason coaches and exercise researchers expect to see many older Olympians in the future is that for the first time in many sports, athletes are finding that they can make a living by competing.

Joyner offered swimming as an example. Elite swimmers cannot just go out and train themselves. They need a coach, a 50-meter pool and the financial support to be able to spend up to five hours a day training. Such a schedule makes it difficult to hold a full-time job.

Until recently, that meant that elite swimmers were in high school or college. After college, it became impossible to train without a team, and most swimmers felt they had to earn a living some other way.

No more, said Frank Busch, an Olympic swimming coach who said companies were now supporting swimmers. "You're seeing the age of the Olympic team continue to get older," Busch said. Now, he said, 90 percent of U. S. Olympic swimmers were professional athletes. In contrast to what happened in the past, very few high school and college students are on the team and it is common for Olympic swimmers to be in their mid- to late-20s.

"Pro swimming has changed the whole scene," Busch said.

Sandy Neilson, an Olympic swimmer who won three gold medals in 1972, watched the transformation happen.

"Back when I was 16, there weren't scholarships for women," Neilson said. "It was unheard of out of college. Things really started to change between 1984 and 1988 to allow the athletes to receive money without losing their amateur status."

She decided to take advantage of the change and return to the sport, coached by her husband.

In 1984, Neilson was named US Swimming's national comeback swimmer of the year. Now, at the age of 40 and as a mother of four, she seeks to maintain that competitive edge.

"It's something no one else has done," she said. "I believe I can go faster. My training hasn't been what it needs to be. There's room for improvement. I'm not looking at the 40-year-old wall. Life goes on after 40."

In addition to money, sports medicine has made a difference, said Joyner, the exercise researcher. Older athletes may be more prone to injuries, but today's medicine allows them to recover quicker. "Knee surgery used to be medieval," he said. But now, athletes can go back to training almost immediately.

So have improved training techniques, González-Alonso said. Athletes today train better and have more support.

And there, Dara Torres may be paving the way.

In 1992, she learned that she had asthma. She takes medicine that allows her to breathe normally, which allows her to train hard and compete. And with her head coach, sprint coach, two stretchers, two masseuses, a chiropractor and a nanny, she spent at least $100,000 a year preparing for the Olympics.
But, of course, the results are clear. Age, it turns out, may not be the obstacle it was thought to be.

Karen Crouse contributed reporting.

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Sorting Out Coffee’s Contradictions

By JANE E. BRODY for the NYTimes.com
Published: August 5, 2008

When Howard D. Schultz in 1985 founded the company that would become the wildly successful Starbucks chain, no financial adviser had to tell him that coffee was America’s leading beverage and caffeine its most widely used drug. The millions of customers who flock to Starbucks to order a double espresso, latte or coffee grande attest daily to his assessment of American passions.

Although the company might have overestimated consumer willingness to spend up to $4 for a cup of coffee — it recently announced that it would close hundreds of underperforming stores — scores of imitators that now sell coffee, tea and other products laced with caffeine reflect a society determined to run hard on as little sleep as possible.

But as with any product used to excess, consumers often wonder about the health consequences. And researchers readily oblige. Hardly a month goes by without a report that hails coffee, tea or caffeine as healthful or damns them as potential killers.

Can all these often contradictory reports be right? Yes. Coffee and tea, after all, are complex mixtures of chemicals, several of which may independently affect health.

Caffeine Myths

Through the years, the public has been buffeted by much misguided information about caffeine and its most common source, coffee. In March the Center for Science in the Public Interest published a comprehensive appraisal of scientific reports in its Nutrition Action Healthletter. Its findings and those of other research reports follow.

Hydration. It was long thought that caffeinated beverages were diuretics, but studies reviewed last year found that people who consumed drinks with up to 550 milligrams of caffeine produced no more urine than when drinking fluids free of caffeine. Above 575 milligrams, the drug was a diuretic.

So even a Starbucks grande, with 330 milligrams of caffeine, will not send you to a bathroom any sooner than if you drank 16 ounces of pure water. Drinks containing usual doses of caffeine are hydrating and, like water, contribute to the body's daily water needs.

Heart disease. Heart patients, especially those with high blood pressure, are often told to avoid caffeine, a known stimulant. But an analysis of 10 studies of more than 400,000 people found no increase in heart disease among daily coffee drinkers, whether their coffee came with caffeine or not.

"Contrary to common belief," concluded cardiologists at the University of California, San Francisco, there is "little evidence that coffee and/or caffeine in typical dosages increases the risk" of heart attack, sudden death or abnormal heart rhythms.

In fact, among 27,000 women followed for 15 years in the Iowa Women's Health Study, those who drank one to three cups a day reduced their risk of cardiovascular disease by 24 percent, although this benefit diminished as the quantity of coffee rose.

Hypertension. Caffeine induces a small, temporary rise in blood pressure. But in a study of 155,000 nurses, women who drank coffee with or without caffeine for a decade were no more likely to develop hypertension than noncoffee drinkers. However, a higher risk of hypertension was found from drinking colas. A Johns Hopkins study that followed more than 1,000 men for 33 years found that coffee drinking played little overall role in the development of hypertension.

Cancer. Panic swept this coffee-dependent nation in 1981 when a Harvard study tied the drink to a higher risk of pancreatic cancer. Coffee consumption temporarily plummeted, and the researchers later concluded that perhaps smoking, not coffee, was the culprit.

In an international review of 66 studies last year, scientists found coffee drinking had little if any effect on the risk of developing pancreatic or kidney cancer. In fact, another review suggested that compared with people who do not drink coffee, those who do have half the risk of developing liver cancer.

And a study of 59,000 women in Sweden found no connection between coffee, tea or caffeine consumption and breast cancer.

Bone loss. Though some observational studies have linked caffeinated beverages to bone loss and fractures, human physiological studies have found only a slight reduction in calcium absorption and no effect on calcium excretion, suggesting the observations may reflect a diminished intake of milk-based beverages among coffee and tea drinkers.

Dr. Robert Heaney of Creighton University says that caffeine's negative effect on calcium can be offset by as little as one or two tablespoons of milk. He advised that coffee and tea drinkers who consume the currently recommended amount of calcium need not worry about caffeine's effect on their bones.

Weight loss. Here's a bummer. Although caffeine speeds up metabolism, with 100 milligrams burning an extra 75 to 100 calories a day, no long-term benefit to weight control has been demonstrated. In fact, in a study of more than 58,000 health professionals followed for 12 years, both men and women who increased their caffeine consumption gained more weight than those who didn't.

Health Benefits

Probably the most important effects of caffeine are its ability to enhance mood and mental and physical performance. At consumption levels up to 200 milligrams (the amount in about 16 ounces of ordinary brewed coffee), consumers report an improved sense of well-being, happiness, energy, alertness and sociability, Roland Griffiths of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine reported, although higher amounts sometimes cause anxiety and stomach upset.

Millions of sleep-deprived Americans depend on caffeine to help them make it through their day and drive safely. The drug improves alertness and reaction time. In the sleep-deprived, it improves memory and the ability to perform complex tasks.

For the active, caffeine enhances endurance in aerobic activities and performance in anaerobic ones, perhaps because it blunts the perception of pain and aids the ability to burn fat for fuel instead of its carbohydrates.

Recent disease-related findings can only add to coffee's popularity. A review of 13 studies found that people who drank caffeinated coffee, but not decaf, had a 30 percent lower risk of Parkinson's disease.

Another review found that compared with noncoffee drinkers, people who drank four to six cups of coffee a day, with or without caffeine, had a 28 percent lower risk of Type 2 diabetes. This benefit probably comes from coffee's antioxidants and chlorogenic acid.

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Swimmer inspires sisters to shoot for Beijing

Swimmer inspires sisters to shoot for Beijing
By Katie Thomas
Published: August 8, 2008
There was something about the Fong sisters that caught Dara Torres's eye at a camp for aspiring swimmers at Stanford University in 2000.

Torres had recently broken the American record in the 50 meters at the Santa Clara International Invitational. Sandra and Danielle Fong were 10 and 8 years old, and dreamed of one day becoming Olympic athletes.

Torres had brought the Santa Clara medal to show the children at camp, but her plan changed when she met the Fong sisters from New York.

"My heart melted around them, so I just went ahead and gave it to them," Torres recalled Thursday in an e-mail message. "I remember Danielle in particular, she just had such a sweet face."

The sisters returned to their family's apartment in New York City, and Danielle Fong hung the medal on her wall."It inspired me to try to work harder in swimming and try to be an inspiration to others," Danielle said.

Swimming did not stick, but the inspiration did. Now 18, Sandra made the United States shooting team after finishing second in three-position rifle. Danielle, who is 17 and has cerebral palsy, will represent the United States next month as a member of the Paralympic shooting team.
Their mother, Nicole Fong, said she believed Torres influenced their future.

"It was just a sign of something to them that you could reach for the stars," Nicole Fong said in a telephone interview Thursday before leaving for the first of back-to-back trips to Beijing. "They weren't meeting a movie star with glasses. She could be a normal person and still have that level of achievement."

The athletes' village is full of brothers and sisters who have followed each other into the elite world of Olympic sports. On the United States team alone, there are the three Lopez siblings in tae kwon do, Keeth and Erinn Smart in fencing, and of course Venus and Serena Williams. The team boasts two sets of twins — not including Paul and Morgan Hamm, who each had to withdraw from gymnastics because of injury.

For the Fongs, the urge to compete originated with their father, Yuman Fong, who encouraged his three daughters — Abigail, 20, is the eldest — to purse sports from a young age.

A surgeon at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, he started his daughters in swimming, but when it became clear that none of them would grow taller than 5 feet 3 inches, he said, they looked elsewhere. Around the same time, Yuman Fong got the urge to dust off his rifle and started shooting in local competitions. Before long, the whole family was spending weekend afternoons at a rifle range in Ridgewood, New Jersey

"It turned out he was a good teacher, and they were good students," Nicole Fong said.

Last year, Abigail and Sandra were named to USA Shooting's national team. Danielle attained similar success in Paralympic competition, placing ninth at the European Paralympic Championships last year.

For a while, Yuman and Nicole thought all three sisters could make it to the Beijing Games. "You know, that would have been perfect," Nicole said.

But at the Olympic shooting trials earlier this year, Sandra edged out Abigail, coming in second while her older sister placed fourth. Both sisters had a chance to make the team, explained David Johnson, the national coach for rifle shooting.

"In that age group, they're both world-class," Johnson said.

Yuman Fong said: "Everybody expected that Abby was going to make the team. But that's the way Sandy is, she rises to the occasion."

Sandra was training with the shooting team in South Korea a few days ago when she checked her e-mail and noticed a message from an unknown sender who turned out to be Torres, wishing the Fongs luck in the weeks to come. An NBC crew recently asked Torres about the sisters, refreshing her memory of the 2000 encounter.

"I don't know if you'll remember me," the e-mail message began.

Sandra had to laugh.

"Do I remember her?" she said Thursday afternoon, after completing practice at the Olympic shooting range.

Does she ever.

Source: http://tinyurl.com/6gwkj9

Canada's Olympic hopefuls: No. 4 of a series

Canada's Olympic hopefuls: No. 4 of a series
Adam van Koeverden: unfinished business

By JONATHON GATEHOUSE for Macleans

It's not difficult to build a case that Adam van Koeverden is some sort of freak of nature. The 26-year-old kayaker, reigning world and Olympic champion in the K1-500 m, and at least the second-best man on earth at the K1-1000 m, has a resting heart rate that borders on the reptilian — 38 beats per minute. His VO2 max, the measure of how many millilitres of oxygen per kilogram he can utilize during a minute of full-tilt activity, is in the mid-to-high 70s. (Someone who scores 60 is considered an elite athlete. A fit, 30-year-old fun-runner would be lucky to hit 45.) His body produces next to no limb-deadening lactic acid, which is awfully useful when the Olympic finals for your events come

24 hours apart. But perhaps the strongest evidence of his otherworldliness is found on the water. Down in Florida, where he has spent most of the winter ramping up for Beijing, he has been spending six to eight hours a day in his boat following a lung-busting training regime that he sums up as "going as close to race speed for as long as you can, as often as you can." A morning session might feature 10 sets of five-minute-long, high-intensity paddles, broken with two-minute rests. In the afternoon, it could be 24 one-minute sprints, with 60 seconds of slow strokes in between. It would kill the rest of us. And one of the main jobs of his coach, Scott Oldershaw, is to stop him from going even harder. Even among paddlers, van Koeverden is an oddity. In training, as in competition, he has only one gear — flat out. He refuses to conserve strength and coast through the heats. "He likes to win every race on the water. Every workout, every piece of a workout," says Dr. Don McKenzie, the UBC physiology prof and physician for Canada's canoe/kayak team. "By and large, he wears everyone else out." Last year, van Koeverden lost a grand total of one race at his chosen distances, finishing just over half a second behind the U.K.'s Tim Brabants in the K1-1000 m at the World Championships in Duisburg, Germany. (Although he clinched his fourth straight overall World Cup titles in both disciplines.) And it still bugs the hell out of him. "I recognize that it's sort of ridiculous to be complaining about being second in the world, but that's the position I'm in," he says. "I can't ignore that I can go faster, that I've beaten those guys before, and that I can do it again."

Silly or not, it's the type of frustration that should make the rest of the kayaking world nervous about how things might unfold alongside the Chaobai River this August in Beijing. Van Koeverden is not only the favourite to defend his 500-m title, he is serving notice that he intends to find the top step on the podium in the 1,000 m as well. This past summer's World Championship silver marked his third turn as bridesmaid. "I've lost to a guy from New Zealand, a guy from Norway and a guy from Great Britain. I don't want to be second anymore, " he says. "Stacking my silver medals on top of my dresser at home is not my favourite activity."

In another athlete you could dismiss it all as bravado. But van Koeverden has a way of backing up his words. Four years ago in Athens, where he was considered only a medal hopeful, the kayaker called out his teammates, challenging them to go beyond the "ultra-Canadian" goal of simply making an Olympic final. "Sorry, that's not good enough," he proclaimed. "That's why Canadians come in fourth more than anyone else." A day later in the 1,000 m, the race that everyone — himself included — viewed as his best chance, he flew out the gate, leaving the sport's elite in his wake for more than half the course, before eventually fading to the bronze. Twenty-four hours after that, he came back for the 500 m — a distance that even he considered his weaker — survived a slow start and pulled out a shock gold in the last push to the line.

Such displays of will, celebrated when it's done by the pros — think Babe Ruth pointing to the fences, or Mark Messier guaranteeing a game seven victory — have earned van Koeverden the odd reputation of being maybe a little too cocky for an Olympian, at least one who wears the Maple Leaf. Something he says he understands, but for which he makes no apology. "I've never really had any problems with motivation or goal setting," says van Koeverden. "I train hard every day, I'm a world-class athlete every day, so there's no reason to think when I line up on race day that I'm a different person or have lost any of those abilities that I've been perfecting and fine tuning over the last 12 years." But it's an attitude that the Canadian Olympic Committee undoubtedly wishes it could bottle and distribute more widely. (The kayaker accounted for 17 per cent of the country's medal haul in Athens.) Penny Werthner, a University of Ottawa sports psychologist who works with a number of winter and summer Olympians, tells a story from Greece. Like a lot of athletes, van Koeverden likes to listen to his iPod as a pre-competition relaxation technique. But standing dockside in the moments before the K1-1000 m race he found he had forgotten his headphones back at the hotel. It's the kind of glitch that would throw many competitors into crisis, says Werthner, let alone one who was awaiting his first ever Olympic final. But what she remembers most is his reaction. "F--k it," van Koeverden said. "I don't need to listen to music." He's not a superman, says the psychologist, but that sort of mental toughness enables him to crash through more barriers than most people she deals with. "Adam has no fear of putting everything on the line," she says. "A lot of athletes subconsciously hold back in a race. But he's able to focus on killing himself for the full 1,000 m, if that's what it takes."

If van Koeverden does have a fear, it seems to be not living up to his own sky-high expectations. His lowest point since Athens, he says, came at the 2006 World Championships, where he finished fourth in both distances. "I was in shock that after all the preparation and work I could still come in fourth. It was that realization that some things are not in my control." How that insight changed him is a little less clear. Winning the Worlds in 2007 became something of an obsession, say those around him. And if anything, the losses appear to have made him even more fanatical about training. Penny Werthner, a University of Ottawa sports psychologist who works with a number of winter and summer Olympians, tells a story from Greece. Like a lot of athletes, van Koeverden likes to listen to his iPod as a pre-competition relaxation technique. But standing dockside in the moments before the K1-1000 m race he found he had forgotten his headphones back at the hotel. It's the kind of glitch that would throw many competitors into crisis, says Werthner, let alone one who was awaiting his first ever Olympic final. But what she remembers most is his reaction. "F--k it," van Koeverden said. "I don't need to listen to music." He's not a superman, says the psychologist, but that sort of mental toughness enables him to crash through more barriers than most people she deals with. "Adam has no fear of putting everything on the line," she says. "A lot of athletes subconsciously hold back in a race. But he's able to focus on killing himself for the full 1,000 m, if that's what it takes."

If van Koeverden does have a fear, it seems to be not living up to his own sky-high expectations. His lowest point since Athens, he says, came at the 2006 World Championships, where he finished fourth in both distances. "I was in shock that after all the preparation and work I could still come in fourth. It was that realization that some things are not in my control." How that insight changed him is a little less clear. Winning the Worlds in 2007 became something of an obsession, say those around him. And if anything, the losses appear to have made him even more fanatical about training. Four years after his gold medal triumph, the only thing that has changed about Adam van Koeverden is that he's better. "Winning isn't everything. It's not the most important thing," he says. "But in a race, it's the point."

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