Athletics as science

U.S. sports medicine neglected, MD says

INSTEAD OF pot-bellied men in sweatshirts and whistles telling everybody to run laps, there are people like Gideon Ariel, PhD, a computer scientist from Amherst, Mass., who competed in two Olympiads (1960 and 1964, as a discus thrower for Israel), and who now does amazing things in the field of biomechanics.

Dr. Ariel figured out a way of taking motion pictures of athletes performing typical sports maneuvers (a basketball player making a jump shot, for example), and translating the critical body motions onto a computer grid.

The computer analyzes the athlete's movements, step by step, and produces a thick printout that in essence compares how the athlete performed the maneuver with the theoretically "perfect" way to perform the maneuverdemonstrating exactly how, and where, the athlete should modify and improve his technique.

It works. Earlier this year, discus thrower Mac Wilkins came to Dr. Ariel's Amherst lab and went through the whirling, ballet-like motions of the discus throw for the benefit of Dr. Ariel's high-speed camera.

WILKINS HAD been throwing the 16-pound disc about 216 feet lately, but the computer said he should be throwing it 250 feet, and spotted a point where his left leg was working the wrong way, against the throwing motion instead of with it.

Wilkins corrected the error and, two days later, broke the world's discus record with a 232-foot throw.

Dr. Ariel's computer can he used for much more. Ile displayed an inch-thick printout analyzing the standard shooting and passing motions of four women basketball players bound for the Olympics.

He has a 10,000 frames-per-second camera that can analyze the way a tennic hall strikes the racket. In case you're interested, a tennis ball touches the strings of a racket for only .004 seconds, so that the "thump" you feel in the racket is not the ball --it's the reaction of the strings themselves, which is much longer lasting.

Biomechanics, like other phases of sports science, has applications outside athletes, too. Dr. Ariel used the same camera-computer technique to figure out how people with leg protheses can be made to walk without the limping, body-twisting motion common among those with artificial legs.

THE COMPUTER churned out a quick answer: for a person with an artificial left leg, put an eight-pound weight on the right arm. Then he'll walk easily and normally.

"There's so much we can learn from these kinds of applications. Things like that, about biomechanics, that coaches and athletes just aren't aware of. The use of the arms, for example.

"You can use your arms to lift your body off the floor. I weigh 220 pounds and, see, I can lift my feet off the floor, just by using my arms." He demonstrated, swinging his arms up sharply, lifting his muscular, fullback-sized body an inch or two off the ground.

Computer man Dr. Ariel and surgeon Dr. Dardik get along famously, each calling the other "a genius," falling into animated conversations about groundbreaking new research while watching films of sticklike figures on a computer grid, uncoiling in slow-motion jump shots.

"WHEN I WAS A physician at the last Olympic games, athletes would come up to me with questions about training, about nutrition, about drugs. That's what gave me the idea to talk to the U.S.

Olympic Committee about setting up the institutes. There are so many things we

don't know about."

Anabolic steroids, for example-the hottest question in Olympic sports right

now. Both Dr. Dardik and Dr. Ariel testify that use of the strength-increasing hormones is widespread in this country, and universal in some other countries, though neither physicians nor athletes know how dangerous they might be.

"In the last Olympic trials," Dr. Ariel said, "if you were in the weight events (shot put, discus throw, and hammer throw), you wouldn't even make the trials if you weren't taking steroids. In the shot put, the difference between those on steroids and those not was as if one group was putting 16-pound shots, and the other was putting 40pound shots."

Dr. DARDIK isn't sure steroid use is that widespread, but it is certainly a problem. "If an athlete asks me, should I take steroids, I would say no. But we don't really have enough information on it one way or the other. People are manipulating their bodies, and we don't know what the long-term effects are."

That's a result of the apparent lack of interest in sports medicine in the United States, he and Dr. Ariel believe.

"The technology is there," Dr. Ariel remarked. "This country has the talent, big corporations could provide all the equipment and funds we need, just as a donation."

He pointed out that there were plenty of companies in the United States who make pulmonary function equipment like the one recently donated to the training center-but the one donated came from a West German firm, given to the U.S. Olympic Committee.

"People think athletics is an art. But it's really a science," Dr. Ariel said. "If nobody cared whether you won a gold medal or not, if you weren't competing against others, then maybe you could call it art.

"BUT THE MOMENT you put a stopwatch or a measuring tape to something, it becomes a science."

Dr. Dardik adds that the goal of the institute is a lot broader, and a lot more distant than merely the 1968 Moscow games.

"We're not just a bunch of jocks up here, training for the next Olympics," he declared, pointing out there had already been a spinoff from the program in his own backyard.

Dr. Dardik has set up a foundation in Englewood, N.J., using Olympic athletes to work "one on one" with juvenile diabetics. With the help of the American Diabetes Assn. and the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation, diabetic kids (along with children with other illnesses, including psychiatrically disturbed kids) were being taken through fitness training programs conducted by the Olympic athletes.

The point was to develop in the kids better cardiovascular condition, to reduce their otherwise elevated chances for arteriosclerosis later in life, he said.

BUT THE SIDE effects had been equally worthwhile: the youngsters' insulin needs were lowered sharply, for example, and all of them felt better, looked better, and displayed much greater selfconfidence as a result of the Olympic fitness program.

Now he has bigger plans. He wants to expand the diabetic fitness program, and he's planning (with the assistance of the U.S. Olympic Committee) to set up as many as six sports medicine institutes around the country. One is now being developed in Colorado Springs, Colo., with the cooperation of the Air Force Academy, and another will be set up in

the East next year.

AMERICAN MEDICAL NEWS August 1977

-Roy Petty