United States Olympic Committee

Department Member, Sport Performance

Director of High Performance

About

I lead a team of sport science professionals charged with impacting performance of United States Olympic athletes in Swimming, Track and Field, Shooting, Equestrian, and Weightlifting. My formal areas of expertise include biomechanics, technology, and motor control. I do a great deal of work providing guidance to our coaches in the area of motor learning, particularly skill acquisition, feedback, and practice design. Nearly all of my work would be considered "applied [sport] science".

My work prior to the US Olympic Committee included 5 years with a human factors research firm (as well as 9 teaching at a University level). During this time, I gained a far greater appreciation of what "human performance" really entails. And, as many professionals find, I believe this understanding has only led me to pursue more challenging and nuanced questions. Here are a couple:

* To what extent does any [applied sport science] intervention affect real-world, on-the-field performance? I am not seeking anecdotes which extol the virtues of [nutrition/psychology/biomechanics/physiology/medicine/recovery/technology] best practices or horror stories of what happened when best practices were not followed. How specifically does proper __________ contribute to an athlete's ability to generate maximum force or power or sustain these over the course of a race?

* How "good" do you really have to be in various aspects of human/sport performance to achieve a given competitive level? That is, "how good is good enough" for an athlete to be a world/Olympic champion in their sport in terms of strength/power, VO2, lactate clearance/tolerance, "mental toughness", technical ability/repertoire, "game awareness", etc? I find this question fascinating and one that the scientific literature rarely addresses. It is easy to find studies on interventions which yield a maximum, minimum, optimum, "better than", etc. I want to know, "what's good enough" and which characteristics are the true differentiators among athletes across and within various levels of competition. Unfortunately for us, the real world operates in a much messier space than we typically read about in our peer reviewed literature. I call this "The Adequacy Criterion" but conceptually it parallels some of the work of Kondraske's "elemental resource model".

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