The statistical revolution is changing the way pro sports are played and watched, but it’s also changing what we know about athletes. By measuring g-forces, breathing patterns, adrenaline and plenty more aspects of athletes and their equipment, these sports technologies go far beyond the old 40-yard dash in measuring a player’s prowess. And they’re not just for professional athletes: Weekend warriors can now receive performance feedback to help them train smarter and get stronger. All you need is a smartphone and plenty of willpower.

Read more: 5 Personal-Sport Technologies to Help You Get Stronger, Faster and Better – Popular Mechanics

As the U.S. Open Snowboard Championships take place in Vermont this week, we take a look at the tech that allowed snowboard halfpipes to get taller, wider and longer—and help snowboarders get some serious air.

Read more: U.S. Open Snowboard Championship – Winter Snowboarding Halfpipe – Popular Mechanics

Old white men can be a curious lot. Through much of the country they’re bellyaching for freedom, against the tyranny of outside forces, like the government, taxes or unions from impeding them in any way. However, sometimes, ideals be damned, they need to stand up for other old white men who feel aggrieved by people exercising the very freedom they harp about defending.

On the day the Knicks introduced Carmelo Anthony after a months-long courtship, the Nets acquired the alleged coach-killing Deron Williams from the Jazz. Not to mention this being less than a year after LeBron, D-Wade and Chris Bosh orchestrated a coup that allowed the three to join forces in Miami. And let’s not forget that Chris Paul isn’t exactly thrilled with his situation either playing for the league-owned Hornets. Well, this isn’t sitting well with old white sportswriters and talking heads.

Dick Vitale thinks the inmates have taken over the asylum, a New York Daily News beat writer takes to the airwaves to argue players have too much power, Ken Berger of CBSSports.com calls it all a “shell game” that exposes a “dark underside,” which portends league-wide “Armageddon,” Rick Reilly is tut-tutting over these egotistic stars deleterious effects on the game, SI’s Michael Rosenberg rails against Carmelo’s selfishness and the same magazine’s Ian Thomsen said these deals just about assured a lockout because owners won’t stand for player machinations of this sort any longer. Yet, I didn’t see anyone writing stories about how wrong Denver was to trade Chauncey Billups, who wanted to finish his career in Denver–so much for player control.

As much as “The Decision” was a disgrace and that the whole ‘Melo trade talk was needlessly protracted, this endless handwringing over players pushing to play on the team of their choosing is fraught with stupidity; a pervasive attitude that athletes should stay under the thumbs of owners. The hive mind of sports media seems to agree that the olden days of owners maintain total control like in those wondrous days of yore before free agency, when sports was closer to indentured servitude.

This idea is hardly new. Chuck Klosterman enjoys arguing that if you polled sports writers on their personal politics, they majority would appear left of center, however the lens through which they view sports makes them seem oppressive and antiquated. None of them would want an asshole like Bill Parcells as their boss, but they insist that players need to stay in lock-step with his dictatorial demands. Columnists, like the current Supreme Court, are firmly on the side of bosses and our corporate overlords. That means the NFL’s dean of journalists, Peter King, writes slurpy love letters to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell in Sports Illustrated on the eve of a major labor negotiation that’s looking to fleece the players and Buzz Bissinger idiotically opines that the NBA is too black for white America.

Somehow, owners have co-opted the notion that their actions represent the ones that are for THE GOOD OF THE GAME and that players, in opposing ownerships’ moves, are in the business of destroying sport. Mind you that it’s the owner Tom Hicks that bankrupted the Texas Rangers and eviscerated Liverpool FC with his over-leveraged idiocy. It was George Shinn whose moral and financial bankruptcy has nearly brought the NBA’s Hornets to their knees. The NHL, in their lust for money, expanded idiotically into the Southern US, diluting and bankrupting their sport. Donald Sterling’s naked profiteering has kept the LA Clippers from ever being great, on top of him being a horrid human. The NFL owners create a system where they don’t guarantee player salaries, forcing them to destroy their bodies to keep a roster spot, but then get fine-happy when the players start destroying their bodies too much, and yet the owners still push to add two more games to an already grueling season. For THE GOOD OF THE GAME, indeed.

The sports media has been complicit in this charade for a long time. These guys have been so used to carrying water for ownership, that siding with them in these current labor disputes must almost be a Pavlovian response. There was hardly a whiff of dissent back in the 1990s, when America’s cities went on stadium-building binges with their own cheering section in the media.

Those halcyon times when a predominantly conservative group of multi-millionaires and billionaires built their entire economic model on government subsidies and handouts in the form of opulent sports palaces constructed on the public’s dime. In these pursuits, sports talk radio and newspaper columnists handled the PR for them by heralding the “need” for stadiums for the city’s economy despite countless studies by the likes of economist Andrew Zimbalist that point to the contrary. They held up the idea that to be a “World Class” city, you had to have professional sports teams, but as was aptly pointed out back when the Seattle Sonics begged for a new arena, the visiting Prime Minister of China didn’t meet with the owners of the team, he met with Bill Gates.

The media helped fleece cities to benefit owners and now they’re primed to do the same to wrest money and rights from the players. Perhaps because with the advent of free agency, sports fandom has become a practice in rooting for laundry, so it makes sense to stick up for those who own the laundry as apposed to the ones who are loaned the shirts and short pants on a limited basis. But in the coming labor battles in both the NBA and NFL, the Tea Party should break with the old white men in the front office and get on the players’ side to demand that they keep their freedom.

Before the season started, I told my editor at Popular Mechanics “Some big pitcher is going to blow out his elbow and need Tommy John surgery, let me write a story right now that explains how it works and how the science is changing to help pitchers recover from a torn elbow ligament faster.” He agreed and here it is! p.s. Sorry, Strasburg fans, he won’t be pitching at a high level again until 2012.

Here’s my list of my five favorite pieces of long-form journalism in 2010, in no particular order:

“Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation?” by Steven Hyden, The AV Club
One man’s journey back to his youth to explore the music that defined the 1990s; charting it’s ebbs and flows in a multi-part series that also explains why alternative rock has largely faded from memory.

“The Empty Chamber” by George Packer, The New Yorker
Packer captures the maddening inactivity and ineptitude of our nation’s deliberative body.

“The Dirtiest Player” by Jason Fagone, GQ
Not only a fantastic piece of reporting and a well-told story of Marvin Harrison’s alleged involvement in another man’s death, but an indictment of sports journalists (and perhaps sports journalism in general, which equates being good on the field with being good off) who did features on Harrison and never dug any further to actually understand the man and his past.

“Roger Ebert: The Essential Man” by Chris Jones, Esquire
From one of the best writers in America right now comes an amazing profile of the venerable film critic, who has lost his jaw to cancer but not his passion for work. Let’s just say it got a little dusty in the room when I got to the part about Siskel. You should also check out Jones’ exceptional, National Magazine Award-winning piece “The Things That Carried Him.”

“The Late Shaft” by Bill Zehme, Playboy
Zehme is one of the absolute masters of the form and few people on the planet know more about the intricacies of the late night comedy world than this man who has covered it since he first profiled Dave back in the early 80s. In the process of writing about Letterman around the time he started Late Night, Dave introduced Zehme to a promising young comic, Jay Leno, and for the last three decades he’s chronicled their rise and feud (along with Johnny’s eventual ouster) in the pages of Rolling Stone and Esquire. Zehme has trolled the mind of these comics more than most, especially Jay, whose autobiography he penned.

—————————

Honorable mentions have to go to Atul Gawande’s “Letting Go,” Michael Lewis’ “Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds,” Mark Greif’s “What Was the Hipster?” Chuck Klosterman’s profile of Jonathan Franzen in GQ and the gang at Slate’s preseason NFL Roundtable with Josh Levin, Stefan Fatsis, Nate Jackson and Tom Scocca–it was truly a thinking fan’s guide to the game.

The bicycle is the near-perfect vehicle, but that doesn’t stop people from (brilliantly) messing with the design to increase speed, comfort or desirability to commuters. I spoke to some leading bicycle designers to highlight 10 variations on the traditional bike. Read the full story and see all the pictures at Popular Mechanics.

Seems that most everything your high school gym teacher told you is wrong. Well, at least when it comes to all that start-of-the-class stretching.

A recent spate of studies shows that when it comes to warming up before exercising, phys ed instructors didn’t do us any favors by having us to go through a series of calf extensions, hurdler’s stretches and the like.

The latest salvo against stretching comes from a study published in the September issue of the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, which found that static stretching before a workout lowered runners’ endurance and made their body less efficient. While previous studies have illustrated the effects of stretching on anaerobic activities, this was the first one to show the effects on runners.

Read the rest at Wired.com

At 28 years old and approaching the downside of his career, a rib injury kept American tennis player Mardy Fish out of last year’s US Open. A few weeks after the tournament, nursing two bad knees, he had the left one surgically repaired and realized his chronic pains and slipping world ranking weren’t merely a product of age.

The 6-foot-2 Minnesotan acknowledged what others had already known: “I was just too heavy,” he told Wired.com. “Flat out too heavy.”

Read the rest at Wired.com

Last Friday was a mixed bag for fans of the fastball. Early in the day, the Washington Nationals announced that phenom Stephen Strasburg, who hurled a 101-mph pitch in his debut in June, would likely require Tommy John surgery for his injured elbow; a procedure that could sideline him for up to 18 months. But later that night Aroldis Chapman, a 22-year-old Cuban defector pitching for the Cincinnati Reds’ triple-A affiliate in Louisville, captured baseball fans’ attention when he threw a pitch clocked at 105 mph.Read the rest on Popularmechanics.com

As NFL and college football training camps begin preparing players for their upcoming 2010 seasons, the focus on the long-term damage of concussions is greater than ever. One industrial designer thinks he’s found a solution: a better, safer helmet.Read the rest at Wired.com