“None of the Kids are Allowed to Eat Junk at the Pool": Discourses of "Optimal Nutrition" in Competitive Youth Swimming and the Impact on Athlete Welfare

In modern competitive sport, athletic success is posited as a result of more than simply being physically fit (Johns and Johns, 2000; Romana, 2010). Rather, understandings of the ‘best’ way to physically prepare as an athlete, underpinned by bio-scientific discourses of performance that emphasize rationalistic concepts of productivity, efficiency and conformity, have come to attribute certain meanings to athletes’ preparation, including that they must comply with strict training regimes and controlled lifestyles to achieve success (Lang, 2010; Potrac et al., 2000). Within this, ensuring ‘appropriate’ nutritional intake is considered crucial. However, knowledge of coaches’ discourses in relation to athlete development and how they enact this in their practice is under-researched (Jones, Glintmeyer and McKenzie, 2005), particularly in relation to coaches’ work with child athletes and coaches’ understandings and enacting of discourses of athlete nutrition. This paper aims to shed light on the discourses coaches draw on in relation to athlete nutrition and how they enact these in their practice to inform and enhance youth coaching practice. It reports the findings from an ethnographic study into coaches’ understandings of good practice when working with competitive youth swimmers. The study comprised an ethnography of three competitive youth swimming clubs at different levels of the performance spectrum. One key finding was that coaches considered it good practice to educate youth athletes about what they referred to as ‘good’ or ‘optimal’ nutrition and consequently, particularly among coaches at the elite level, they enforced strict dietary rules to achieve this. The consequences of such practices are discussed in relation to the health and wellbeing of (child) athletes

Touchy Subject: A Foucauldian Analysis of Coaches’ Perceptions of Adult-Child Touch in Youth Swimming

It has been suggested that child safety discourses are creating an environment in which safety from abuse defines every act of adult-child touch as suspicious, resulting in adults who work with children being positioned as ‘risky’ and child-related settings becoming no-touch zones. Research on the impact of these discourses on coaches is limited and there have been few attempts to theorize coaches’ behaviors to better understand how child safety concerns impact on their practice. Focusing on coaches’ avoidance of child touch, this paper uses a Foucauldian perspective to explore coaches’ embodied disciplinary and emancipatory responses to child protection discourses in competitive youth swimming. It also discusses the implications of coaches’ apprehension about child touch on swimming practice and young athletes.</jats:p

The Orbital Period of the Ultraluminous X-ray Source in M82

The ultraluminous x-ray source (ULX) in the galaxy M82 has been identified as a possible intermediate-mass black hole. We have found that the x-ray flux from M82 is modulated with a peak-to-peak amplitude corresponding to an isotropic luminosity of 2.4x10^40 erg/s in M82 and a period of 62.0 +/- 2.5 days, which we interpret as the orbital period of the ULX binary. This orbital period implies that the mass-donor star must be a giant or supergiant. Large mass-transfer rates, sufficient to fuel the ULX, are expected for a giant-phase mass donor in an x-ray binary. The giant phase has a short lifetime, indicating that we see the ULX in M82 in a brief and unusual period of its evolution.Comment: 3 pages, appeared in Scienc

Telling (Dangerous) Stories: A Narrative Account of a Youth Coach's Experience of an Unfounded Allegation of Child Abuse

This paper (re)tells the story of a sports coach who was accused of emotional abuse of a child athlete and, following an investigation by his club, cleared of the allegation. Accounts of such allegations are rare and no research to date has explored coaches’ lived experiences of this. Such stories are ‘dangerous’ and remain largely unrecognised and undebated as they represent a challenge to the meta-narrative of child protection. Using the stance of a ‘storyteller’, the coach-participant’s story is presented as a monologue crafted using his words and embellished with literary techniques. The story is purposefully largely left open for interpretation in an attempt to encourage readers to engage cognitively and emotionally with it. Telling such a ‘dangerous’ story aims to add to the narrative repertoires available to those working in this field and expand understandings of child protection in sport.</p

A research methodology study to map the process of initiating and operating a randomised controlled trial of podoconiosis treatment in Northern Ethiopia

No description supplie

A touchy subject? The (unintended) consequences of child protection regulations on youth swimming coaches

This chapter discusses one of the key findings from a study into good practice in competitive youth swimming – how child protection and safeguarding regulations are resulting in coaches avoiding all forms of child touch in order to protect themselves from false allegations of abuse and/or poor practice. It begins by offering an overview of the development of child protection regulations in British sport, and in swimming in particular, before highlighting the impact that child safety discourses have had on adult-child settings, including sports coaching. An outline of the methods used in the study is then presented, followed by a discussion of the key themes. To conclude, the central messages for policymakers and sports organisations are presented

Anomaly Cancellation and Smooth Non-Kahler Solutions in Heterotic String Theory

We show that six-dimensional backgrounds that are T^2 bundle over a Calabi-Yau two-fold base are consistent smooth solutions of heterotic flux compactifications. We emphasize the importance of the anomaly cancellation condition which can only be satisfied if the base is K3 while a T^4 base is excluded. The conditions imposed by anomaly cancellation for the T^2 bundle structure, the dilaton field, and the holomorphic stable bundles are analyzed and the solutions determined. Applying duality, we check the consistency of the anomaly cancellation constraints with those for flux backgrounds of M-theory on eight-manifolds.Comment: 30 pages, harvmac; v2: typos corrected and minor clarifications adde

Reports of child protection and safeguarding concerns in sport and leisure settings: an analysis of English Local Authority data between 2010 and 2015

The abuse of children in sport has received considerable attention in recent years not least in the UK, where high-profile disclosures of abuse by former sports professionals has led to several independent inquiries and reviews. Subsequent public and media interest has focused on the potential scale of child abuse in sport. This scrutiny has highlighted how little data there are in this area, in a sector that thrives on statistics. This paper analyses official reports of child abuse in sport and leisure settings received by local authorities (LAs) in England during a five-year period (2010-15) across a range of factors. Findings show that English LAs have varying capacity to provide data on sport/leisure contexts; receive substantively different volumes of reports of child abuse in sport/leisure; and record reports of sexual abuse in sport at higher levels than other forms of abuse. These data suggest that abuse in English sport is significantly underreported but that reports per annum increased over the period