Surviving child sexual abuse in women\u27s artistic gymnastics: ‘It\u27s beautiful, because had I stayed in the past, I wouldn’t have evolved as a person’

The USA Gymnastics sex abuse scandal raised global awareness about child sexual abuse (CSA) in women\u27s artistic gymnastics. The ensuing media coverage also centre-staged victims’ survivorship stories, a process that for many moved from dissociating, recognising and disclosing CSA to feeling comfort when connecting with survivors and accepting CSA as part of their life history. However, scholarship on what survivorship from CSA in sport entails, and importantly, what it means to athletes, is limited. In this article, we frame the survival of CSA using Arthur Frank’s socio-narratological conceptualisation of people being able to process the devastating consequences of a life-threatening and/or a life-altering event, and present the survivorship stories of two former gymnasts, Maria and Lucia (pseudonyms). For these two women, survivorship was facilitated by hearing others’ stories of sexual abuse, purposefully facing their CSA experiences and connecting with one another later in life to raise awareness about sexual abuse in sport. Thus, in addition to presenting Maria and Lucia\u27s stories for the purpose of providing CSA victims with a survivorship narrative, we outline and reflect on the role hearing and telling stories have in CSA survivorship

Unraveling Gender and Non-Accidental Violence in Women’s Gymnastics Research: A Critical Interpretive Synthesis

Non-accidental violence in women’s gymnastics has gained significant attention, and is a sport where gender is clearly differentiated. Despite the volume of gymnastics research on these themes it seemingly had little impact in preventing harm. We conducted a critical interpretative synthesis of 45 articles to reexamine the literature for understanding of, and connections between, gender and violence. We found that where gender viewed as a structure was explicit, violence was not. Conversely where violence was explicit, gender was implicit and viewed in individualist terms. Only one article explicitly connected gender and violence recognizing violence as a gendered outcome. We encourage researchers to incorporate gender as a structure in analytical inquiries and identify the wider contexts and associated mechanisms through which gender intersects with violence. Doing so can help to develop prevention measures that align with international definitions of gender-based violence

The anatomy of body shaming in sports coaching

Stories of body shaming in sports coaching are becoming widespread, and can intentionally, unintentionally, or inadvertently be used in different sports coaching practices. These practices do not necessarily intend to harm athletes. The aim of this paper is to explore body critical and body sensitive sport coaching practices that have the potential to be shaming, or as we call it in the title, the ‘anatomy’ of body shaming. The study used photo elicitation interviews including vignettes for data generation with 12 coaches from nine different sports. The results demonstrate that body criticality and body sensitivity function in different subtle ways and that coaches were well-aware of the potentially damaging influence that they can have on athletes. The article concludes with recommendations for further research exploring how athletes experience the most subtle and invisible ways of body critical and body sensitive practices, and how they internalize this well-intended but still potentially shaming advice

Injury-Free Children and Adolescents: Towards Better Practice in Swedish Football (FIT project)

This interdisciplinary research project will produce evidence-based recommendations on how injuries in Swedish youth football (soccer) can be prevented. Fewer injuries will positively impact athlete health, performance and career longevity and have the potential to promote life-long physical activity and wellbeing. Injury pattern research demonstrates that injuries are a significant problem in (Swedish) youth sport. Football has a higher traumatic and overuse injury rate than many contact/collision sports (e.g., field hockey, basketball). In research on youth football, the incidence of overuse training injuries was measured as high as 15.4 injuries per 1000 training hours, and the incidence of traumatic and overuse match injuries was 47.5 injuries per 1000 match hours. The injury frequency is alarming and applies to the 54% of children aged 7-14 and the 39% of youths aged 15-19 years who participate in Swedish organised sports. A large body of research identifies injury risk factors and preventative strategies; however, as the recent IOC consensus statement on youth athletic development points out, the existing, mostly bio-medical knowledge does not provide effective evidence-based injury prevention strategies. To address this deficit, interdisciplinary and context-driven knowledge on injury development in youth sport is needed. The proposed project will produce scientific evidence through four consecutive studies: a) Questionnaire to register the types, frequency and management of injuries; b) Laboratory testing of biomechanical, clinical and training-specific parameters to establish individual physical and sport-specific dispositions; c) Observation of sporting contexts to understand sporting cultures, coaching methods and coach-athlete relationships; and d) Interviews with coaches and players to recognize knowledge that shapes coaching and training. The sample of youth players will be recruited from Sweden’s most popular and injury-prone sport: football. Each of the four studies will conduct its own data production and analyses, and a collective analysis will produce integrated evidence. Concrete recommendations for best sporting practice will be developed, which will serve sporting federations, sport education institutions, coaches, sport support staff and players

Trampoline gymnasts’ body-self narratives of the leotard:a seamless fit?

Critical gymnastics literature suggests that a specific and narrowly defined body aesthetic is, in part, to blame for a range of serious health and well-being issues observed amongst female gymnasts. The leotard, a vital component of this ideal body aesthetic, has received relatively little scholarly attention which we suggest reflects a wider lack of focused attention towards gymnasts’ subjective or phenomenological experiences of their bodies. In this chapter we draw from an 18-month ethnographic study of British trampoline gymnasts’ bodily experiences told through their body narratives. We draw upon Frank’s (2013) body typology to explore the moments of body-self construction, unity, and disruption as the trampoline gymnasts respond to action problems in various social contexts. We illuminate moments of body-self disruption as gymnasts experience puberty and body dissatisfaction highlighting the role of the leotard in these experiences. We close by suggesting that the focus on gymnastic body problems requires more self-conscious and reflexive solutions and encourage researchers and practitioners to enable gymnasts to tell stories in an ethical endeavour to find more liveable relations with their bodies

‘One door closes, a next door opens up somewhere’: The learning of one Olympic synchronised swimmer

Although training in sport is necessary to reach Olympic status, a conditioned body is not the only outcome. Athletes also learn how to be Olympians. This learning involves taking on certain ways of acting, thinking and valuing. Such learning has implications beyond competition, as athletes eventually retire from elite sport and devote their time to other activities. This paper examines processes of learning and transition using the case of Amelia, a former Olympic synchronised swimmer. Through two in-depth interviews, empirical material was generated which focused on the learning that took place during this athlete’s career and after, during her transition to paid employment. A cultural view of learning was used as the theoretical frame to understand the athlete’s experiences. Our reading suggests that the athlete learned in various ways to be productive. Some of these ways of being were useful after retirement; others were less compatible. In fact, Amelia used a two-year period after retirement to reconstruct herself. Key to her eventual successful transition was to distance herself from the sport and to critically reflect upon her sporting experiences. We thus recommend that those involved with high-performance athletes foster a more balanced perspective that acknowledges and promotes ways of being beyond athletic involvement

Differential cross section measurements for the production of a W boson in association with jets in proton–proton collisions at √s = 7 TeV

Measurements are reported of differential cross sections for the production of a W boson, which decays into a muon and a neutrino, in association with jets, as a function of several variables, including the transverse momenta (pT) and pseudorapidities of the four leading jets, the scalar sum of jet transverse momenta (HT), and the difference in azimuthal angle between the directions of each jet and the muon. The data sample of pp collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV was collected with the CMS detector at the LHC and corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 5.0 fb[superscript −1]. The measured cross sections are compared to predictions from Monte Carlo generators, MadGraph + pythia and sherpa, and to next-to-leading-order calculations from BlackHat + sherpa. The differential cross sections are found to be in agreement with the predictions, apart from the pT distributions of the leading jets at high pT values, the distributions of the HT at high-HT and low jet multiplicity, and the distribution of the difference in azimuthal angle between the leading jet and the muon at low values.United States. Dept. of EnergyNational Science Foundation (U.S.)Alfred P. Sloan Foundatio

Optimasi Portofolio Resiko Menggunakan Model Markowitz MVO Dikaitkan dengan Keterbatasan Manusia dalam Memprediksi Masa Depan dalam Perspektif Al-Qur`an

Risk portfolio on modern finance has become increasingly technical, requiring the use of sophisticated mathematical tools in both research and practice. Since companies cannot insure themselves completely against risk, as human incompetence in predicting the future precisely that written in Al-Quran surah Luqman verse 34, they have to manage it to yield an optimal portfolio. The objective here is to minimize the variance among all portfolios, or alternatively, to maximize expected return among all portfolios that has at least a certain expected return. Furthermore, this study focuses on optimizing risk portfolio so called Markowitz MVO (Mean-Variance Optimization). Some theoretical frameworks for analysis are arithmetic mean, geometric mean, variance, covariance, linear programming, and quadratic programming. Moreover, finding a minimum variance portfolio produces a convex quadratic programming, that is minimizing the objective function ðð¥with constraintsð ð 𥠥 ðandð´ð¥ = ð. The outcome of this research is the solution of optimal risk portofolio in some investments that could be finished smoothly using MATLAB R2007b software together with its graphic analysis