Blog MOVED

Dear readers,
I have decided to move my blog to a more flexible platform. My new blog can now be reached on marcocardinale.com.

Power BI Dashboards and Athletics Results Seasonality

I am trying to build a PowerBI dashboard to look at the seasonality of best times from the Top List of the IAAF website.

The first example looks interesting. Hopefully I will have the time to finish this in the next few weeks. You can navigate it from the maps indicating the number of results in the top list by the nation of the athletes and check the seasonal distribution

4 years in the desert

It is amazing how time goes so fast. Today I celebrate my fourth anniversary living in the desert and working at Aspire Academy in Doha. It is as hot as I found it getting out of the airport (40 degrees C today!) when I arrived from a much colder London. While it seems like yesterday, four years have gone by quickly and a lot has happened professionally and personally. This blog article is a bit of a mix. A reflection on my work here but also on my life here with my family.

So what has happened in the last 4 years?

Quite a lot actually. I have seen four graduations of Aspire athletes with some of our graduates progressing their sporting careers to international stardom and some continuing a healthy lifestyle and  careers in education/army/business. I have worked with the rest of the coaching and sports science team to support the development of many young athletes over the last four years in Doha and abroad.

Getting ready for the Gymasiade 2013 in Brasilia with Coach Carlos Cavalheiro (now head coach of Brazil Athletics), Abubaker Hayder (who won Gold in that even and competed in Rio 2016 last summer) and training partner Adam Mousab (which we hope to see in London this summer)

It is great to see these young men grow in our facilities with the mentoring and support of teachers, parents, coaches and support staff to reach their potential on the international stage. I have written previously about our graduates in Rio Olympics. But it is not all about athletics in Aspire. We have had some great results with the squash programme, with our graduate Abdulla Al-Tamimi climbing the World Ranking in the seniors in the top 40 and reaching the first senior semifinal at the Pittsburgh Open in March this year and the younger boys have reached the podium in international competitions very often.

Table Tennis has also produced some good results with our young athletes Mohamed Abdulwahab and Nawaf Al-Malki and Abdulaziz Mohd winning medals in international competitions.

Finally, we have a new programme in Fencing, and the first few months with the new coaching team in place have been quite exciting.

My department has been providing relentless support to all the athletes in the programme and some senior athletes from national federations on a daily basis with training monitoring, testing, project-based support and many other activities required to make sure each individual athletes has the best chance to get better. Over the last four years, thousands of hours of services have been provided and  gigabytes of data have been analysed, turned into reports and into interventions. The team has also produced 36 articles on peer reviewed journals, which is an incredible accomplishment, considering that we are not an academic institution and all staff has limited time to produce research papers. For me, it is important to apply scientific principles to the activities we conduct and also communicate via peer review publications our work to share knowledge and engage with peer review. Two of my team members joined us and then moved on to more senior opportunities and are doing very well in their new roles. Andrew Murray as a Director of Performance and Sports Science at the University of Oregon and and Thomas Jones as a senior lecturer in Northumbria University have contributed enormously to the activities and culture of the sports physiology unit in Aspire and are now making an impact in sport and research in other cultures/environments. Seeing former staff move to bigger responsibilities and succeed always makes me proud as I always try to support and develop keen and motivated individuals. New staff will join us soon and I am already looking forward to next season for some exciting new projects and activities to support Aspire's mission to become the World reference.

I have been fortunate to work with colleagues in other departments to organise 3 conferences. Two youth athletics coaching conferences (the last one is available here) and the #trainingload2016 conference (all talks available here and special issue of International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance here) which will be for sure a major milestone in this scientific field for years to come. I was also involved in a big project during the Handball World Championships in Qatar 2015, developing a new analytical solution with Prozone for Handball and conducting a comprehensive study on the demands of elite men's handball with the scientific and medical commission of the World Championships. This was thanks to the vision of the organising committee, Aspetar hospital, and a fellow former handball player (albeit more successful than me with his Olympic Gold medal) Dr. Nebojsa Popovic, showing how great it is to work in a large campus (Aspire Zone) with amazing expertise and passion for learning and developing new knowledge.

Tracking camera ready before game 1 of Qatar 2015.

On a personal front it has been quite exciting too. I have taken on few new sports and I am enjoying a more active lifestyle since moving here.

I have managed to visit some pretty cool places here in Doha and in nearby countries and taken some nice pictures.

So, it's been a great 4 years after all.

2016 is gone, looking forward to a great 2017

I realised I have not written much on the blog for ages now and this is a good time to analyse the year just finished as well as looking a bit into 2017.

First of all, thanks to the 13,134 users who read the blog. It feels like a small town was curious about my writing and I want to thank everyone for the more than 72,000 page views.

Despite the fact that I am not terribly active on the Blog, "old" articles still seem to be of interest and hopefully in 2017 I will be able to write more.

This has been an incredibly positive year (oh well, a part from my knee injury). At work many things happened which were incredibly rewarding.

In February 2016, we held the first scientific conference dedicated to Training Load monitoring in Aspire. The conference was a big success also echoed by the #trainingload2016 and the twitter trending. All the talks are now available for free online and in the first few months of 2017 a special issue of the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance will be made available online (again for free) with all the papers and reviews from the conference.

Dr. Marco Cardinale (QAT) - Monitoring Athlete Training Loads - The Hows and Whys from Aspire Academy on Vimeo.

Training activities and at Aspire were in full swing and summer camps saw few of our young athletes get medals in Regional and Continental championships as well as qualifications to World Juniors in many sports.

In July our student/athlete Mohamed Ibrahim Moaaz coached by Ivica Jakeljic became World Junior Champion throwing his discus 63.63 meters. An incredible result considering his young age and a testament to the excellent coaching and support received at Aspire Academy since he joined.

In August, we had four former students qualified in Rio de Janeiro for the 2016 Olympics and they all did very well with Mutaz Barshim coming back to Qatar with an historical silver medal.

These were incredible results for a small country like Qatar and something to be really proud of. furthermore, these are very young athletes with great potential for the "home" World Championships in Doha 2019. For the first time in years I was away from the Olympic environment and I have to say I missed it, but it was great to support Qatar and also see how well my former colleagues did with Team GB and Team Italia.

The Olympics always give us incredible stories of athletes, coaches and support staff capable of doing amazing things. However, sadly, they also remind us of the dark side of sport with many doping stories, in particular the McLaren reports (1 and 2) from WADA.

In October I was invited to speak at the 50th anniversary of the Italian School of Sport at the Olympic Committee and it was great to see again so many familiar faces, but also remember former colleagues like the late Marcello Faina and my mentor Carmelo Bosco. I left Italy many years ago to pursue my career in sports science, and it is always special to be able to come back and hopefully inspire the younger generation of Italian Sports Scientists.

Thanks to work within my unit and collaborative efforts with other scientists, this has been a productive year from a scientific standpoint. First we published this work on Citrulline Malate conducted before the London 2012 games. Then this paper on Ischaemic Preconditioning, part of a series of studies conducted with colleagues in UCL before I left for Qatar. Work conducted in the lead up to London 2012 with Boxing and in the lead up to Sochi 2014 with Skeleton was also published. The first of the papers related to the Handball study conducted during a World Championship in Qatar was also published as well as the mini review from the talk I gave at the Training Load conference. In the last few weeks, we also received acceptance for a study conducted understanding practices and attitudes towards recovery in adolescent athletes in Asian and UK cohorts, and this work from Dr Pujari's PhD in Aberdeen on a novel vibration exercise device. Few papers are still under review or just accepted but not available online yet, so overall it has been a very productive year.

2017 looks already interesting. We have athletes competing in international competitions and trying to qualify for World Youth and Junior events in various sports. Some interesting scientific efforts are continued to understand more how to support better young athletes and I am due to speak to a super interesting conference on young athletes in Montreaux in September 2017. If you want to know more about this event just go on http://yaf2017.org, it is going to be a very interesting conference and I am looking forward to learn from many international colleagues as well as give my views.

So, au revoir 2016 and welcome 2017.

Olympic Results Visualization

In recent months I have been using Microsoft Power BI to develop dashboards to present data in graphical format and analyse data gathered during the day to day activities in my workplace. This product is absolutely amazing (also because it is free!) and it has really facilitated the way I can put together dynamic reports and share data with my staff as well as other colleagues and coaches.

If you want to know more about Power BI you can go to this weblink and also you can have a look at the demo video to understand the capabilities.

I am following the Olympics from a distance and I am very interested in the results just like anybody involved in Olympic Sports. Most of all, I like to track the medal table and understand more about who is winning what medal and how countries are doing in various sports. Considering the fact that there are many data repositories on the internet to have such information, I have developed a Power BI dashboard which collects live data and can visualise them in a simple way. I would like to share this dashboard with the readers and will continue to develop it in order to conduct a detailed analysis of the medal table once the Olympics are over.

The dashboard is interactive and you can click and expand graphs as well as change the visualisations. I hope you will like it.

Here is the dashboard:



Alternatively, if you cannot access it via this blog, just click on THIS link and you should be able to view it.