Archives de catégorie : Sport

THE ATHLETE CODE de Joe Lemire

A debut nonfiction by a Sports Business Journal writer Joe Lemire, THE ATHLETE CODE explores the fast-changing world of tech- and data-driven athlete development and injury prevention, using vivid narrative and experiential journalism to chronicle humanity’s progress in these areas. For fans of The Sports Gene and Born To Run.

THE ATHLETE CODE:
Biohacking the Limits of Human Performance
by Joe Lemire
St. Martin’s Press, Spring 2028
(via the David Black Agency)

From our Apple Watches to our Oura Rings, wearable tech is everywhere. But where is performance technology going? And with its help, how far can we push the human body?

THE ATHLETE CODE by Joe Lemire will explore these questions while taking readers on an enlightening journey of data and devices, breakthroughs and revelations, vivid anecdotes and memorable characters—and even his own admirable athletic efforts.

Athletes, coaches, and trainers have always tried to turn scientific breakthrough into on-the-field advantage. But historically that has happened by way of more effective equipment, better nutrition, and data that outsmarts conventional wisdom. Now, the fertile ground for a tech- and data-driven edge is in player development and injury prevention. And the sports tech industry is on the precipice of realizing the Holy Grail potential of two goals that long seemed mutually exclusive: performance and durability.

We are witnessing a golden era of sports performance, as new technologies are allowing athletes to reach unprecedented heights. These devices monitor, analyze and predict athlete form and performance in increasingly more precise and less invasive ways—and as a result, they help their subjects push the boundaries of what humans can achieve.

THE ATHLETE CODE will chronicle humanity’s progress in these areas, including:

• The data-driven development of the fittest man in world history.
• The implementation of the first real-time injury detection system capable of identifying muscle, ligament or tendon tears minutes before they happen.
• Insole sensors that can detect asymmetrical movement and advanced motion-capture analysis, both of which have been used by some of the world’s fastest sprinters.
• Bluetooth-connected EEG caps that enable athletes to play video games with their mind to train concentration and decision-making.
• Biomechanical analysis that helped turn a walk-on college baseball player into an ACC Pitcher of the Year, the No. 7 overall MLB draft pick, and a future ace.

Lemire will bring this reporting to life with absorbing stories (the remarkable tale of a professional baseball team’s injury-free season), dozens of exclusive interviews (including with Olympic gold medalists, world-renowned runners, and baseball Hall-of-Famers), and Plimptonian experiential journalism (he has used augmented reality glasses while running and AR goggles while swimming, exercised while wearing as many as four different sensors, and trained with a pocket-sized radar and a smartphone-based biomechanical analysis to raise his fastball to 82 mph.).

There is a strong history of readers devouring books about the intersection of sport and science, including David Epstein’s The Sports Gene and Range, James Nestor’s Breath, Jeff Passan’s The Arm, and Alex Hutchinson’s Endure. THE ATHLETE CODE will attract readers of those books; it will also be required reading for coaches and trainers across sports and levels of competition, as well as for weekend warrior athletes across the country.

Joe Lemire is a reporter for Sports Business Journal, and the country’s only devoted sports technology writer. He began his career with Sports Illustrated as an entry-level reporter, quickly ascending the ranks to become the youngest writer on the magazine’s masthead. He has contributed to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and USA Today, and has appeared regularly on the MLB Network. He specializes in stories that distill complicated concepts into accessible ideas and blend objective research with engaging anecdotes for a thorough and compelling exploration of a topic.

BOUNCE de William Milberg

An engaging, authoritative and accessible study of globalization—in the vein of A History of the World in 6 Glasses—told through the fascinating histories of six different balls used in sports.

BOUNCE: The Story of Globalization
by William Milberg
The New Press, late 2026/early2027
(via The Gernert Company)

Globalization is the central economic issue of our time: it’s tied to everything we buy; impacts elections; leads to the wholesale collapse (or revitalization) of a town, or a city, or a region, with jobs going someplace else, coming in, or never coming back. It’s a primary reason behind the Trump administration’s tariffs, which are causing major economic upheaval. Yet for all its significance, globalization is still widely misunderstood. It’s too complex, too diffuse, with too many moving parts – its design makes individuals feel powerless. In BOUNCE, a Professor of Economics examines the history of six sporting balls as a way to understand the story of globalization, how it has evolved, and how the decisions that society has made and is currently making, continue to shape it.

The golf ball, the baseball, the football, the soccer ball, the tennis ball and the basketball: each has a complex and fascinating history that parallels the evolution of globalization. Balls have been used in games for hundreds of years and each one tells us unique and vital things about this evolution: the golf ball uncovers the dynamics of the first wave of globalization, with colonial powers seeking rubber in the plantations of Africa, Asia and South America, and the importance of machine technology and innovation. The football shows how labor unions provided the “countervailing power” needed to stand up to growing industrial corporations, prompting steady growth in pay and economic security for the average worker. Milberg, Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research where he directs the Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies, slices each ball open, dives deep into its story, and spins a narrative revealing how each microhistory is inextricably linked to the greater economy.

Globalization has been a series of choices by individuals, corporations, governments, countries. Understanding the history of these game balls helps us to better understand the consequences of those choices and where we want the economy to go.

Professor Milberg’s research focuses on the history and philosophy of economics. He has written extensively on global value chains and their implications for economic development, jobs, finance and intellectual property.

William Milberg is Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research, where he also directs the Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies. His recent project at the Heilbroner Center is on the economic causes and consequences of the multinational retreat from liberal democracy. Milberg has worked as a consultant to the International Labour Organization and the World Bank and lectured at the World Trade Organization. Author of three academic books, Milberg served as Dean of the New School for Social Research from 2013-2023. He lives in Westchester, NY with his wife, his youngest daughter and his dog Lola.

THE BALANCE d’Aimee Boorman

From Paris Olympics star and legendary gymnast Simone Biles’s longtime coach, an insider’s look at the making of a champion.

THE BALANCE:
My Years Coaching Simone Biles
by Aimee Boorman
with Steve Cooper
foreword by Simone Biles
Abrams Press, Frankfurt 2024

THE BALANCE is coach Aimee Boorman’s inside account of the growth of a transcendent athlete and the tumultuous events—from the dictatorial coaching of Martha Karolyi to the sexual abuse by Larry Nassar—that upended the lives of many girls, including Biles.

Simone Biles is one of the greatest athletes of all time. She’s won six all-around world championships and eleven Olympic medals (seven gold). Five gymnastics moves are named after her, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom (the youngest recipient ever), and at an age when most elite gymnasts have retired, Biles is not just still competing—she’s dominating. She soared in Paris last summer, bringing home more Olympic gold. She’s having so much fun that LA 2028 is not out of the question.

But when coach Aimee Borman met her at a gym in Texas, Simone was just a seven-year-old kid. An exceptionally athletically gifted one, to be sure, but not yet great. That would take time, care, love, and balance.

Boorman helped shape Biles, both pushing her and holding her back, protecting both her mental and physical health. “She’s like a second mom to me,” writes Biles, and Boorman was the National Team coach in 2016, where the US—and Biles—took home all-around gold.

THE BALANCE combines unprecedented insider perspective on a legend, newsworthy details on gymnastics history, and compelling lessons on coaching, leadership, and development.

Aimee Boorman, a Chicago native, is a decorated and globally respected gymnastics coach, whose career included 12 years coaching the sport’s all-time greatest, Simone Biles. Boorman was named USA Gymnastics Coach of the Year four times (2013–2016) and US Olympic Committee Coach of the Year (2016). She was head coach of the US Women’s Gymnastics Team at the Rio Olympic Games and coached for the Dutch Gymnastics Federation at the European Championship, the Tokyo Olympic Games, and the World Artistic Gymnastics Championships in Japan in 2021. Boorman holds a bachelor of science in management and a master of sport from USA Gymnastics, and is actively representing the United States as a FIG Brevet judge. She is also a cofounder of Global Impact Gymnastics Alliance. She has three sons—Jamie, Chris, and Ben—with her husband, James Boorman, whom she has been married to for 25 years.

Steve Cooper is a journalist with over two decades of writing, reporting, and editing experience, covering marriage, business, technology, entrepreneurship, and gymnastics, which he has also covered as a photographer. He is the coauthor of Life is Short, Don’t Wait to Dance with former UCLA Gymnastics head coach Valerie Kondos Field, and is COO of GymCastic, the largest gymnastics podcast in the world.

THIS IS NOT A BOOK ABOUT EVEREST de Melissa Arnot Reid

A searching, uplifting memoir by the celebrated, groundbreaking climber: a journey of overcoming where the mountain’s highest peaks can only be reached by traversing the dark crevasses of the soul.

THIS IS NOT A BOOK ABOUT EVEREST
by Melissa Arnot Reid
Sugar23, April 2025

At twenty-seven, when Melissa Arnot Reid accepted a tank of oxygen just short of the summit of Mt Everest, she felt ravaged by defeat. Driven by a relentless, lifelong quest to prove to herself, her family, and the world that she was enough, she had set herself an incredible goal to be become the first American woman to summit Everest without oxygen, in the manner of history’s greatest alpinists. The failure battered her spirit and left her struggling to keep her tenuous grip on hope.

In the candid and adventurous spirit of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, THIS IS NOT A BOOK ABOUT EVEREST is a story of a life in which the most dangerous mountain faces became a refuge until suddenly Ithey, too, no longer seemed safe. From a childhood marked by conflict, betrayal, and predation, Reid propelled herself to the top of the mountain climbing world, summiting and guiding on the world’s most challenging peaks, and establishing herself as woman unafraid to throw elbows in a milieu dominated by men. And yet for every summit she attained, her valleys of inner turmoil–over her estrangement with the family she believed she’d destroyed as a child; over relationships that cycled through deception and infidelity grew deeper and more self-destructive. Eventually, she could not keep these worlds from colliding, especially after a series of tragedies at dangerous elevations took the lives of her mentors and friends. Forced at last to face herself, Reid made her most perilous climb vet -toward the uncertain promise of forgiveness and self-acceptance

A beautiful, aching memoir of a journey with life-and-death stakes on the mountain and off, THIS IS NOT A BOOK ABOUT EVEREST bares the soul of one of the world greatest climbers, offering views on the awesome, rarified heights visible only at thin-air altitudes and the dark depths home to demons at once personal to Reid and yet familiar to anyone who has struggle to love themselves.

Melissa Arnot Reid is the first American woman to summit Everest without supplemental oxygen. It was her sixth summit of the highest ground on earth, cementing her place in mountaineering history. In doing so, she became a media star, in demand from many publications, television shows, and organizations looking for inspirational speakers.

OUTOFSHAPEWORTHLESSLOSER de Gracie Gold

In this explosive tell-all memoir, Gracie Gold, Olympic medalist, offers an unprecedented look inside the pressure-packed world of figure skating and reveals her battle to survive mental illness, eating disorders, and crippling perfectionism.

OUTOFSHAPEWORTHLESSLOSER
A Memoir of Figure Skating, F*cking Up, and Figuring It Out
by Gracie Gold
Crown, February 2024

When Gracie Gold stepped onto center stage (or ice, rather) as America’s sweetheart at the 2014 Sochi Olympics, she instantly became the face of America’s most beloved winter sport. Beautiful, blonde, Midwestern, and media-trained, she was suddenly being written up everywhere from The New Yorker to Teen Vogue to People and baking cookies with Taylor Swift.

But little did the public know what Gracie was facing when the cameras were off. In 2017, she entered treatment for what was publicly announced as eating disorder and anxiety treatment, but what was, in reality, suicidal ideation. While Gracie’s public star was rising, her private life was falling apart: Cracks within her family were widening, her bulimia was getting worse, and she became a survivor of sexual assault. The pressure of training for years with demanding coaches and growing up in a household that accepted nothing less than gold had finally taken its toll. As Gracie entered treatment, she was asked to cite only her eating disorder and anxiety in the announcement: suicidal ideation wasn’t “palatable.”

In OUTOFSHAPEWORTHLESSLOSER, Gracie shares the less “palatable” parts of her life, revealing exclusive, and harrowing, details about her struggles: the battles with her family, her coaches, the powers-that-be at her federation, and the voice in her head that she calls « outofshapeworthlessloser. » Gracie’s memoir is not only a forceful reckoning from a world-class athlete, but also an intimate account of surviving as a young woman in a society that rewards appearances more than anything and demands perfection at all costs.

Gracie Gold is a two-time U.S. figure-skating champion and an Olympic bronze medalist. Gold is the first and only American woman to win an NHK Trophy title and holds the record for the highest short-program score ever recorded by an American woman. Her writing has been published in The Cut. She lives in Wilmington, Delaware, and trains in suburban Philadelphia.