Word: coachful
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Journeymen coaches have long been part of the sporting narrative, with European soccer managers flitting between rival nations and Eastern Europeans spanning the world to run gymnastics camps. But China has only recently started offering coaches for export. For decades, the People's Republic's state-run sports system was closed, with little chance of either athlete or coach migrating abroad. (Rare defections, like that of a female tennis player in the early 1980s to the U.S., only strengthened Chinese resolve not to let others out the door.) Nor, frankly, would most countries at that time have wanted a Chinese...
Some Chinese coaches were lured abroad by lucrative contracts that offered far higher salaries than what they might make as a cog in their homeland's state sports system. Others, though, were motivated by different concerns. James Li, who coaches American runner Lagat, decided to stay abroad in the U.S. in 1989 largely because of the Tiananmen crackdown on pro-democracy protestors. He has trained Lagat for the past 12 years and last year was named coach of the year by the American track and field authority...
...Foreign coaches haven't fared as well in China. The well-regarded German coach of China's canoeing and kayaking team was sacked less than two months before the Olympics were to begin. In July, the Serbian manager of China's Olympic men's soccer squad was also axed. And last spring, the French coach of the women's national soccer team was let go in a particularly frosty manner - her dismissal came by email. All three foreigners were replaced by local counterparts. The Chinese sports system, it turns out, prefers "Made in China...
...which helped the club double its annual revenues to $180 million. The problem, of course, is that building a new stadium takes massive capital investment, and Arsenal recently admitted that the annual interest payment on its new stadium is $48 million - meaning the club's competitiveness may hinge on coach Arsene Wenger's genius for buying unproven but talented youngsters and turning them into world-class players who can be sold for a huge profit after a few years' service...
Lightfoot, who originally wanted to coach college basketball and is himself an avid athlete, began studying activity levels as a way to try to figure out why, given all we know about the overwhelming health benefits of physical activity, so many people still choose not to exercise. A lecture at Johns Hopkins University about genetics and lung disease served as Lightfoot's eureka moment, and he became interested in studying genes as our prime mover. For the new study, Lightfoot and his team bred two strains of mice - active and inactive. Researchers then crossbred two generations of the active...