Pod Insights StarTalk Podcast #ICYMI – Soccer: The Art of Goalkeeping, with Hope Solo About this episode GOOOAAALLL! Gary O’Reilly and Chuck Nice look at the science behind the most underrated position in the world’s most popular sport. With Neil Tyson, 2-time Olympic gold medal goalkeeper Hope Solo, athletic trainer Christine Friel, and astrophysicist Charles Liu.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Gary O'Reilly? I'm Gary O'Reilly.
0:02 Chuck Nice? And I'm Chuck Nice.
0:03 Gary O'Reilly? And this is Playing with Science.
0:08 Gary O'Reilly? I'm Gary O'Reilly.
0:09 Chuck Nice? I'm Chuck Nice.
0:10 Gary O'Reilly? And this is Playing with Science. Today, we gaze into the world's most popular sport and find out what it is like to play in the least popular position on the field: goalkeeper.
0:22 Chuck Nice? Oh, yeah. So if you've ever wondered what it takes to face down a penalty kick or dive headfirst into a flurry of flying cleats, well, then you're in the right place.
0:32 Gary O'Reilly? Because two-time Olympic champion and World Cup winner Hope Solo sat down with Neil deGrasse Tyson to discuss just what it takes to become one of the best ever.
0:41 Chuck Nice? And laying bare the physics behind the plays is none other than our very own Charles Chuck Liu. And I know you played football for quite some time.
0:51 Gary O'Reilly? Yes.
0:51 Chuck Nice? And professionally, if you guys are unaware, but Gary was a professional footballer. And who'd you play for?
0:56 Gary O'Reilly? I had the honour to play for my boyhood club Tottenham Hotspur. Then I went to Brighton, then Crystal Palace, back to Brighton. I had 14 years.
1:04 Chuck Nice? Wow, man.
1:04 Gary O'Reilly? Of professional soccer.
1:06 Chuck Nice? And you were a centre-back, right?
1:08 Gary O'Reilly? I played all across the defensive line: left-back, centre-back, right-back. Wherever the coach says, "Gary, do you want to play there today?" "Yes, please, sir. I'm in there." Now, Chuck, the importance of goalkeeping is vital. It is one of the positions where you just don't really consider it until your goalkeeper picks the ball out of the net, and then all hell breaks loose, and you hate that goalkeeper.
1:29 Chuck Nice? Absolutely, yeah. One of the most underappreciated positions in all of sports is the goalkeeper. And today, we're going to be keying on Hope Solo, who is one of the greatest goalkeepers, period, but of course, is the goalkeeper for the Olympic women's team. And we've got a great clip of her right now, just showing one of her more amazing saves. So why don't we take a listen and look?
1:53 Gary O'Reilly? What you find here Chuck is when this builds up, Hope's gonna be starting to position. But all of this goes out of the window because it takes a deflection off of her own player. She has to change direction, cut back 180 degrees across the goal. But that's not the real, real art of this save. What happens here is the striker follows in just in case it spins back out. So Hope now puts her face where the boot is.
2:20 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
2:21 Gary O'Reilly? And that is what it takes. That is bravery that you don't think is happening.
2:27 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
2:27 Gary O'Reilly? Because this thing happens so quickly, she's got no time, she has to calculate. I have got to get across there, that's agility, that's foot speed and bravery. And you know why Hope Solo comes with world's number one.
2:40 Chuck Nice? Right.
2:40 Gary O'Reilly? Attached to her name.
2:41 Chuck Nice? Yeah, because let me tell you personally, my loyalties for everything end where I gotta take one in the face. Like that's where it stops right there. It's just like, not the face, please, this is the money maker. So.
2:52 Gary O'Reilly? See, this is the thing about goalkeeping. The mindset is at some point in my career, this face meets a boot. These teeth don't quite get to be the way they used to be. I'm gonna have scar tissue. This thing's gonna go wrong.
3:08 Chuck Nice? Right.
3:08 Gary O'Reilly? And I tell you what, there's something like how many million views on YouTube for that save?
3:13 Chuck Nice? Yeah, so there's 2 million views on YouTube for this particular save. And it's because it was so sensational, like you said. But a lot, a lot of times, the goalkeeper doesn't get that kind of accolades because, you know, they're just doing their job and a lot of times they're making it look easy. And our own Neil deGrasse Tyson sat down with Hope Solo and talked to her about this very thing.
3:38 Speaker 02 Goalkeeping isn't, it's not about, you know, acrobats. It's not about making a circus out of this position. It's about.
3:48 Speaker 02 Finding the quickest path to the ball. And I think for me, it's about efficiency. I want to be quick and agile, but I also want to have great angles. I want to find the quickest path to the ball to make my work less. And oftentimes, people don't give me praise because I'm not making this huge acrobatic save. And it drives me crazy because unless you're being a showbo and making these acrobatic saves, you're really not getting praised for it. And so people, my goalkeeper coaches, believe that what makes me great is my ability to make things look easy.
4:23 Chuck Nice? There you have it. Always underappreciated, the goalkeeper. And now you, as a man who has scored a game-winning goal, you've been on the opposite end of that equation.
4:32 Gary O'Reilly? Oh, yeah. I've been on a team where we got beat 9-0.
4:35 Chuck Nice? Oh, man.
4:36 Gary O'Reilly? We were lucky to get 0. However, what Hope says there, the trademark of any world-class player, they somehow have the ability to make it look easy. Now, I can tell you what it's like to play in front of a goalkeeper. Let's find out the science behind and within a goalkeeper and bring in Chuck Liu. Chuck?
4:54 Charles Liu? Hey.
4:55 Gary O'Reilly? Hey. Talk to me about the science in goalkeeping.
4:58 Charles Liu? I have to tell you, you were saying earlier that the goalkeeper is the most underappreciated important player on the field. I have to tell you that from a physicist's point of view, at the risk of waxing poetic, it is the coolest position. It is the place we want to look for the science. I mean, think about this. Well, first of all, the goal is 24 feet wide. So no human being is actually eight feet high, or 24 feet wide, in fact. What you have is a situation where the human being literally has to become bigger than she is in real life. So the ball is coming. She has to be able to expand her area. And you have to do that with physics. There's no other way you can achieve it, right? When she's jumping, for example, for a ball,
5:41 Charles Liu? she has to take into account into her head that she's launched into a suborbital trajectory. She's traveling in a parabola. So she can't just go straight at the ball because the ball will go over her. She actually has to aim above and then come down and hit it exactly the right space. That's just one tiny example of... The thing she has to do and the concept about being easy and making it look easy. That resonates with astronomers, with scientists of all kinds, right? Because when things are complicated, like those funny Rube Goldberg machines that you sometimes see. They're fun to watch, but in the end, they take up enormous amounts of energy and they achieve very little.
6:15 Chuck Nice? Right.
6:15 Charles Liu? The goal is to make the the theory, the practice, the machine, the activity as elegant and simple as possible. And that is exactly what scientists love to see and hear.
6:26 Chuck Nice? And so it's that same simplicity that actually brings about the under appreciation of the position. Because when they do it right, well, there's nothing to it. Whereas like you talked about the Rube Goldberg machine. You know, when there's a bunch of bells and whistles and all kinds of things going on, you're like, wow, look at that. But when it's done right, it is simplistic and elegant, like you said.
6:46 Gary O'Reilly? OK, we're going to go to another Hope Solo clip chat. This time it's the Algarve Cup from last year. The USA are playing France. It is a penalty kick situation and let's see if our girl comes out on top.
7:02 Gary O'Reilly? As you can, you can see definite penalty. The French player gets tugged down in the box. So at this stage at two nil, Hope Solo's got to keep this clean sheet and she does so. All right, it's a right footed penalty kick. Quite naturally, you would expect it to go to the goalkeeper's right. That from a penalty taker's perspective. Hope Solo, look, she's already moving before that ball is hit. She's already read the complete scenario and she knows what she needs to do to keep that go.
7:35 Chuck Nice? So with that in mind, we have our very own Neil deGrasse Tyson sitting down with Hope Solo. They're talking about what goalies face in terms of penalty kicks. Love to have you take a listen and comment on this.
7:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? How much of it is luck? And how much of it is you reading a person? Because that's now mental. That's not reflexes. That's not, I'm strong and can jump high. That is, I've out psyched that person.
8:03 Speaker 02 So, if you asked me this probably even six, seven, six years ago, five years ago, maybe, I would have said that I can read it. You know, I can read some of these players who step up. I know what way they're gonna go from their arm swing to their leg swing to how many steps they approach the ball with, to their hip shape. I can read it. But, within six years, players have gotten so good at disguising what way they're gonna go, that I'm not as confident in saying that anymore. I try to read it, and oftentimes I get it wrong.
8:36 Gary O'Reilly? So, Charles?
8:37 Charles Liu? Yes?
8:38 Gary O'Reilly? Talk to me about the science of a penalty save now, please.
8:41 Charles Liu? Okay. A typical soccer ball, football, being struck by a penalty kicker, leaves the foot at about 70 miles per hour.
8:49 Gary O'Reilly? Wow.
8:50 Charles Liu? By the time it reaches the keeper, it'll be somewhere between 50 and 60. But even so, it will strike with approximately 160 pounds of force, which, you know, is pretty substantial. Imagine, say, me standing on your head. Okay, that's how much force that the ball is coming at. The reaction time, if you do the math, turns out you have maybe a half a second, somewhere between four tenths and five tenths of a second, to actually stop the ball before it goes into the goal. Okay? So, the human nervous system needs about three tenths of a second actually to compel your body to move. So you only have maybe a tenth, two tenths of a second, in order to be able to be in
9:34 Charles Liu? front of the ball, somehow, with some part of your body. So that's the math that's going on. And you can train, you can train, but you can't think it.
9:42 Chuck Nice? Well, you know what, Chuck? What you just said there was that the instincts of the goalie has to be greater than the reaction. So you really have to read that penalty kicker. And you have to make a decision before contact is made with the ball. Otherwise, just from the sheer mathematical standpoint, it would be impossible to stop the ball.
10:05 Charles Liu? Hundred percent true. A great analogy for US fans who don't know the game of football as well is baseball. When a pitcher is pitching at ninety, hundred miles an hour, the batter has about that same amount of time to react before the ball goes past him in the strike zone. And so the batter often has to guess curve ball, or fastball, or slider before the ball even leaves the hand. So you have to watch the pitcher and see how they're holding the ball, see how their arm is going, all that kind of thing. It's a cat and mouse game. And it's not surprising that, say, we measure the effectiveness of a batter in baseball by batting average.
10:47 Charles Liu? The typical batting average for a Major League Baseball player is like two fifty, maybe two sixty. If you get three hundred, then you're going to the All-Star game. But the same thing happens in a soccer goal. The ability for somebody to stop, the percentage, say, the average, that a professional soccer goalie will stop a penalty kick is actually around two twenty, two thirty. So similar to that of a baseball hitter. And so if you're stopping two-thirds, if you're stopping one-third even, you know, if you're going three hundred or four hundred, you are a superstar.
11:24 Chuck Nice? Well Chuck, I'm just going to disagree with one thing you said there, and that is, I judge the effectiveness of my Major League Baseball batters by how many Lamborghinis they own.
11:34 Charles Liu? Oh, well, I don't know. I personally go for the hybrids myself.
11:39 Chuck Nice? Oh, right on.
11:41 Gary O'Reilly? Chuck, we need to talk. We need to realign. We will take a break. When we come back, we're going to sink our teeth into more science, this time, the engineering, the physics of a soccer ball. Do not go wrong.
12:02 Gary O'Reilly? Welcome back to Playing with Science with part two. We're discussing the science of goalkeeping in the game of soccer and featuring clips from an interview with Hope Solo, conducted by Neil deGrasse Tyson. The science of goalkeeping isn't just about mastering the angle, the psychology, and everything that's wrapped up around it. In fact, a lot of the science and engineering goes into the design of the ball itself, which can have such a profound effect on the game. Let's get back to Hope Solo's interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson and get her take on exactly that.
12:40 Speaker 02 Each new ball that they come out with is different and it's getting more and more difficult for a goalkeeper to read the flight of the ball.
12:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is someone sitting in a laboratory saying, "How can we mess with their soccer ball yet again?"
12:53 Speaker 02 Well, here's my theory. We like goals in America, right?
12:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, we like scoring.
12:59 Speaker 02 We like scoring.
12:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No matter the sport.
13:00 Speaker 02 We need a lot of entertainment in order to watch a sport. So how can we create more goals in the game of soccer? Perhaps by creating a ball that makes it more difficult for the goalkeeper. Possibly.
13:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you think it's a diabolical plot?
13:21 Speaker 02 A plot against goalkeepers.
13:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's a conspiracy. It's created a level of uncertainty in the trajectory of the ball while it's airborne. It makes your job harder.
13:34 Speaker 02 It does make my job harder, but I have to tell you, I like challenges. I really do. And there's something new to overcome. Whether it's, okay, let's learn how this Adidas ball flies for this World Cup. And now let's go back to the Nike ball and see how it spins off the turf versus off the grass. And it makes me just focus in not much more. And it challenges me and it keeps me focused and I actually do enjoy the challenge.
14:01 Chuck Nice? Wow. Conspiracy theory and science? And science. And the heart of a champion, that Hope Solo. Yes, she's just like, "I don't care what you throw at me. I'm gonna block it." That's basically where she's coming from. So talk about some of the things that she brought up when she was speaking about the ball.
14:18 Charles Liu? The ball is not a perfect ball, as you all know. They have different stitching patterns, different sizes and shapes, different constructions, different thicknesses of materials, and different amounts of inflation, which allow for everything that the ball is experiencing as it goes through the air to affect its path. It can wiggle, it can jiggle, it can slide, it can slough, it can hook. It's a really interesting thing that people have done. You may remember in the World Cup in Africa a few years back, the players were all complaining. It wasn't just the goalkeepers that were having a hard time with the ball.
14:54 Chuck Nice? All the players didn't like the ball either.
14:56 Charles Liu? Exactly.
14:57 Chuck Nice? But nobody cared because all we hated was the bezoo bezoo bezoo.
15:02 Gary O'Reilly? Vuzavailas were...
15:05 Chuck Nice? That's all we cared about.
15:06 Gary O'Reilly? Don't mention that thing. Man.
15:08 Chuck Nice? Go ahead.
15:10 Charles Liu? Soccer might be more memorable than Andreas Kantor calling a goal. Goal.
15:20 Chuck Nice? Wait, Chuck, I'm sorry. You gotta do it again, man. Come on, one more time.
15:26 Charles Liu? Goal.
15:35 Chuck Nice? All right.
15:35 Gary O'Reilly? All right. Dislocated jaw there.
15:37 Chuck Nice? I was gonna say, yes, and we don't have to worry about you having a career in calling soccer in Spain or South America. So, anyway, talk about the movement of the ball. You were saying about the inflation. I'm kind of interested in from a Tom Brady standpoint.
15:52 Charles Liu? Oh, yes. It makes a big difference there, too. The soccer ball is much larger for its weight. In other words, its average density is lower than that of an NFL football. And so, it's almost like the difference between throwing a rock and throwing a blob of cotton, right? You can have a lot of effects on the blob of cotton if the air is blowing. And depending on what direction it's going or how it's kicked, you can make a big difference on it. Remember also that, as we said earlier, the soccer ball is not a perfect sphere. And so, we don't get what's called the laminar flow of the air going over the surface of the ball as it goes in the air. So, it actually, the stitches on the ball of a, say, a football pitch
16:37 Charles Liu? is very similar to the stitches of a baseball. When a pitcher's trying to grab it in just the right way, so when it's thrown, it will actually curve or split or swirl as we go forward. The baseball is just much smaller, and so you can have a much more strong effect over a short distance, as opposed to the soccer ball, which takes a long time to make its flight.
16:56 Gary O'Reilly? The soccer ball, with FIFA, the world governing body, there should be, in theory and generally its practice, a standardized pressure. For each ball. However, over the years, and I I kind of struggled to get my head around this from being a young child. They made the ball rounder. Because they they changed the configuration of the panels. They went from hand stitching to actually melting panels together so as there wasn't that. And obviously becomes a much lighter ball. And if it's a lighter ball, I as a soccer player can do a lot more things with it. Which as Hope Solo just pointed out, becomes her worst nightmare.
17:34 Charles Liu? That's right. And remember that position players have to deal with this too, right? One of the conspiracy ideas that we want more goals is confounded actually because many of the best goals are long passes to someone diving in toward the goal and making a sudden directional change to the ball. And if you can't make those long passes accurate, you can't have those, right? Some of the most dramatic World Cup scores, for example, by the Team USA women's team would be, say, Megan Rapinoe coming down the side, kicking a forty yard or fifty yard long pass and Abbie Wambach coming in and Abbie would come and smack the ball with her head while it's in midair. You can't make those long distance connections anymore if the ball starts shifting or steering away from the head.
18:18 Gary O'Reilly? As a player, if you change the constitution or composition of a ball, I will then change the way I use my technique to strike it to therefore get the best out of it. Are you seeing that kind of evolution within the players' games?
18:33 Charles Liu? It has to happen and it certainly is happening. That's exactly what Hope was saying to Neil, right? I look at these balls and wonder how they move. This one goes this way, that one goes that way, and then I change year to year. We all have to always adapt in this situation. And you could tell even, experts who were watching, say, the World Cup back in South Africa those years ago. Early on in the tournament, many passes were being missed. A lot of balls were being shanked, hit off the side of the foot. Things that they, the players thought would be going in one direction wound up going awry. But toward the end and toward the final, the balls were going true. And passes were hitting their marks and shots were getting in toward the goal.
19:15 Chuck Nice? Well, just as Hope was talking about in the last clip, you know, how ball reacts off of the turf and how the ball reacts off of the grass and, you know, different ways of kicking it. There's another aspect, and Gary, you were telling me about this the other day. Yeah. And this is absolutely fascinating what you talked about. We have a clip of Hope talking about the same thing Gary told me about, which I find fascinating, so just, just check this out.
19:40 Speaker 02 The best free kick takers. Do you know what a free kick?
19:43 Chuck Nice? Yes, I do. Yeah, thank you, thank you.
19:45 Speaker 02 The best free kick takers are the ones who can bend the ball and make it whip. And they go up and they know where to put the valve on the ball to use it to their advantage. So Ayame Yama, she's the captain for Japan, and she's one of the best players in the world. And two tournaments ago in Portugal, she scored a magnificent set piece goal on me. And I was like, how did the ball do that? I don't even understand it. And after the game, I'm friends with her. She's like, Hope, I, I basically toe kicked the ball where the valve was, and that's why it made it do what it did. And I was like, wow, players are now using the valve, using science, I guess, to their advantage to help win games.
20:27 Chuck Nice? Now, what's fascinating about that is Gary actually told me about this before I saw this clip.
20:32 Gary O'Reilly? And this is the one thing that you're seeing possibly in the last six, maybe slightly more years with the very top end soccer players in the world. If you imagine Cristiano Ronaldo placing a ball, being quite meticulous about it, taking his traditional steps, back the arms, come down by his side, it's a power stance. He then unleashes this 40, 30 yard free kick. The goalkeeper might as well be sat in the stands next to me because he has that much chance of stopping it. Chuck, talk to me about the physics, because if I hit the aperture of the valve, I really am engaging some serious science when I do.
21:11 Charles Liu? Absolutely. For those members of our audience who aren't exactly familiar with how soccer balls put together, the way you blow air into a soccer ball is there's a valve, kind of like where the tire valve might be in your bicycle. And you have to stick the needle of the pump into that valve hole, and then that's how you inflate the, the ball.
21:31 Chuck Nice? That's also how baby soccer balls are born, too.
21:36 Charles Liu? You have to check with mommy soccer balls first.
21:40 Chuck Nice? Mommy soccer balls, that's gonna be the name of my next punk band.
21:43 Gary O'Reilly? Oh, my word.
21:45 Charles Liu? Sorry about that, Gary. But back to the real science.
21:48 Gary O'Reilly? Yes.
21:48 Charles Liu? The valve itself is an imperfection in the surface of the ball.
21:53 Gary O'Reilly? Okay.
21:53 Charles Liu? Much the same way, let's say if you are a baseball pitcher and you're trying to do something a little bit underhanded and and you rough or you scuff the ball.
22:02 Chuck Nice? Right.
22:03 Charles Liu? Pine tar on your, the cap of bill of your cap and you spin it onto the ball.
22:07 Chuck Nice? The old, the old sandpaper in the glove.
22:09 Charles Liu? Absolutely.
22:10 Chuck Nice? Okay.
22:10 Charles Liu? So what happens is striking it causes the imperfection, the non-sphericity, shall we say, of the soccer.
22:19 Gary O'Reilly? Good word.
22:20 Charles Liu? The, the fact that it's not perfectly round, okay? The valve makes it even less round. And if you hit the valve, the valve has a different texture, has a different hardness, it's different density than the rest of the surface of the ball. And so it will cause it to do even more weird things as it's going in the air.
22:36 Chuck Nice? So you get a little bit more movement and a little bit more unpredictability of that movement because of the valve.
22:42 Charles Liu? That's exactly right. And that's exactly what baseball pitchers want too. If you can take a look, many quality hitters, for example, in the major leagues can tell what a curve ball is going to do, how it's going to curve as it comes towards you. But if it is spinning towards you and it's curving normally, but there's a little scuff on it, a little bit of pine tar, a little bit of something else, all of a sudden it'll go in the wrong direction. It'll go where you don't expect it to go. And that's exactly what happens when a soccer ball gets hit on the valve.
23:08 Gary O'Reilly? Chuck, does the actual shape of the soccer ball, if you hit on the valve, change?
23:14 Charles Liu? Oh, yes.
23:14 Gary O'Reilly? Because the new balls now, they are designed to not absorb any of the energy from the strike they receive. That energy goes through them a hundred percent, but the change in the shape of the ball, that must have an effect.
23:27 Charles Liu? Absolutely. Slow motion photography shows very clearly that anytime you strike a ball, the ball deforms. It's just going to, you know, that kind of thing that happens. But it happens very quickly. And depending on the material of the ball, it will deform and reform slowly or quickly. And that makes a big difference on whether or not the the amount of force in your foot is transferred as efficiently or effectively to which parts of the foot that's being struck. So, yes, I imagine that the people who are the keepers of the soccer balls are always trying to make it so that there's less of these kinds of strange advantages, disadvantages that come with striking the ball at different parts.
24:11 Charles Liu? But when it happens, it's going to happen. There's no way you can completely remove it. And if you completely removed it, the game wouldn't be nearly as much fun.
24:20 Gary O'Reilly? Chuck, OK, so the advantage lies with the free kick taker. Is there anything a goalkeeper can do? Or do they have to just do the best they can?
24:29 Charles Liu? Scientifically, they have to do the best they can. Very, very little.
24:34 Chuck Nice? So, so your scientific answer is they're screwed?
24:39 Charles Liu? In a big way.
24:40 Chuck Nice? In a big way.
24:41 Charles Liu? But but not in the same way that the mama soccer ball is.
24:45 Gary O'Reilly? Oh, OK.
24:46 Chuck Nice? Well done, my friend. That's a callback, and I appreciate it.
24:51 Charles Liu? Everything I know from comedy, I learned from you, Chuck.
24:53 Chuck Nice? Well, then, you're never gonna make any money.
25:00 Gary O'Reilly? Chuck, thank you. That is possibly the first and best explanation of the physics behind what is happening to a soccer ball once you hit through the valve. Please don't listen to this Chuck anymore. He's taking you down a bad road.
25:15 Chuck Nice? Listen to that, Chuck, not this Chuck.
25:17 Gary O'Reilly? OK, we are gonna take another commercial break. We'll be back with part three when we'll take a look at the body science, the training, the medicine and recovery that comes with being a professional soccer player and an athlete.
25:36 Gary O'Reilly? Welcome back to Playing with Science. This is part three. We will delve into the body science, the training, the medicine, and the all-important part of an athlete's recovery. So much has been done over the last few years to understand and then enable athletes to be injured and come bouncing straight back and not miss an awful lot of game time, particularly if it is one of your game-changing players. Help us understand a little bit more. We are pleased to call on Christine Friel, who is an athletic trainer out in Long Island University, Brooklyn. So Christine, how are you today?
26:17 Speaker 02 How are you?
26:18 Gary O'Reilly? Hey. Fabulous. Welcome to our show.
26:21 Chuck Nice? So you know, our own Neil deGrasse Tyson sat down with Hope Solo and talked about the fact that she has suffered some pretty horrific injuries over the course of her career. We want you to take a listen to this and then we'll talk about it, okay?
26:36 Speaker 02 Okay.
26:37 Chuck Nice? All right.
26:38 Speaker 02 I've been fortunate enough, for the most part, to be healthy throughout my career, besides the shoulder injury, which happened in 2010, as you said, but...
26:48 Chuck Nice? Did you fall on your shoulder?
26:49 Speaker 02 But I had been dealing with the pain for probably a couple of years prior to when they actually said, "Enough is enough. Let's go get this taken care of."
26:56 Chuck Nice? Oh, it wasn't a catastrophic injury?
26:58 Speaker 02 No, it happened over time. And when I went in, because I was still strong, my doctor was like, "Oh, you're fine." "Solo, you know, we'll do some x-rays and MRIs, but Solo, you're fine." And then he went in and he looked at the x-rays and he was like, "How in the world are you playing?" And I basically, my arm was basically hanging off my body. I mean, I had my bicep tendon was unattached. I had a 360-degree tear of the labrum off the bone. They had to do a microfactual because I had no cartilage left. And there's 13 anchors now holding it together. And they reattached the bicep tendon, and so now...
27:43 Chuck Nice? That hurt just talking about it.
27:45 Speaker 02 Yeah. So this is my range of motion now in my arm as a goalkeeper.
27:49 Chuck Nice? On your right arm?
27:50 Speaker 02 On my right arm. Yeah, I'm raising it right now.
27:53 Speaker 05 And I've managed to play five years since surgery, which is kind of unheard of, but...
28:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But you're missing five inches of reach on this side of your body.
28:04 Speaker 05 I'm missing a lot of range of motion.
28:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is that a secret? Should we like edit that out?
28:07 Speaker 05 No, no, I mean, I...
28:10 Chuck Nice? So Christine, now that we've given the entire world the prescribed method to defeating hope solo...
28:16 Gary O'Reilly? Yes, we've unveiled the kryptonite.
28:18 Chuck Nice? Exactly. Couple of things. One, what's the way that you return range of motion, which is very important to an athlete once they're injured? And secondly, how do you deal with pain management? Because I read somewhere that a lot of, you know, it's coming to be a problem off the field when you're just handing a player pills and telling them, "Yo, man, take care of it. Don't worry about it. You'll be able to play." So those are two very important things. How do you deal with that?
28:45 Speaker 05 Well, first of all, the range of motion is tough. Range of motion can only develop over time. You can't just fix it in one shot. You have to do a lot of work, a lot of like heat stuff, you know, just get the motion going. It's kind of like oil in a car, but you can't just pour oil in there.
29:00 Chuck Nice? Right.
29:01 Speaker 05 You kind of got to get it loosened up. And it takes a while. I had a goalie, same thing. Goalies get beat up really bad, especially their shoulders. And, you know, I would have to spend every week trying to get a range of motion back in their shoulders so she could play over the weekend.
29:15 Chuck Nice? Right. Now, let me ask you this. So here you are, kind of trying to restore this person to, you know, a full range of motion, but then they go out and play. Aren't they re-injuring that same place when they play again?
29:29 Speaker 05 Well, I mean, just for that person, I mean, it wasn't really an injury. It was more of, like, the injury was there. Like, we knew it was there. There was nothing we can do to fix it.
29:38 Chuck Nice? Well, actually, let me stop you because I asked my question wrong. When you're injured and you play injured, aren't you just making that injury worse? Even though we want everybody to play injured, wouldn't it be better to take your million-dollar player and sit him down for two games than to force him to go out there, well, not force him, they want to play, but have him go out there, aren't you making it worse? If I have a tear and I'm playing with a tear, like, even though it's a micro tear, isn't it going to get worse if I'm just out there playing?
30:06 Speaker 05 Uh, yes, it can.
30:08 Chuck Nice? Right.
30:08 Speaker 05 Doesn't always get worse, but it can. I'm not gonna say that it doesn't. But there are ways to manage things.
30:14 Chuck Nice? Mm-hmm.
30:15 Speaker 05 That is a big thing. Management is a huge thing, especially in sports, really Division One sports. It, people do it every single day. You know, there, you are, there is a risk and we always make sure everyone knows the risk. But, you know, the athletes always wanna go, go, go. There are times, there's plenty of times where people sit out and it's because we know the risk is too high. You just have to kinda be able to measure, you know, what's, where can you, where, where do you need to draw the line?
30:38 Gary O'Reilly? Christine, I mean, now we can do keyhole surgery, we can hit things with lasers. Whereas before, we had to just get a scalpel and open that athlete up.
30:48 Chuck Nice? Put some ice on it.
30:49 Gary O'Reilly? And, and, yeah, yeah.
30:50 Chuck Nice? Put some Bengay on it.
30:51 Gary O'Reilly? Get some.
30:52 Chuck Nice? Get back out there.
30:52 Gary O'Reilly? Get some Advil, whatever it took. What are the real cutting-edge, no pun intended, advances in surgery that sportsmen and women are benefiting from right now?
31:06 Speaker 05 I think they're just doing a lot more research. There's a lot more orthopedic research going on where, like, they're growing meniscuses in labs and they're, they're growing cartilage in labs. I had a kid get, you know, their own meni, their own cartilage taken out of their body and they grew it in a lab for two weeks and then put it back in them, bigger.
31:23 Chuck Nice? Wow.
31:24 Speaker 05 You know, maybe five years ago, people were just taking meniscuses out of people's knees and then, you know, ten years down the road, they're having knee replacement surgery because there's nothing, there's no shock absorbers left in their knee. Now they don't do that anymore. Now they're trying to just repair it and see maybe if they can, you know, take a little piece of cartilage out and stick it in there that's from their own body and try to create a new meniscus so that they don't have these problems down the road. I think the big thing now is trying to prevent these long-term issues that, you know, seeing a lot of the baby boomer generations having all these replacements done, things like that.
31:55 Chuck Nice? Mm-hmm.
31:56 Speaker 05 Try to avoid that from happening.
31:58 Chuck Nice? Wow. So, uh, listen, all I can say is, and you can take whatever you want from this, uh, now that they're growing body parts, there's, I'm very interested. I'm just very interested.
32:08 Gary O'Reilly? We still need to talk.
32:09 Chuck Nice? Which body part are you interested? We're not gonna go there, Chuck.
32:14 Gary O'Reilly? Please don't. All right, returning to the Neil deGrasse Tyson interview with Hope Solo, let's hear what Solo had to say about using science to get the best out of our bodies.
32:27 Speaker 02 It's changed the entire training aspect of how we train our soccer players. And it's crazy because I feel a little prehistoric in my mindset because I believe that being a great athlete comes from, you know, your willpower, your desire, your motivation, your dedication, as well as your skill. But there's so many elements to it. And now we apply science, which is a wonderful, incredible thing, to help get the best out of our bodies. But it's almost like we've softened as athletes, the mentality aspect, because it's like, oh, sorry, my heart rate is at 180 right now, so I'm not going to run another sprint. Where in the day it used to be like, you get on the line and you run this tense sprint
33:10 Speaker 02 because everybody on the team is going to do it, and you kind of are unified. And you find a way to push your body past that brink where you don't think you can go. But now science is saying, well, your max heart rate is 180, so when you hit your max heart rate, let's not do another sprint. So there's a fine balance because I think it's really changed how we train as athletes. But I think we're losing a little bit of our mentality as well.
33:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And the science is not really addressing the mentality, it never did. It's addressing your physiology.
33:38 Speaker 02 Yeah.
33:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So the full value of the role of science in increasing your performance remains to be revealed in the marriage of the science plus the will.
33:49 Speaker 02 Athletes are only going to get better with each year, you know, bigger, stronger, faster. And it's going to be because of science.
33:57 Gary O'Reilly? Wow. Bigger, faster, stronger, all because of science. Chuck, do you see this? I mean, you're our science man today, so do you see this being the case?
34:08 Charles Liu? It is for a few reasons, right? Not the least of which is that we have better nutrition than we used to. We are actually genetically improving and evolving toward larger, stronger, smarter people.
34:21 Chuck Nice? Thank you.
34:22 Charles Liu? So that's naturally going to happen anyway. But I disagree with the point that claims, well, with the people who claim that science doesn't address the mentality. Science is addressing the mentality. In fact, sports psychology is a gigantic area of training these days. We're getting to understand better and better that the mentality, that the psychology, that the drive does also have some sort of scientific background to it. So it's not just, I want to, I want to, I want to. But how do you make that want into reality actually requires a little bit of scientific knowledge.
34:57 Chuck Nice? Wow. So Christine, let me bring you back in here. When you talk about working with athletes and you're helping them get back on the field for the most part, is that part of your process?
35:07 Speaker 05 It very much is. But what's important is you have to realize that each athlete is different and you have to treat each person differently. We have 250 athletes here where I work and you have some that want to get back on the field and some are more hesitant to get back on the field. So just creating like short-term goals, long-term goals is a big part of the rehabilitative process. You have to know each athlete, you have to know how they're going to react to pain, you have to know how they're going to react to, you know, doing something different or maybe trying something new, especially with something long-term like an ECL or some sort of shoulder surgery.
35:38 Charles Liu? Right.
35:39 Speaker 05 You have to know each athlete and they're all gonna, you know, you all have protocols for doing things, but each kid is going to challenge that protocol because of both mental and physical capabilities.
35:48 Chuck Nice? Wow. So our short-term and long-term goals have actually just ended because we got to get out of here. But I want to say thank you Christine, to you for calling in and giving us such great insight.
35:59 Speaker 05 You got it. No problem.
36:01 Gary O'Reilly? Thanks Christine. Chuck.
36:03 Speaker 05 You got it.
36:04 Gary O'Reilly? Thank you to you for your absolutely fabulous input and the science behind the art of goalkeeping.
36:09 Chuck Nice? My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me, Gary.
36:11 Gary O'Reilly? Oh, the pleasure was all ours, sir. And Chuck, thank you for being my co-host today.
36:16 Chuck Nice? Absolutely.
36:17 Gary O'Reilly? I'm Gary Arini. You've been listening to Star Sports Presents Playing with Science, brought to you by TuneIn Radio.
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