Elite Athletes
High performance sport or elite sport is sport at the highest level of competition. In sports administration, "high-performance sport", where the emphasis is on winning prestigious competitions, is distinguished from "mass sport" or "recreational sport", where the emphasis is on attracting the maximum number of participants. In team sports, the concept of high performance involves also team performance strategy and assessment. High-performance sport overlaps with the upper tiers of professional sport; within the realm of professional sport, the elite tiers of the sport are known, particularly in North America, as major leagues. On the other hand, elite competitors at the Olympic Games or World Games in some minority sports may be part-time or rely on government grants. Likewise, student athletes, especially in college sports, are often high performance despite being nominally amateurs. Much research in sports psychology and sports medicine is motivated by the needs of elite rather ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Sport
Sport pertains to any form of Competition, competitive physical activity or game that aims to use, maintain, or improve physical ability and Skill, skills while providing enjoyment to participants and, in some cases, entertainment to spectators. Sports can, through casual or organized participation, improve participants' physical health. Hundreds of sports exist, from those between single contestants, through to those with hundreds of simultaneous participants, either in teams or competing as individuals. In certain sports such as racing, many contestants may compete, simultaneously or consecutively, with one winner; in others, the contest (a ''match'') is between two sides, each attempting to exceed the other. Some sports allow a "tie" or "draw", in which there is no single winner; others provide tie-breaking methods to ensure one winner and one loser. A number of contests may be arranged in a tournament producing a champion. Many sports leagues make an annual champion by ar ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Olympic Medal
An Olympic medal is awarded to successful competitors at one of the Olympic Games. There are three classes of medal to be won: gold, silver, and bronze, awarded to first, second, and third place, respectively. The granting of awards is laid out in detail in the Olympic protocols. Medal designs have varied considerably since the Games in 1896, particularly in the size of the medals for the Summer Olympic Games. The design selected for the 1928 Games remained for many years, until its replacement at the 2004 Games in Athens as the result of controversy surrounding the use of the Roman Colosseum rather than a building representing Greek roots. The medals of the Winter Olympic Games never had a common design, but regularly feature snowflakes and the event where the medal has been won. In addition to generally supporting their Olympic athletes, some countries provide sums of money and gifts to medal winners, depending on the classes and number of medals won. Introduction and ea ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Sports Business
Sport pertains to any form of competitive physical activity or game that aims to use, maintain, or improve physical ability and skills while providing enjoyment to participants and, in some cases, entertainment to spectators. Sports can, through casual or organized participation, improve participants' physical health. Hundreds of sports exist, from those between single contestants, through to those with hundreds of simultaneous participants, either in teams or competing as individuals. In certain sports such as racing, many contestants may compete, simultaneously or consecutively, with one winner; in others, the contest (a ''match'') is between two sides, each attempting to exceed the other. Some sports allow a "tie" or "draw", in which there is no single winner; others provide tie-breaking methods to ensure one winner and one loser. A number of contests may be arranged in a tournament producing a champion. Many sports leagues make an annual champion by arranging games in a r ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Professional Sports Leagues In The United States
Professional sports leagues in the United States include several major leagues as well as other professional and semi-professional leagues. Major leagues The major sports leagues tend to have the greatest fan interest, have national TV contracts, draw high fan attendance, and have teams located throughout the largest metropolitan areas in the United States. Major League Baseball Major League Baseball is the highest level of play of baseball in North America. It consists of the National League (founded in 1876) and the American League (founded in 1901). Cooperation between the two leagues began in 1903, and the two merged on an organizational level in 2000 with the elimination of separate league offices; they have shared a single Commissioner since 1920. There are currently 30 member teams, with 29 located in the U.S. and 1 in Canada. Traditionally called the "National Pastime", baseball was the first professional sport in the U.S. National Basketball Association The National Bas ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Semi-professional Sports
Semi-professional sports are sports in which athletes are not participating on a full-time basis, but still receive some payment. Semi-professionals are not amateur because they receive regular payment from their team, but generally at a considerably lower rate than a full-time professional athlete. As a result, semi-professional players frequently have (or seek) full-time employment elsewhere. A semi-pro player or team could also be one that represents a place of employment that only the employees are allowed to play on. In this case, it is considered semi-pro because their employer pays them, but for their regular job, not for playing on the company's team. The semi-professional status is not universal throughout the world and depends on each country's labour code (labour law) and each sports organization's specific regulations. Origin The San Francisco Olympic Club fielded an American football team in 1890. That year, the Olympic Club was accused by a rival club of enticing a ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Professional Sports
In professional sports, as opposed to amateur sports, participants receive payment for their performance. Professionalism in sport has come to the fore through a combination of developments. Mass media and increased leisure have brought larger audiences, so that sports organizations or teams can command large incomes. As a result, more sportspeople can afford to make sport their primary career, devoting the training time necessary to increase skills, physical condition, and experience to modern levels of achievement. This proficiency has also helped boost the popularity of sports.Andy Miah Sport & the Extreme Spectacle: Technological Dependence and Human Limits' (PDF) Unpublished manuscript, 1998 In most sports played professionally there are many more amateur than professional players, though amateurs and professionals do not usually compete. History Baseball Baseball originated before the American Civil War (1861–1865). First played on sandlots in particular, scoring ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Olympic Medal Table
The Olympic medal table is a method of sorting the medal placements of countries in the modern-day Olympics and Paralympics. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) does not officially recognize a ranking of participating countries at the Olympic Games. Nevertheless, the IOC does publish medal tallies for information purposes, showing the total number of Olympic medals earned by athletes representing each country's respective National Olympic Committee. The convention used by the IOC is to sort by the number of gold medals the athletes from a country have earned. In the event of a tie in the number of gold medals, the number of silver medals is taken into consideration, and then the number of bronze medals. If two countries have an equal number of gold, silver, and bronze medals, they are ordered in the table alphabetically by their IOC country code. Background The Olympic Charter, Chapter 1, section 6 states that: The Charter goes even further in Chapter 5, section 57, expres ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Cold War
The Cold War is a term commonly used to refer to a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term '' cold war'' is used because there was no large-scale fighting directly between the two superpowers, but they each supported major regional conflicts known as proxy wars. The conflict was based around the ideological and geopolitical struggle for global influence by these two superpowers, following their temporary alliance and victory against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in 1945. Aside from the nuclear arsenal development and conventional military deployment, the struggle for dominance was expressed via indirect means such as psychological warfare, propaganda campaigns, espionage, far-reaching embargoes, rivalry at sports events, and technological competitions such as the Space Race. The Western Bloc was led by the United States as well as a number of other First W ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Eastern Bloc
The Eastern Bloc, also known as the Communist Bloc and the Soviet Bloc, was the group of socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America under the influence of the Soviet Union that existed during the Cold War (1947–1991). These states followed the ideology of Marxism–Leninism, in opposition to the Capitalism, capitalist Western Bloc. The Eastern Bloc was often called the Second World, whereas the term "First World" referred to the Western Bloc and "Third World" referred to the Non-Aligned Movement, non-aligned countries that were mainly in Africa, Asia, and Latin America but notably also included former Tito–Stalin split, pre-1948 Soviet ally SFR Yugoslavia, which was located in Europe. In Western Europe, the term Eastern Bloc generally referred to the USSR and Central and Eastern European countries in the Comecon (East Germany, Polish People's Republic, Poland, Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, Czechoslovakia, Hungarian ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Public Policy
Public policy is an institutionalized proposal or a decided set of elements like laws, regulations, guidelines, and actions to solve or address relevant and real-world problems, guided by a conception and often implemented by programs. Public policy can be considered to be the sum of government direct and indirect activities and has been conceptualized in a variety of ways. They are created and/or enacted on behalf of the public typically by a government. Sometimes they are made by nonprofit organisations or are made in co-production with communities or citizens, which can include potential experts, scientists, engineers and stakeholders or scientific data, or sometimes use some of their results. They are typically made by policy-makers affiliated with (in democratic polities) currently elected politicians. Therefore, the "policy process is a complex political process in which there are many actors: elected politicians, political party leaders, pressure groups, civil servants ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |