Kens comment on: From podium to public health – translation in research and innovation
There’s much debate as to whether elite sport can have a wider impact on society, not least on public health. Recently, I took part in a conference panel discussion on this very topic. Panel members agreed that elite sporting success, including hosting a home Olympic and Paralympic Games, has little or no impact on sport mass participation – indeed evidence from across the globe consistently shows that such events have, at best, only a very short-term impact on mass participation. For those of us in the UK, this is perhaps best illustrated by the ‘Wimbledon effect’ – where we see a short-lived increase in tennis participation each year – but more on this in a future comment feature.
If we look at this question through a research and innovation lens, we see a more positive image – or at least the emergence of one coming into focus. The London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games provided a stimulus for unprecedented collaboration between elite sport, academia and industry in science, medicine and technology. Not only did this help afford Team GB and Paralympics GB every advantage for their home Games, it also saw a step change in knowledge and practice. Basic and applied scientists came together with end users (e.g. athletes, coaches and practitioners) more than ever before to address specific performance questions with the UK’s best science and technology capability.
Unfortunately, there is very limited funding for researchers working in sports performance. With public health a far more pressing issue than sporting success, funding is understandably concentrated on basic and applied sciences in health and disease. Research groups interested in sports performance often attempt to include aspects of performance in their health-focused research – they do after all have to capture grant funding and publish in high impact journals to be successful. But what can we learn from elite athletes and how can this inform and support public health?
The elite athlete is the perfect case study to examine human function. By taking such extreme phenotypes, which regularly undergo the most extreme physiological stress, we have a powerful model to enhance our understanding of the mechanisms that underpin health and performance. With today’s increasing attention on molecular pathways and systems biology, the relevance of this ‘elite model’ has never been so real. By observing responses in athletes we have valuable inputs into our modelling and understanding of human function, which in turn drives hypothesis-driven research to elucidate human function in a range of scenarios, from ageing to disease.
At a more practical level, recent progress in sport and exercise science has had profound benefits for health. For example, extensive research in dietary protein intake in athletes has driven greater understanding of the optimal exercise and nutritional strategies for the development and maintenance of skeletal muscle tissue – which is as important, if not more important, in offsetting age-related sarcopenia and disease-induced cachexia as it is in athletes seeking to maximise muscle mass and power. Another example is seen in the area of athletic recovery strategies. In the pursuit of marginal gains, athletes commonly use a wide range of recovery strategies. The investigation of the efficacy of these techniques and their impact on long-term adaptation has yielded invaluable insights into the role of inflammation in tissue repair and adaptation, and how this differs between young and old, and between healthy and unhealthy populations. And in terms of technology, elite sport continues to be both a ‘shop window’ for the commercialisation of consumer products and a fruitful sector for the rapid development and prototyping of new technologies.
So there appears a very real opportunity for translation between sport performance and public health, but how well are we doing? Well, the quick answer is not very well. In 2012, with a focus on Olympic legacy, the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology conducted an inquiry into the benefits of sport and exercise science and medicine in the UK. The inquiry investigated the wider value that science and medicine in elite sport has on public health. The inquiry’s conclusions included there being a lack of co-operation and co-ordination between sport and exercise science and sport and exercise medicine in the UK, and a need for greater translation to public health.
Four years on, these conclusions still stand. We must work harder to realise and exploit the synergies and make tangible translations between research in elite performance and public health. Only then will the value of sport science and research in elite athletes be realised by policy makers and research funding agencies ... and more importantly, the UK can become one of the world’s healthiest nations as well as being one of the world’s most successful sporting nations. Now that would be impact!
