The United States Olympic Committee (USOC) and D.I.S.C. Sports and Spine Center today officially announced a strategic partnership in which D.I.S.C. will become an Official Medical Services Provider through the 2012 Olympic Games. With this agreement D.I.S.C. will collaborate with the USOC sports medicine team to develop and implement a comprehensive sports medicine program with unmatched continuity of care to meet the medical needs of America's greatest athletes.

A study by six researchers, including a University of Colorado at Boulder associate professor and his former doctoral student, shows that amputees who use running-specific prosthetic legs have no performance advantage over counterparts who use their biological legs. A debate on the matter was spurred when Oscar Pistorius, a bilateral amputee, was barred from the 400-meter dash at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, and other able-body races.

James Pivarnik, Ph.D., FACSM, spends most of his days in the classroom, the exercise science lab, or fulfilling his duties as research integrity officer at Michigan State University. But the current President of the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) will take on a different a role in January - that of Torchbearer in the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Torch Relay. Pivarnik was selected for the honor by Coca-Cola, a founding partner of the

While watching swimmers line up during the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, former Olympic swimmer and NBC Sports commentator Rowdy Gaines quipped that swimmers keep getting bigger, with the shortest one in the current race towering over the average spectator. What may have been seen as an off-hand remark turns out to illustrate a trend in human development -- elite athletes are getting bigger and bigger.

Between the 1932 and 2008 Olympic Games, world record times of the men's 100m sprint improved by 0.6 seconds due to improved training techniques and technological advances. Imagine if this improvement could be achieved by a simple change in diet. Scientists at the Research Institute of Wildlife Ecology in Austria have managed to achieve an equivalent feat in mice fed on a diet high in polyunsaturated fatty acids.