Episode
A "Concussion Sensor" Comes to the Tour de France / Spain Dismantle France / Does SA Rugby Have a Doping Problem?
- Published
- Jul 15, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 4214
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Summary
Become a Supporter of the Science of Sport and you'll get the Applied show every week, ad-free listening, and a seat in the best community in sports science, all for the price of a coffee a month (or a gel if you're a cyclist). Here are all the membership benefits , join now! Show notes This week our headline topic is a "concussion sensor" being trialled by some teams at the Tour de France, and why it is a welcome innovation, but one that, for now, invites potentially dangerous false hope. We also take a spin through the rest of the week in sport, covering football, cycling, tennis and track and field. Oh, and hotdogs. (00:00:20) The World Cup nears its finale, and Spain utterly outplayed France to reach the final, making fools of our predictions after Gareth handed France to Ross. We get into why the France-Spain dynamic flipped so completely, the scarcity of penalty shootouts this tournament, the mooted expansion to 64 teams, hydration-break ad money paying for the broadcast rights, the ref cam, and the goal-line technology row over the England-Norway "wire" incident. (00:16:18) Following our David Bailey podcast , we ask whether the peloton is simply scared of Tadej Pogačar, whose dominance at the Tour has riders like Ben Healy and Florian Lipowitz shaking their heads in bewilderment. We also unpack why "marginal gains" and sports science only ever matter as a point of difference, borrowing points-of-parity and points-of-difference thinking from marketing. (00:24:16) Our headline piece. A " concussion" sensor sitting behind the helmet's BOA dial is being trialled by some teams the Tour, and we explain why the name is a dangerous misnomer. A helmet-mounted device measures helmet acceleration, not the brain, may be triggered off by cobbles, and can never be diagnostic…