Hamstring Injuries: A Comprehensive Review of Current Treatment Options
Piotr Górka, Julia Frączek, Karolina Borówka
et al.
Background: Hamstring muscle injuries (HMI) remain the most prevalent non-contact injury in high-speed sports, particularly football and athletics. Despite sports medicine advancements, HMI is characterised by high recurrence rates (12–33%), causing significant time loss and performance decrements.
Aim: This paper provides a comprehensive literature review regarding the functional anatomy, risk factors, diagnostic classification, and evidence-based treatment strategies for HMI.
Material and methods: A narrative literature review was conducted using PubMed and MEDLINE. We focused on high-quality studies (systematic reviews, randomised controlled trials, clinical guidelines) published between 2010 and 2025, covering conservative and surgical management.
Results: The biceps femoris long head's bi-articular architecture and dual innervation predispose it to eccentric strain during sprinting. Diagnosis has evolved with the British Athletics Muscle Injury Classification (BAMIC), which identifies intratendinous involvement as predicting prolonged recovery. Conservative management remains the gold standard for mid-substance injuries; L-protocol (lengthening) and eccentric strengthening show superior outcomes over concentric training. Surgery is indicated for complete proximal avulsions or high-grade partial tears with retraction (>2 cm); acute repair yields better outcomes than chronic reconstruction.
Conclusions: Effective HMI management requires a multimodal approach. While conservative care resolves most injuries, precise MRI diagnosis is crucial to identify surgical candidates early. Return to play must be criteria-based, prioritising restored eccentric strength, fascicle length, and sprint mechanics over time-based protocols or imaging clearance.
Effects of local anesthetics on yield and differentiation of synovial mesenchymal stem cells
Takuya Kitamura, Kentaro Endo, Nobutake Ozeki
et al.
Abstract Human synovial mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) demonstrate high chondrogenic capacity for regenerative medicine. While ultrasound-guided collection procedures utilize local anesthetics for patient comfort, their effects on synovial MSCs remain unclear despite their known cytotoxicity to other MSC types. This study investigated whether clinically relevant concentrations of lidocaine and ropivacaine affect synovial MSC proliferation and differentiation. Human synovial tissue from eight donors undergoing knee surgery was minced and treated for 20 min with 0.5% lidocaine, 0.2% ropivacaine, or saline control. Following enzymatic digestion, cell viability and nucleated cell yield per synovial weight were assessed immediately and after a 14-day culture expansion. Trilineage differentiation capacity was evaluated through chondrogenic pellet culture, adipogenic Oil Red O staining, and calcification Alizarin Red staining. Cell viability, nucleated cell numbers per synovium weight, and cell yield after 14-day expansion showed no significant differences between treatments. Cartilage pellet weights, Oil Red O-positive adipogenic colonies, and calcification areas remained comparable across all groups. Lidocaine or ropivacaine can be safely used during ultrasound-guided synovial tissue collection without compromising therapeutic potential. These findings support the safe clinical implementation of ultrasound-guided synovial tissue harvesting using local anesthetics, reinforcing this process as a feasible and practical platform for synovial MSC-based regenerative therapies.
Bilateral native knee septic arthritis caused by group G Streptococcus: A rare presentation in an uncommon host
Noopur Basu, Matthew Ryan, Joshua Altman
Background: Septic arthritis is an uncommon but severe condition that can lead to rapidly progressive articular destruction and septicemia. Although the knee is the most commonly affected joint in septic arthritis, bilateral involvement is an exceedingly rare condition often associated with immunocompromising conditions, medical comorbidities or other sources of infection. Case report: A 74-year-old male immunocompetent patient presented with two to three days of atraumatic bilateral knee pain and swelling with difficulty ambulating, with presenting vital signs concerning for sepsis. Physical exam was notable for large bilateral knee effusions, warmth and significantly limited range of motion. Bilateral knee arthrocentesis was performed with synovial fluid analysis consistent with bilateral septic arthritis. The patient was managed with intravenous antibiotics and operative arthrotomy and irrigation. Synovial fluid cultures from the emergency department and operating room, as well as 4/4 blood cultures all grew Group G streptococcus. No primary source of infection was identified. The patient completed a course of intravenous antibiotics tailored to culture susceptibility and had resolution of symptoms. Why should an emergency physician be aware of this?: Polyarticular septic arthritis carries high morbidity and mortality. Although uncommon, atypical presentations and absence of usual risk factors can lead to delays or missed diagnoses in the emergency department. It is essential to maintain a high index of suspicion in the patient presenting with undifferentiated multifocal joint pain or swelling, in the appropriate clinical context, to make an early diagnosis and initiate aggressive treatment to prevent complications.
Medical emergencies. Critical care. Intensive care. First aid
Generalizing Sports Feedback Generation by Watching Competitions and Reading Books: A Rock Climbing Case Study
Arushi Rai, Adriana Kovashka
While there is rapid progress in video-LLMs with advanced reasoning capabilities, prior work shows that these models struggle on the challenging task of sports feedback generation and require expensive and difficult-to-collect finetuning feedback data for each sport. This limitation is evident from the poor generalization to sports unseen during finetuning. Furthermore, traditional text generation evaluation metrics (e.g., BLEU-4, METEOR, ROUGE-L, BERTScore), originally developed for machine translation and summarization, fail to capture the unique aspects of sports feedback quality. To address the first problem, using rock climbing as our case study, we propose using auxiliary freely-available web data from the target domain, such as competition videos and coaching manuals, in addition to existing sports feedback from a disjoint, source domain to improve sports feedback generation performance on the target domain. To improve evaluation, we propose two evaluation metrics: (1) specificity and (2) actionability. Together, our approach enables more meaningful and practical generation of sports feedback under limited annotations.
Les terrains du « football du dimanche » : le stade René Corbelle à Bully-les-Mines (Pas-de-Calais)
Olivier Chovaux
L’histoire du football est autant écrite dans les grands stades des métropoles que dans ceux plus petits des villes moyennes ou des villages. Le bassin minier du nord de la France en offre un exemple tout à fait éclairant avec le stade de l’Étoile Sportive de Bully-les-Mines. Cette enceinte témoigne du dynamisme du football du Nord de la France dès la veille de la Grande Guerre et des aménagements et des œuvres sociales des Compagnies des Mines. Lieu autant de contrôle social que de réalisation de soi-même, le stade dont la tribune est achevée en 1927 est omnisport tout en devenant le terrain de l’ES Bully qui brille en Coupe de France. Aux heures de l’occupation allemande, le stade devient l’un des lieux de distraction en des temps difficiles. Il est aujourd’hui le théâtre du football amateur du dimanche.
Sports, Economic history and conditions
Women Sport Actions Dataset for Visual Classification Using Small Scale Training Data
Palash Ray, Mahuya Sasmal, Asish Bera
Sports action classification representing complex body postures and player-object interactions is an emerging area in image-based sports analysis. Some works have contributed to automated sports action recognition using machine learning techniques over the past decades. However, sufficient image datasets representing women sports actions with enough intra- and inter-class variations are not available to the researchers. To overcome this limitation, this work presents a new dataset named WomenSports for women sports classification using small-scale training data. This dataset includes a variety of sports activities, covering wide variations in movements, environments, and interactions among players. In addition, this study proposes a convolutional neural network (CNN) for deep feature extraction. A channel attention scheme upon local contextual regions is applied to refine and enhance feature representation. The experiments are carried out on three different sports datasets and one dance dataset for generalizing the proposed algorithm, and the performances on these datasets are noteworthy. The deep learning method achieves 89.15% top-1 classification accuracy using ResNet-50 on the proposed WomenSports dataset, which is publicly available for research at Mendeley Data.
Action Valuation in Sports: A Survey
Artur Xarles, Sergio Escalera, Thomas B. Moeslund
et al.
Action Valuation (AV) has emerged as a key topic in Sports Analytics, offering valuable insights by assigning scores to individual actions based on their contribution to desired outcomes. Despite a few surveys addressing related concepts such as Player Valuation, there is no comprehensive review dedicated to an in-depth analysis of AV across different sports. In this survey, we introduce a taxonomy with nine dimensions related to the AV task, encompassing data, methodological approaches, evaluation techniques, and practical applications. Through this analysis, we aim to identify the essential characteristics of effective AV methods, highlight existing gaps in research, and propose future directions for advancing the field.
FSBench: A Figure Skating Benchmark for Advancing Artistic Sports Understanding
Rong Gao, Xin Liu, Zhuozhao Hu
et al.
Figure skating, known as the "Art on Ice," is among the most artistic sports, challenging to understand due to its blend of technical elements (like jumps and spins) and overall artistic expression. Existing figure skating datasets mainly focus on single tasks, such as action recognition or scoring, lacking comprehensive annotations for both technical and artistic evaluation. Current sports research is largely centered on ball games, with limited relevance to artistic sports like figure skating. To address this, we introduce FSAnno, a large-scale dataset advancing artistic sports understanding through figure skating. FSAnno includes an open-access training and test dataset, alongside a benchmark dataset, FSBench, for fair model evaluation. FSBench consists of FSBench-Text, with multiple-choice questions and explanations, and FSBench-Motion, containing multimodal data and Question and Answer (QA) pairs, supporting tasks from technical analysis to performance commentary. Initial tests on FSBench reveal significant limitations in existing models' understanding of artistic sports. We hope FSBench will become a key tool for evaluating and enhancing model comprehension of figure skating.
AI and analytics in sports: Leveraging BERTopic to map the past and chart the future
Manit Mishra
Purpose: The purpose of this study is to map the body of scholarly literature at the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI), analytics and sports and thereafter, leverage the insights generated to chart guideposts for future research. Design/methodology/approach: The study carries out systematic literature review (SLR). Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) protocol is leveraged to identify 204 journal articles pertaining to utilization of AI and analytics in sports published during 2002 to 2024. We follow it up with extraction of the latent topics from sampled articles by leveraging the topic modelling technique of BERTopic. Findings: The study identifies the following as predominant areas of extant research on usage of AI and analytics in sports: performance modelling, physical and mental health, social media sentiment analysis, and tactical tracking. Each extracted topic is further examined in terms of its relative prominence, representative studies, and key term associations. Drawing on these insights, the study delineates promising avenues for future inquiry. Research limitations/implications: The study offers insights to academicians and sports administrators on transformational impact of AI and analytics in sports. Originality/value: The study introduces BERTopic as a novel approach for extracting latent structures in sports research, thereby advancing both scholarly understanding and the methodological toolkit of the field.
Hierarchy and ranking in pairwise sports contests
Bogdán Asztalos, Boldizsár Balázs, Gergely Palla
et al.
Ranking athletes by their performance in competitions and tournaments is common in every popular sport and has significant benefits that contribute to both the organization and strategic aspects of competitions. Although rankings are perhaps the most concise and most straightforward representation of the relative strength among the competitors, beyond this one-dimensional characterization, it is also possible to capture the relationships between athletes in greater detail. Following this approach, our study examines the networks between athletes in individual sports such as tennis and fencing, where the nodes are associated with the contestants and the edges are directed from the winner to the loser. We demonstrate that the connections formed through matches arrange themselves into a time-evolving hierarchy, with the top players positioned at its apex. The structure of the resulting networks exhibits detectable differences depending on whether they are constructed purely from round-robin data or from purely elimination-style tournaments. We find that elimination tournaments lead to networks with a smaller level of hierarchy and thus, importantly, to an increased probability of circular win-loss situations (cycles). The position within the hierarchy, along with other network metrics, can be used to predict match outcomes. In the systems studied, these methods provide predictions with an accuracy comparable to that of forecasts based on official sports ranking points or the Elo rating system. A deeper understanding of the delicate aspects of the networks of pairwise contests enhances our ability to model, predict, and optimize the behaviour of many complex systems, whether in sports tournaments, social interactions, or other competitive environments.
SportR: A Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Model Reasoning in Sports
Haotian Xia, Haonan Ge, Junbo Zou
et al.
Deeply understanding sports requires an intricate blend of fine-grained visual perception and rule-based reasoning - a challenge that pushes the limits of current multimodal models. To succeed, models must master three critical capabilities: perceiving nuanced visual details, applying abstract sport rule knowledge, and grounding that knowledge in specific visual evidence. Current sports benchmarks either cover single sports or lack the detailed reasoning chains and precise visual grounding needed to robustly evaluate these core capabilities in a multi-sport context. To address this gap, we introduce SportR, the first multi-sports large-scale benchmark designed to train and evaluate MLLMs on the fundamental reasoning required for sports intelligence. Our benchmark provides a dataset of 4,789 images and 2,052 videos. To enable granular evaluation, we structure our benchmark around a progressive hierarchy of question-answer pairs designed to probe reasoning at increasing depths - from simple infraction identification to complex penalty prediction. For the most advanced tasks requiring multi-step reasoning, such as determining penalties or explaining tactics, we provide 6,841 high-quality, human-authored Chain of Thought annotations. In addition, our benchmark incorporates both image and video modalities and provides manual bounding box annotations to test visual grounding in the image part directly. Extensive experiments demonstrate the profound difficulty of our benchmark. State-of-the-art baseline models perform poorly on our most challenging tasks. While training on our data via Supervised Fine-Tuning and Reinforcement Learning improves these scores, they remain relatively low, highlighting a significant gap in current model capabilities. SportR presents a new challenge for the community, providing a critical resource to drive future research in multimodal sports reasoning.
The effect of Hydrogen-rich „Truskavetska” bottled water on the swimming stress test in female rats
Walery Zukow, Igor Popovych
Background and aim. Despite the use of drinking hydrogen rich water both in clinical and sports medicine, further research into the mechanisms of its beneficial effect remains relevant. We found that both Naftussya bioactive water per se and combined balneotherapy have an ambiguous effect on physical performance. It was also found that the preventive use of “Truskavetska” bottled water, the chemical composition of which is somewhat similar to that of Naftussya bioactive water, has both similar and different effects on the post-stress parameters of rats. We set ourselves the goal of finding out the possibility of correcting the effect of "Truskavetska" bottled water on the post-stressor state of the neuro-endocrine-immune complex, as well as the endurance of rats by enriching it with hydrogen.
Material and methods. The experiment is at 26 female Wistar rats purposefully divided into three homogeneous (according to the swimming test and HRV parameters) groups. 5 animals remained intact with free access to regular daily water. Rats of the control group (n=4) for 7 days loaded through a tube with “Truskavetska” bottled table water (2 mL once), while the animals of main group (n=17) received the same water, but enriched with Hydrogen. After completing the preconditioning course, a repeated swimming stress test was performed. The next day after stressing, a number of parameters of the neuro-endocrine-immune complex and metabolism were recorded.
Results. Hydrogen rich water (HRW) minimizes the post-stressor increase in sympathetic tone and adrenal mass, and prevents the increase in catecholamines and corticosterone as well as plasma cells in the blood and rod-shaped neutrophils in the spleen. On the other hand, HRW prevents a post-stressor decrease in the intensity of macrophage phagocytosis and the bactericidal capacity of blood microphages, the content of lymphoblasts in the thymus, the activity of both antioxidant enzymes and vagal tone, and also minimizes the decrease in the content of eosinophils in the blood, non-alpha-lipoprotein cholesterol in the serum, and the mass of the spleen, in addition, the reduced content of plasma cells in the spleen reverses to an excess. Finally, the non-stress-responsive parameters of the control animals: the activity of AlT, CPhK, AsT and diene conjugates of the serum, the content of reticulocytes and Hassal’s bodies in the thymus - under the influence of HRW increase to one degree or another. Importantly, this also applies to the duration of swimming until exhaustion. A strong canonical correlation was found between the activity of antioxidant enzymes, on the one hand, and metabolic-endocrine (R=0.959) and immune (R=0.959) sets, on the other hand.
Conclusion. Enrichment of "Truskavetska" bottled table water with hydrogen generally has a favorable effect on its stress-limiting and actotropic capacity, associated with antioxidant activity.
Culture, emotion, and cognition: Understanding the psychological dynamics of Chinese sports with emotional regulation skills and cognitive reappraisal
Jilin Li, Xiaohui Jiang, Yuning Zhou
This study illuminates the complex relationship between cultural orientation towards collectivism, emotional regulation skills, cognitive reappraisal ability, sports engagement, perceived coach support, and sports self-efficacy in Chinese athletes' performance satisfaction. Seven hundred and fifty athletes from Guangdong, Jiangsu, and Sichuan completed 5-point Likert scale assessments. The study employed structural equation modeling (SEM) to analyze variable connections. The results reveal significant relationships between performance satisfaction and cultural orientation towards collectivism (β = 0.35, p < 0.001), emotional regulation skills (β = 0.28, p < 0.001), cognitive reappraisal ability (β = 0.32, p < 0.01), sports engagement (β = 0.20, p < 0.05), perceived coach support (β = 0.25, p < 0.01), and self-efficacy in sports (β = 0.30, p < 0.001). These findings underscore the importance of psychological factors in shaping athlete well-being and performance satisfaction. These relationships linked the self-determination theory, social support theory, and the transactional model of stress and coping. Treatments that improve athlete self-efficacy, emotional control, and coach-athlete relationships may improve player happiness, retention, and organizational performance. These actions affect management and the economy. A supportive environment and athlete development initiatives may boost athlete well-being and performance, leading to long-term sports success and competitiveness.
Science (General), Social sciences (General)
Photobiomodulation use in ophthalmology – an overview of translational research from bench to bedside
Krisztina Valter, Krisztina Valter, Stephanie E. Tedford
et al.
Photobiomodulation (PBM) refers to the process in which wavelengths of light are absorbed by intracellular photoacceptors, resulting in the activation of signaling pathways that culminate in biological changes within the cell. PBM is the result of low-intensity light-induced reactions in the cell in contrast to thermal photoablation produced by high-intensity lasers. PBM has been effectively used in the clinic to enhance wound healing and mitigate pain and inflammation in musculoskeletal conditions, sports injury, and dental applications for many decades. In the past 20 years, experimental evidence has shown the benefit of PBM in increasing numbers of retinal and ophthalmic conditions. More recently, preclinical findings in ocular models have been translated to the clinic with promising results. This review discusses the preclinical and clinical evidence of the effects of PBM in ophthalmology and provides recommendations of the clinical use of PBM in the management of ocular conditions.
OSL-ActionSpotting: A Unified Library for Action Spotting in Sports Videos
Yassine Benzakour, Bruno Cabado, Silvio Giancola
et al.
Action spotting is crucial in sports analytics as it enables the precise identification and categorization of pivotal moments in sports matches, providing insights that are essential for performance analysis and tactical decision-making. The fragmentation of existing methodologies, however, impedes the progression of sports analytics, necessitating a unified codebase to support the development and deployment of action spotting for video analysis. In this work, we introduce OSL-ActionSpotting, a Python library that unifies different action spotting algorithms to streamline research and applications in sports video analytics. OSL-ActionSpotting encapsulates various state-of-the-art techniques into a singular, user-friendly framework, offering standardized processes for action spotting and analysis across multiple datasets. We successfully integrated three cornerstone action spotting methods into OSL-ActionSpotting, achieving performance metrics that match those of the original, disparate codebases. This unification within a single library preserves the effectiveness of each method and enhances usability and accessibility for researchers and practitioners in sports analytics. By bridging the gaps between various action spotting techniques, OSL-ActionSpotting significantly contributes to the field of sports video analysis, fostering enhanced analytical capabilities and collaborative research opportunities. The scalable and modularized design of the library ensures its long-term relevance and adaptability to future technological advancements in the domain.
Investigating Event-Based Cameras for Video Frame Interpolation in Sports
Antoine Deckyvere, Anthony Cioppa, Silvio Giancola
et al.
Slow-motion replays provide a thrilling perspective on pivotal moments within sports games, offering a fresh and captivating visual experience. However, capturing slow-motion footage typically demands high-tech, expensive cameras and infrastructures. Deep learning Video Frame Interpolation (VFI) techniques have emerged as a promising avenue, capable of generating high-speed footage from regular camera feeds. Moreover, the utilization of event-based cameras has recently gathered attention as they provide valuable motion information between frames, further enhancing the VFI performances. In this work, we present a first investigation of event-based VFI models for generating sports slow-motion videos. Particularly, we design and implement a bi-camera recording setup, including an RGB and an event-based camera to capture sports videos, to temporally align and spatially register both cameras. Our experimental validation demonstrates that TimeLens, an off-the-shelf event-based VFI model, can effectively generate slow-motion footage for sports videos. This first investigation underscores the practical utility of event-based cameras in producing sports slow-motion content and lays the groundwork for future research endeavors in this domain.
Buzz to Broadcast: Predicting Sports Viewership Using Social Media Engagement
Anakin Trotter
Accurately predicting sports viewership is crucial for optimizing ad sales and revenue forecasting. Social media platforms, such as Reddit, provide a wealth of user-generated content that reflects audience engagement and interest. In this study, we propose a regression-based approach to predict sports viewership using social media metrics, including post counts, comments, scores, and sentiment analysis from TextBlob and VADER. Through iterative improvements, such as focusing on major sports subreddits, incorporating categorical features, and handling outliers by sport, the model achieved an $R^2$ of 0.99, a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 1.27 million viewers, and a Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) of 2.33 million viewers on the full dataset. These results demonstrate the model's ability to accurately capture patterns in audience behavior, offering significant potential for pre-event revenue forecasting and targeted advertising strategies.
The effects of adapted physical education sessions on the empathy of female students with overweight
Oumayma Slimi, Santo Marsigliante, Vito Ciardo
et al.
The global prevalence of childhood and adolescent overweight and obesity increases rapidly. Physical activity plays a major role in the prevention of obesity. The present study aimed to analyze the effect of adapted basketball sessions according to the empathic capacity of adolescent girls with overweight. Forty-two girls with overweight (age: 16.09 ± 0.85; years; height: 1.64 ± 0.67 m: weight: 73.02 ± 0.61 kg; BMI: 27.15 ± 1.37) volunteered to participate in the study and were randomly assigned to the experimental group (EG, n = 21) and control group (CG, n = 21). EG was submitted to a basketball intervention adapted to students with obesity while the CG performed classic basketball exercises for 7 weeks. Each week girls had 2 basketball teaching-learning sessions, lasting 50 min. The participants’ empathy was assessed before and after the intervention using the Favre CEC. The results showed that adaptation intervention was associated with a significant emotional contagion decrease (Δ% = 0.466) and splitting with emotions (Δ% = 0.375), and with an empathy increase (Δ% = 1.387), in EG compared to CG. No significant difference was assessed in the empathy CG, before and after the intervention. This study demonstrated that adapted physical education classes could be an effective strategy to improve empathetic skills and inclusion of overweight girls as well as a means to prevent obesity.
Onchain Sports Betting using UBET Automated Market Maker
Daniel Jiwoong Im, Alexander Kondratskiy, Vincent Harvey
et al.
The paper underscores how decentralization in sports betting addresses the drawbacks of traditional centralized platforms, ensuring transparency, security, and lower fees. Non-custodial solutions empower bettors with ownership of funds, bypassing geographical restrictions. Decentralized platforms enhance security, privacy, and democratic decision-making. However, decentralized sports betting necessitates automated market makers (AMMs) for efficient liquidity provision. Existing AMMs like Uniswap lack alignment with fair odds, creating risks for liquidity providers. To mitigate this, the paper introduces UBET AMM (UAMM), utilizing smart contracts and algorithms to price sports odds fairly. It establishes an on-chain betting framework, detailing market creation, UAMM application, collateral liquidity pools, and experiments that exhibit positive outcomes. UAMM enhances decentralized sports betting by ensuring liquidity, decentralized pricing, and global accessibility, promoting trustless and efficient betting.
COVID-19 Outbreak at Sports Club: Conditions of Occurrence and Causes of the Spread of Infection
A. A. Golubkova, T. A. Platonova, S. S. Smirnova
et al.
Relevance. The new coronavirus infection (COVID-19), which appeared in late 2019 in China, has spread to almost all countries of the world in just a few months. The explosive nature of its spread was accompanied by the formation of large epidemic foci in organizations of various profiles, including leisure and sports. Aims. To establish the conditions and causes of the spread of SARS-CoV-2 among the members of one of the sports clubs based on an in-depth epidemiological analysis. Materials and methods. To study the features of the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in a sports organization, the following documents were used previously developed by the authors and successfully tested in practice: «Act of epidemiological investigation of group and outbreak morbidity of new coronavirus infection (COVID-19) at an enterprise/organization/institution» and «Individual card of a patient with a new coronavirus infection (COVID-19) at the enterprise / organization/institution». In the process of epidemiological investigation, in order to detect SARS-CoV-2 RNA in PCR, a laboratory examination of sports club participants (sick and contact) was conducted, followed by genome-wide sequencing of isolated SARS-CoV-2 viruses on the basis of the Laboratory of Molecular Virology of the A. A. Smorodintsev Influenza Research Institute, which performs these types of studies. Results. Within 17 days, 26 cases of COVID- 19 were registered among the sports team members and staff from the support group (coaching staff, medical staff, administrators), which was 74.3% of their actual number. The majority of patients (76.9%) had mild acute respiratory infection, two (7.7%) had no symptoms, and four (15.4%) had interstitial pneumonia. Of the clinical manifestations of the disease, the most frequent were weakness, fever, headache, muscle and joint pain, difficulty in nasal breathing and serous-mucous discharge from the nose, sore throat, cough, shortness of breath, anosmia and dyspeptic manifestations in the form of diarrhea, nausea or vomiting. The occurrence of the outbreak was the result of the introduction of infection from the opposing team at the tournament. The leading factors that contributed to the spread of COVID-19 among sports club members were the admission to games and training of athletes with acute respiratory infections, prolonged close contact between players during training and competitions, violations in the use of personal protective equipment, compliance with hygiene and hand antiseptics, disinfection measures in the premises of sports institutions and defects in the implementation of the regulations for the examination of teams for SARS-CoV-2 during tournaments. Conclusion. Based on the results of the study, data were obtained on the features of the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in sports organizations, which can be used in conducting preventive and anti-epidemic measures in sports and leisure institutions.
Epistemology. Theory of knowledge