Latest news with #Paralympics
Calgary Herald
11 hours ago
- Business
- Calgary Herald
Alberta Innovates invests $340k in province-wide wearable technology
Alberta Innovates is supporting a province-wide wearable technologies initiative to the tune of $340,750. Article content The funding will allow small and medium-sized enterprises to access facilities at the Canadian Sport Institute Alberta, and help move products from prototype to final, releasable product. Article content Article content The Sport Product Testing program had already been working with large clients such as Under Armour and Adidas. The funding will instead go directly to providing smaller teams with that same opportunity to test and validate their emerging wearable tech, otherwise a struggle in the province. Article content 'They are doing things internally, potentially, and they are doing things, if I will say, not properly,' said business development manager for the sport institute, Pro Stergiou. Article content Article content Wearable heart rate monitoring tools from small Albertan developers will be able to compare their results to a full electrocardiogram, allowing them to refine their algorithms and give more accurate results. Sport-specific technology will be granted access to the world-class athletes who train in the facility for their testing data. Without that access to these validation tools, smaller organizations can struggle to make it to market. Article content Article content Stergiou still thinks the industry has plenty of room to grow. After working with some of the largest wearable technology companies in the market, he sees plenty of gaps for smaller teams from Alberta to fill, not just with data collection, but with information analysis. Article content 'Apple, Garmin, Fitbit, all these companies in the wearable device space, they're introducing more and more and more data to the consumer, but they're not helping the consumer — as a health-conscious consumer, as a sport consumer — understand what the data means,' Stergiou said. Article content Article content Adam Kingsmill uses wearable technology every day. He's a Canadian Paralympic sledge hockey goalie who played on the teams that won silver at the Beijing 2022 Paralympics and the world championship in 2024. Article content Kingsmill tracks the miles he runs, bikes or skates. Throughout the long training period of a full season, he says it is a powerful tool to monitor load management and keep himself and the team away from injury.
NZ Herald
12 hours ago
- Entertainment
- NZ Herald
From the catwalk to the Paralympics: Michael Whittaker's journey with retinitis pigmentosa
From the glitz and glamour of the catwalk to studying literature, Michael Whittaker has always been ambitious, and later this year he's set to turn the page on the latest chapter of his life, beginning his quest to qualify for the 2028 Paralympics in Los Angeles. Becoming an athlete was
Time of India
17 hours ago
- Sport
- Time of India
Civic chief, team to meet IOC officials
Ahmedabad: To initiate the bidding process to host the 2036 Summer Olympics and Paralympics, city municipal commissioner Banchha Nidhi Pani and other officials will visit Switzerland from June 28 to July 5 to meet International Olympic Committee (IOC) officials. The proposal for this visit was presented for approval at the standing committee meeting held on Wednesday. The proposal stated that the visit was part of preliminary preparations for India's bid to host the Games. A state minister and senior state govt officials will also be part of the delegation. Preparations are on central and state govts to host the 2036 Olympics in Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar. Construction of the Sardar Patel Sports Enclave will take place at Motera. Additionally, a master plan is being prepared by selecting land around this enclave.
Fast Company
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Fast Company
The 2026 Winter Olympics just got 10 gorgeous posters
The official posters for the 2026 Winter Olympics and Paralympics were revealed today, and they're designed to introduce the world to some of Italy's foremost emerging artists. For next year's Milano Cortina Games, 10 posters have been created: 5 for the Olympic Games and 5 for the Paralympic Games, featuring the work of 10 Italian artists (all younger than 40) hailing from different regions of the country. According to a press release from Milano Cortina, the artists were chosen in collaboration with the Triennale di Milano, an art and design museum in Milan that displayed the torches designed for the 2026 Games earlier this year. The tradition of Olympic posters goes back to the 1912 Stockholm Games, when Swedish painter and illustrator Olle Hjortzberg was tasked with advertising the Games as a newly global media phenomenon. More than a century since then, the posters have become an integral symbol of each unique edition, ranging from an explosion of color for the 2016 Rio Olympics to a series of trippy designs for the 2020 Tokyo Games and a multimedia collection of high art for the Paris Games in 2024. The Olympic posters The five designers tasked with creating posters for the 2026 Olympic Games are all women: Flaminia Veronesi, Beatrice Alici, Giorgia Garzilli, Martina Cassatella, and Maddalena Tesser. Veronesi, a 39-year-old from Milan, took the prompt in a whimsical direction with her work The Oasis of Play, a bubbly portrait overflowing with bright color and dynamic shapes. 'It tells how we create a parallel world when we play that is an oasis of joy,' Veronesi explained in a video promoting the designs, adding that the painting's subject represents 'a young athlete or young spectator' dreaming about the Games. Sprinkled throughout the work are Easter eggs referencing the Biscione of Milan, a symbolic dragon; the Dolomites mountain range; and the five Olympic rings. Alici, a 33-year-old from San Donà di Piave, took a more literal approach with her work Silver Peaks, opting to render three true-to-scale Olympic athletes in the foreground of the Venetian Prealps. The composition's cold, subdued color palette draws viewers' eyes to the medals held by each figure—gold, silver, and bronze. In contrast, 28-year-old Cassatella, hailing from San Giovanni Rotondo, chose a warm palette for her painting Torch. The poster spotlights a close-up of two glowing, intertwined hands—reminiscent of the Olympic torch—in a deep range of reds and yellows. 'Representing a poster for the Olympic Winter Games has been, especially at the beginning, a challenge, since I did not want my work to be too explicit, too didactic,' Cassatella shared in a video interview. Instead of leaning too literally into the symbolism of the winter season, she chose to highlight a warmer image of unity and inclusion. The Paralympic posters Of the five posters created for the Paralympic Games by artists Roberto de Pinto, Andrea Fontanari, Giulia Mangoni, Aronne Pleuteri, and Clara Woods, several take a distinctly unexpected direction. Perhaps the most abstract among them is 24-year-old Pleuteri's Untitled. The piece is a burst of brightly colored shapes made using digital sketches on paint, inkjet prints, and mixed-media add-ons, resulting in a composition that verges on chaotic. According to an interview with Pleuteri, the poster works with the idea of 'escaping from visual stereotypes.' For his work Untitled (Snowdrops), 29-year-old De Pinto chose to forgo color altogether—relying only on black charcoal against a white background to depict a field of snowdrops, white flowers that bloom in late winter and early spring, often when there's still snow on the ground. It's captioned, 'Cracking the limit just like snowdrops crack cold ice.' '[I compared] the figure of the para-athlete with the snowdrop, since it is a flower that breaks the ice and snow to blossom,' De Pinto said in an interview. 'It is a symbol of hope.'
South China Morning Post
a day ago
- Sport
- South China Morning Post
Hong Kong ex-Paralympian Daniel Chan aims to improve badminton players' lives in new role
Two-time Paralympic medallist Daniel Chan Ho-yuen hoped to push for more resources from the Badminton World Federation (BWF) to further develop the sport worldwide after being appointed chair of the Para Badminton Athletes' Commission and a BWF Council member last Thursday. Advertisement While his chairmanship is technically only until re-elections in December – though there was an understanding with the BWF that he would continue in the role and his re-election would be a formality – Chan intended to use his time in the position to improve the conditions for those still playing the sport. 'It wasn't even a Paralympic sport when I first started serving,' said Chan, who has been a commission member for eight years. 'It is now a sport, and people are learning more about it, but the resources are lacking and quite poor. 'We are lucky in Hong Kong because we can be full-time athletes, but that is not the case for athletes in many other countries.' Daniel Chan won a bronze medal at the Tokyo Paralympics in 2021. Photo: Hong Kong Paralympic Association Chan, who won a bronze and silver medal at the Tokyo and Paris Paralympics respectively, also said that badminton's prominence in Asia meant the sport in the region was better off than in the other continents. Advertisement 'In Europe, Africa, South America and even Oceania, where badminton isn't a prime sport or as much a part of the culture, players need to cover their own expenses to compete overseas, and this can be very expensive,' he said.
