It is the beginning of June 2018, when the Italian men's volleyball squad wins the first 3 matches of the inaugural Volleyball Nations League, beating Germany, Brazil, and Serbia within one weekend in Serbia.
The Italian team, however, did not have time to celebrate the victory much - the next weekend they had to play in Argentina, after that in Japan and South Korea, to end the month playing in Italy again. Flying across the globe in four weeks, had its toll on the team and they eventually finished 8th, winning only 4 out of 12 matches after the first round. In contrast, the team on top of the table at the end of the competition was France, who never had to leave Europe for their matches. A few weeks later the French team failed and the Italians succeeded in qualifying for the final rounds of the World Championships, which was organized without much traveling between matches. If we look at the second week, we see that Italy flew to Argentina, Brazil to Brazil, Germany to Poland and Serbia to Bulgaria. All four teams played in different groups! Coincidence? No. As the teams can't meet again (it is a Round Robin tournament), they have to play in different groups. As there are four groups every week, there will be exactly one team from Group 4 in each of the groups next week. And this holds for every group, every week.
Fairness is not evident It is safe to say that traveling impacts the peak performance of teams and athletes in general - studies have been done across all kinds of sports that confirm this intuitive idea. Thus, to avoid unfair- and unhappiness, an organizer should aim to minimize the effect of travel time disparities.
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If we look at the Volleyball Nations League (VNL), this has a set-up that is very prone to be influenced by jet lags. There are 16 teams, who play in 5 consecutive weeks, where every week all teams are divided into four groups of 4, in such a way that all teams meet each other exactly once; such a tournament, where every participant plays everyone else once is called Single Round Robin. The group stages are played in different venues anywhere on earth, so there are 20 different locations used to host the groups. To participate in the competition, teams may have to travel all around the world to play, with only a limited time to rest. In the table below, the groups of the Italian team during the Men's 2018 tournament are shown - notice how they meet all of their opponents exactly once! The Italian team, however, did not have time to celebrate the victory much - the next weekend they had to play in Argentina, after that in Japan and South Korea, to end the month playing in Italy again. Flying across the globe in four weeks, had its toll on the team and they eventually finished 8th, winning only 4 out of 12 matches after the first round. In contrast, the team on top of the table at the end of the competition was France, who never had to leave Europe for their matches.
Two weeks ago I had the pleasure to attend two events where prizes for outstanding research in mathematics were awarded, the Christiaan Huygens Science prize and the CWI Best Thesis in Applied Math 2024.
EWM-NL has prepared a poster about women in mathematics, inspired by a poster on Notable Women in Computing. In this article you can find the beautiful poster, prepared by a joint Dutch and UK team comprising Maria Vlasiou and Silvy Hendriks (NL), and Houry Melkonian.
