Nicholas P. Linthorne, BSc, PhD (1963 – 2020)

Dr Nicholas P. Linthorne (1963–2020), Senior Lecturer in Biomechanics from Brunel University London, died on the 26^th day of October 2020. Nick served as an editorial board member for the journal Sports Biomechanics for the term 2019–2021, and has been a very helpful reviewer since 2008. He has reviewed 30 times, the 14^th highest among the 1600 reviewers who have ever reviewed for the journal. In all the reviews, Nick provided very constructive and useful comments which were well received and appreciated by the authors. I will always remember the day in December 2018 I rang Nick on the telephone to invite him to join the editorial board and to personally thank him as his expertise in mathematics and modelling in jumping biomechanics has been very helpful for our journal.

Nick’s academic journey started with a BSc (Hons) in Physics from the University of Queensland, where he worked with Frank Stacey and Gary Tuck on their controversial fifth force experiment. Nick gained his PhD in Physics from the University of Western Australia with David Blair’s Gravity Wave Group and developed a cryogenic resonant bar gravitational-wave detector (‘Niobe’). After graduating, Nick continued as a Lecturer in Physics and Biophysics at the University of Western Australia, and later switched to sports biomechanics at The University of Sydney and developed a new undergraduate programme in Exercise and Sport Science. In 2003, Nick joined Brunel University London as a Senior Lecturer in Biomechanics and Programme Leader for the BSc Sport, Health and Exercise Sciences (Human Performance) course.

Nick was also an elite pole vault athlete, having cleared 5 metres in his early twenties. He went on to officiate athletics events including being a jumps judge at the 2000 Olympics Games in Sydney, as well as every British Universities and Colleges Sport (BUCS) Championship since 2003. Nick was also a keen cyclist. When he attended the annual conferences of The International Society of Biomechanics in Sports (ISBS), he brought his bike and flew to somewhere else then cycled across the country over a few days to get to the conference venue. In 2020, the conference was originally hosted by Liverpool John Moores University, but was unfortunately cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic, or else we would have seen Nick riding his bike from London to Liverpool and back. Nick still managed to deliver his very last presentation on ‘Visualising the effect of sample size on descriptive statistics: with application to a countermovement jump test’ (Linthorne, 2020), which is available to view on YouTube via this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoMIZfChKKE, or on the webpage of ISBS 2020 Online Event: https://isbs.org/conferences/isbs-2020-online.

I wish to convey our deepest condolences to Nick’s family on behalf of the Editorial Board of Sports Biomechanics. Nick still had one last accepted manuscript with Sports Biomechanics after his passing. It is titled ‘The correlation between jump height and mechanical power in a countermovement jump in artificially inflated’ (Linthorne, 2021), and this is now available in this issue and is freely open until mid-2021, as a tribute to Nick’s contribution to both the sports biomechanics field and the journal, Sports Biomechanics.