Not long ago, Emma Hinchliffe of Fortune Magazine asked Clara Wu Tsai this question: “Would you rather build the first billion-dollar WNBA team or make a major scientific discovery about human performance?”
Smartly, Wu Tsai responded, “I’d rather do both!” The first option is close to getting done. Sportico recently estimated that New York Liberty is worth a conservative $600 million, a mere seven years after she and Joe Tsai bought the WNBA club for around $12 million from James Dolan, mostly in debt
relief and promise of future revenue-sharing.
Less known is the couple’s efforts with the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance, a $220 million commitment to answering a unique health question. Can studying professional athletes—human beings at peak performance— both drive success in professional sports and improve the general population’s health. While federal funding goes mainly to finding cures for disease, the alliance work is about innovations in health, Wu Tsai explained.
Of particular note is a $50 million infusion of cash from the Alliance and Jane and David Ott, who serves on the USA Track & Field Foundation board, into what’s called the Women’s Health, Sports & Performance Institute, located in Brighton, Mass. The funding has relevance of course for the Liberty owner. Women are far more likely to suffer knee injuries and are two to eight more likely to tear their ACLs in comparison to men, per data from Yale Medicine.
As Liberty fans know, more than one of the team’s top players has suffered such injuries. Betnijah Laney-Hamilton has missed significant time over the past several years to knee injuries, including all of last season.
Now five years in, wrote Hinchliffe, there are some tangible results from the alliance.
Headquartered at Stanford, the Alliance now encompasses more than 500 scientists across
seven institutions. Scientists within this group have published 850 pieces of research, filed 28
patents, and have three drugs seeking FDA approval.One of the Alliance’s most exciting discoveries is related to muscle regeneration. In sports, this
will help answer questions about why female athletes suffer more ACL injuries and how to
better treat and prevent them. But it’s also led to the discovery of a new molecule involved in
the regenerative capacity of muscle that is now part of a drug in an FDA trial that would
maintain muscle health, mass, and strength with age.
Wu Tsai admits that the real milestones will come when the research gets translated into better results.
“Research is great, but impact comes when you are able to translate the findings onto the court or the field,” Wu Tsai said. Eventually, she added the couple would like the NBA and WNBA to get involved.
“When you come up with an incredible breakthrough that you can translate to players, it means
they can be on the floor longer, miss fewer games, and that means more fans can see their
favorite athletes play more,” Wu Tsai argued. “That just leads to a better product, more fan
engagement, more excitement. And it’s really good for business.”
The Tsais, the Fortune reporter noted, have already integrated new “best practices” for long-range travel, sleep, and nutrition into the Liberty and the Nets performance regimens. The Liberty effort will be enhanced next year with the opening of the team’s new $80 million practice facility in Greenpoint which will have state-of-the-art training equipment.
The women’s health initiative, Wu Tsai noted, is about filling in what she calls the “white spaces” in philanthropy.
“This really flips that discussion to understand health.” Wu Tsai said. “One of the key tenets of our philanthropy is to find quote-unquote white spaces, places where funding doesn’t exist, but it’s a subject matter of great importance, and if funded could lead to some breakthrough for a wide swath of population. This fit that.”
