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With sports engineering, we
can model a whole sport.
And we can use it to push the
physical boundaries of the
discipline.
And if we introduce technology
into sport, is it cheating?
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Let's start with the
100-meter sprint.
We've collected data on the
average performances of the
top 25 athletes in the 100-meter
sprint every year
since the 1890s.
You can immediately see some
pretty major spikes and steps,
most obviously from the First
and Second World Wars, which
worsen performance
dramatically.
The first post-war Olympics were
in 1948, so we usually
use that year as the
baseline for any
comparisons that we do.
In the 1970s, there's a dramatic
increase in times,
which was due to the
introduction of fully
automated timing.
Removing the reaction time of
the judges setting their stop
watches going increased the time
recorded for all runners.
There's another smaller step
change in 2008 when Usain Bolt
came on the scene with
his dramatic win
at the Beijing Olympics.
What's interesting is that, if
we remove Bolt from our top 25
and just analyse the
other 24, the step
change is still there.
At these elite levels, it looks
like a standout athlete
makes everyone else perform
better too.
The men's 100-meter sprint
has improved by
around 5% since 1948.
Over the same period, the men's
javelin has gone some 70
meters to 85 meters,
an increase of 21%.
Are we really saying that the
performance improvements of
these two sports is
that different?
Well, one issue we have is
that, with sprinting, our
measurement is time, while, for
javelin, it's distance.
What we need is a
common metric.
That shared measure is an
energy calculation.
And as an example of how we
can visualise that, we can
look at the women's 100-meters
freestyle swimming event.
Now this circle represents a
baseline performance in 1948.
And by 2010, performance had
improved by 52% to here.
Now what are the things that
contributed to that
performance improvement?
Well here, we have the
globalisation effects.
And by that, I mean population
increase, nutrition, coaching,
professionalisation.
But there are other effects that
have improved performance
in swimming as well.
Here, we have the Olympic
games oscillation.
And that occurs every four
years, so that, in an Olympic
year, you see a small but
measurable performance
improvement.
What about technologies
that we've allowed?
Well, in swimming, we think
about the swimsuit.
And in 2000, they went from the
traditional female style
and the Speedos to the longer,
full-body suits.
More impressively, though,
goggles, hats, and shaving
down had quite a large effect
prior to those swim suits.
An effect of goggles was to
allow the swimmer to train for
longer in chlorinated pools.
thereby, improving
performance.
Of course, there are
technologies that have not
been allowed.
There were the full-body
swimsuits in 2008 that had
polyurethane panels
down the sides.
And by 2009, the whole body was
covered in polyurethane.
And what that did was that
reduced the skin friction
across the body.
It pulled the body in and
reduced the cross sectional
area of the body presented
to the water.
And that reduced hydrodynamic
drag.
The other thing we've noticed in
swimming is the transition
between hand timing and fully
automated timing, something
we've seen in other sports.
So with these statistics and
with this methodology, we can
look at the effect of different
factors on sport.
And one thing we've noticed is
how globalisation has started
to reach its limits.
The Industrial Revolution
has had its impact.
Most of the improvements we're
seeing in sport today are
smaller in nature and
due to technology.
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We started our journey with the
birth of modern sport and
its development, hand-in-hand,
with technology.
But performances are starting
to plateau.
And even with the occasional
Usain Bolt mixing things up,
world records are going
to become rare
in some of our sports.
Now athletes don't like that,
audiences don't like that, and
the ruling bodies
don't like that.
Sports engineering will hold the
balance between the world
of the possible, that's Newton's
laws, and the world
of the allowed, that's
the rules of sport.
Now the rules of sport are
completely arbitrary.
They're steeped in tradition,
but they do change.
There were 300 ancient
Olympic games
lasting over 1,200 years.
And in that time, we went from
the sprint to chariot racing.
So the science and engineering
we're learning with today's
sports will be used to develop
those sports that we'll see in
the 300th modern Olympic games
1,000 years from now.
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