You might think that the combination of science and
sport together is a relatively new thing, but actually
they've gone hand in hand ever since humans first started
playing games.
To ensure fairness, they would draw a line in the dirt.
But to improve things and ensure continuity
year-on-year, they cut two grooves in a marble sill.
You would stand on the sill and put your toes in the
groove before you started, hence the saying "toeing the
line." It's one of the earliest examples of sports
technology, and something you can still see today
at Olympia in Greece.
Fast forward through history and we crash into the
Industrial Revolution.
And for the first time, the average worker had a little
bit of disposable income, but there were
huge numbers of them.
And thanks to the new labour laws they also had the
Saturday afternoon off, so what to do with that time?
And the answer lies here in Sheffield's Kelham Island
Industrial Museum, and on the fantastic shelves over there.
So 19th century Sheffield was a huge manufacturer of
cutlery, of hand tools, and of cannon shells.
So at lunchtime on a Saturday afternoon, the whistle would
go on the workers would clock out using the clocking
machines over there.
They would then go down the pub for a couple of hours, and
then pass through those turnstiles there into the
football matches.
And that's why, traditionally, football starts at 3 o'clock
on a Saturday afternoon.
The story is all there on these shelves.
I give them feedback that helps them
achieve their goals.
And that's the goals for that session, the goals for that
training cycle.
And ultimately the goals that will get them towards elite
performance, and hopefully an Olympic medal.
So we've got the video of Ben.
This is the high-speed video linked to the force plate
data, and we can play the video through.
Oh, wow, I love that.
You can see the line projected on screen.
And if the line's longer, he's pushing harder, and depending
on what direction the line goes, that's the direction
he's pushing into the towers.
So here, for example, you see he's pushing back quite hard.
The drivers for this technology have obviously been
interaction with computers, gesture recognition, the sort
of thing that kind of normally happens in a living room.
With sports engineering, we can model a whole sport.
And we can use it to push the physical boundaries of the
discipline.
Is it cheating?