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with sports engineering we could 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 a hundred meter spray
we've collected data on the average
performances of the top 25 athletes in
the hundred meter sprints 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 used 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 stopwatch is going
increase the time recorded for all
runners there's another smaller step
change in 2008 when Usain Bolt came on
the scene with this dramatic win at the
Beijing Olympics what's interesting is
that if we remove bolt from our top 25
and just analyze 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's as improved
by around 5% since 1948 over the same
period at the men's javelin has gone
from 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 your
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 visualize that we can look at the
women's hundred meters freestyle
swimming event now this circle
represents a baseline of performance in
1948 and by 2010 performance it 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
professionalization 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 bodysuits more
impressively though goggles hats and
shaving down had quite a large effect
prior to those swimsuits an effective
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 is 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 the
globalization has started to reach its
limit the Industrial Revolution has had
its impact most of the improvements were
seeing in sport today are smaller in
nature and due to technology
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 have they allowed that's the rules
of sport now the rules of sports are
completely arbitrary they're steeped in
tradition but they do change there were
300 ancient Olympic Games lasting over
1200 years and in that time we went from
the sprint to Chariot Racing so the
science and engineering were learning
with today's sports will be used to
develop those sports that we'll see in
the three hundredth modern Olympic Games
a thousand years from now
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you
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