Competition is part of what makes us human.
We strive to be better, stronger, faster.
We set rules, invent sports, arrange contests,
and we yearn to win.
Science and technology are tools we use to improve our
performance.
But while carbon fibre tennis rackets and aerodynamic
bicycles might represent the cutting edge today, sports and
technology have been linked since the very earliest
Olympic games more than 2,000 years ago.
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.
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 lunch time on a Saturday afternoon, the whistle would
go, and 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.
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The concentration of people, existence of leisure time, and
availability of disposable income were all required for
the development of team sports like football.
And that situation arose through the technology of the
Industrial Revolution.
The steam engine was a key development that powered mass
production.
So when in 1827, Edward Budding invented the lawn
mower, steam power churned them out by the thousands, so
that a neat lawn was no longer the preserve of the rich.
And in 1843, Thomas Hancock patented the vulcanization of
rubber, so changing the rubber ball from some obscure ancient
Mesoamerican invention to a mass produced play thing.
So with flat lawns and a bouncy rubber ball, lawn
tennis was not far behind.
When we consider the legacy of the Industrial Revolution, we
might imagine scenes like this.
But these mills and factories drove not just technological
change, but also changes to society.
And sports is an intimate part of that.
The Bessemer converter is a symbol of large-scale steel
manufacture.
Much of that steel went into Britain's railways, and that
changed the landscape forever.
Suddenly, huge numbers of people
could travel long distances.
And for sport, that was a revelation.
Football teams could travel to away games, and fans could
follow them.
And whether there were crowds, there is money.
So in little more than a generation.
sports had gone from something that few could
afford to big business.
Technology has driven sports and, in turn, sports has
driven technology.
We built these huge cathedrals to sports.
And we filled them with technologies to help improve
our athletes' performance.
Timing is no longer done mechanically, but we use
fully-automated timing systems.
Telephoto lenses have revolutionised the way the
media covers our sport, as have the high-speed digital
cameras that have just come on the market.
Modern materials have profoundly changed the nature
of some of our sports.
And now science is so important to sports that my
title is Professor of Sports Engineering, something that
couldn't have happened a mere two decades ago.
These films are about the next part of the story.
They're about how we use our scientific understanding of
sports to improve our athletes and how it's changed the
nature of some of those sports.
We go to see how technology can help a coach train their
athletes more effectively--
Oh, wow, I love that.
--how we're developing ways to measure and understand a sport
more deeply, but without disturbing performance, and
how we can model all the elements of a sport to test
the limits of the game and safeguards its future.
Ultimately, though, it's about how we keep that balance
between progress and tradition.
Is it cheating?
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