Olympic technology 1996

At a speed-skating meet in Norway in the 1960s, Canadian Paul Enoch smashed a world record by three seconds. He did it wearing a pair of his wife’s skintight nylon stockings–in an age when most skaters still wore flapping woolen garments. A year later, the first skin-tight nylon racing suit was released on the market.

That just goes to show the effect new technology can have on a sport–and these days, that technology is a lot more sophisticated than nylon stockings. At the Olympic Games now underway in Atlanta, technological advances are helping both athletes and organizers.

Take the cyclists, for instance. As they race around a 400-metre track at 55 kilometers per hour, they’ll be riding “superbikes” that compare to ordinary bicycles roughly the way Jacques Villeneuve’s Williams-Renault Formula 1 race car compares to your father’s Oldsmobile.

On the U.S. bicycles, for example, except for the pedals and seat, most parts are little more than 2 1/2 centimetres wide, and the metal tubing that makes up the frame is curved in front and pointed in back, just like the cyclists’ racing helmets. This tear-drop design lets air pass cleanly around the frame, minimizing drag. Each bike is then individually fitted to the rider in a wind-tunnel, to find a riding position for the cyclist that minimizes drag while maximizing riding power. The bicycles are also incredibly light: the Australian bicycles, for instance, weight about as much as two litres of milk.

Reducing drag is also important in canoeing and kayaking. Two percent less drag on a canoe translates into a lead of two full boat-lengths in a 1,000-metre race. The paddle also plays a key role. This year, several teams are using a revolutionary paddle produced by Australian inventor Howard Crocker. While watching videos of the Barcelona Olympics. Crocker noticed that rowers had to almost tug the oar from the water at the end of a stroke. His new Crocker oar, made of carbon fiber, is flatter than traditional oars; as a result, it’s more stable in the water, comes out of the water more easily, and passes through the air more cleanly.

Even sports like gymnastics, where all the athletes use the same equipment, have benefited from technology. Traditionally, gymnastics equipment has been made of wood, because it is flexible, bending slightly as a gymnast works on it. But the latest gymnastics equipment is made of a new composite material, a mixture of wood and fiberglass, which is stronger and more flexible than ordinary wood. This means it absorbs more of the force of the athlete’s body hitting it, which takes some of the pressure off the athlete’s joints.

Judges, scorers and organizers are also benefiting from technological advances. For example, marathon runners will be wearing microchips in their shoelaces. Each chip is a transponder keyed to a specific runner. Their signals will be picked up by other transponders along the course, so that each runner can be precisely timed, even if he’s running in the middle of a pack of 50.

Out on the shooting range, another unique scoring mechanism is being used. Each target has four microphones spaced equidistantly around its perimeter. Each microphone measures the time it takes the sound of the bullet striking the target to reach it. A computer will then instantly calculate the exact location of the hit. If the sound reaches all four microphones at the same instant, then the computer knows a bull’s-eye was scored.

Computers are everywhere at these Games: so many, combined with so much high-speed communications equipment, it’s hard to imagine how anyone managed to stage the Olympics in years past without either. In addition to four IBM mainframe computers, the Olympics are using 80 office servers, 7,000 desktop and laptop computers, 250 PC networks, 6,000 pagers, 9,000 radios and 1,000 printers–and that doesn’t count all the computers and communications equipment in use by journalists, competitors and coaches. And, of course, for the first time, people all over the world are getting Olympic results directly from the Internet–in some sports, such as yachting, they can even follow the competition in real time over the Internet.

Yet all the technology isn’t what makes the Games so fascinating (although hopefully it did something in that regard for my column). The Olympic Games still come down to individual athletes reaching inside themselves for the will and strength to perform better than their best one special time, in one special place. That’s why we watch the Games, and that’s one thing technology will never change.

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