Technology / Gadgets

The International Olympic Committee tries to ensure that the competition is between athletes and not their gear. That has not stopped manufacturers and coaches from seeking technological advantages, however. For example, a software package called Dartfish is standard training equipment among U.S. athletes; it enables coaches to record an athlete in action, then instantly review the performance, freezing a frame to highlight a glitch. After immediate feedback, the athlete can head right back out and make the necessary adjustment—and study the results later at home by means of the system’s Web-publishing feature. Johnson & Johnson is working with various teams to improve athletes’ visual skills. And other programs are double top secret: Jim Miller, the endurance programs director for USA Cycling, will not divulge the advanced training techniques his group has developed until after the Games.

Sometimes the newest, coolest gear is only marginally better than what it replaces. But technological one-upmanship may confer a psychological advantage. Brent Rushall, a human performance expert and sports psychology professor emeritus at San Diego State University, says athletes can perform worse if they believe the competition has significantly better equipment. The most telling case may be in the pool. Some swimmers have called for Speedo’s reengineered suit to be banned, since sponsorship affiliations may force them to wear a different brand. Others insist that the emphasis on space-age materials in swimming and in other sports is overblown. “It always comes back to the ability of the athlete,” says Tom Parrish, leader of the U.S. Olympic archery team.

Heart-stopping contests and photo-finish races are a given at the Olympics, but 2008 is a year of more subtle competitions, too. Look for who sports that new Speedo suit, how kayakers fare on the faster artificial whitewater course, whether U.S. cyclists can transform lighter wheels into bigger leads. This is your guide to the science and technology face-off, the match within the match.

Table tennis: watch for . . .
Both the ball’s spin—its action as it bounces off the table—and its speed. Given the speed, you’ll need to wait for the instant replays.

Table Tennis
Don’t call it Ping–Pong. Modern table tennis is one of the world’s most popular sports, and a match between top-notch competitors looks like a hard-court tennis game played in fast-forward. The ball jumps off the paddle at up to 60 miles an hour and can spin as fast as 9,000 revolutions per minute. It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that the paddles used at the highest levels don’t much resemble the busted-up wooden things sitting on the average basement pong table. “More spin and more speed are demanded than 10 years ago,” says Junichi Toda, an engineer at Killerspin, a Chicago-based equipment maker.

Teodor Gheorghe, technical director of U.S. Table Tennis, says all the top players use advanced paddles, so it’s hard for one player to gain a technological edge. One of the new Killerspin models is covered with a dense synthetic rubber that offers more surface tension. Because the molecules are packed closer together than in standard rubber, Toda says, there are more particles to grip the ball, and a player can transfer more spin with the same swing. Competition rules specify that the blade must be at least 85 percent natural wood. Inside the wood, though, you might find a hybrid titanium-carbon layer. The carbon fiber adds speed, while the titanium “bends like a bow and shoots a ball as if shooting an arrow,” Toda says. Killerspin is also incorporating a new material called Texalium, a glass fiber with an aluminum coating. It is supposed to improve defensive play because it gives and is therefore more effective at absorbing the impact of a ball.

Image © Speedo

Swimming: watch for . . .
New gear from Mizuno, Nike, and others, who are debuting their own space-age swimsuits. Look for who wears what—and who wins—to see if suits really matter.

Swimming
For the second time in as many Games, Speedo has triumphantly trotted out a revolutionary space-age swimsuit, and in the months leading up to Beijing, the LZR Racer didn’t make waves just in the pool. It generated serious controversy, too.

The suit, which leaves the arms and shoulders exposed but extends to the swimmer’s ankles, features a series of polyurethane-based, millimeter-thick panels designed to reduce drag. Watch a swimmer in a traditional suit pushing off a wall and you’ll notice a kind of rippling effect in the muscles—even if the swimmer has almost zero body fat. Speedo ran computational fluid dynamics tests to identify these drag hot spots, then placed panels in parts of the suit that cover the chest, thighs, and other friction spots to cancel out the ripple.

At press time, swimmers wearing the LZR Racer had broken 37 world records since the February unveiling, causing many to cry technological foul. Others say that Speedo’s claims about the suit’s performance-enhancing, drag-reducing capabilities are marketing double-talk rather than real science. Rushall insists that the faster times should be attributed to recent advances in stroke mechanics and training techniques; freestyl­ers, for example, have stopped pulling through an S-shaped curve, adopting a straighter, more powerful path for each stroke. Anything that gives swimmers a psychological boost is more important than the new suits, Rushall argues. “If I could get the top 100 swimmers in the world to swim with their faces painted red,” he says, “I could make the same claims as Speedo.”