Cycling: watch for . . .
How the cyclists fare on the climbing portions of the road race—and whether the U.S. riders outduel the competition up the hills, where weight savings are crucial.
Cycling
The focus this year is not on the bike—it’s on the wheels. USA Cycling turned to aerospace engineer Paul Lew for lighter, stronger wheels. What’s an aircraft guy doing in cycling? Lew says bicycles and airplanes are similar in that a reduction in weight and increase in strength should automatically enhance performance.
Image courtesy of Lew Racing
The spokes of his new wheel, the VT-1, have an airfoil shape. Since they taper to a sharp edge, they are aerodynamically more efficient than standard cylindrical spokes. But the real advance is in the material. Lew is using a new boron-based composite—something he first started experimenting with while building unmanned aerial vehicles, including the Inventus class of long-range, autonomous surveillance planes. The boron composite, he says, is three times as strong as carbon fiber of the same weight. Although he has extensively tested his wheel in wind tunnels and other environments, Lew isn’t releasing the data yet. The principle is simple, however: By applying the same force to less mass, riders should be able to generate more acceleration.
Each U.S. cyclist will get a custom-made set of VT-1s, but if you want your own, prepare to open your wallet. The first commercial wheels, which will be available after the Games, could go for as much as $15,000 a pair.
Image courtesy of Kisik Lee/USA Archery
Archery: watch for . . .
How training affects the archers’ form: A balanced, solid stance is critical, and some coaches differ on how much weight athletes should place on their front, or leading, foot
Archery
Not to knock the world’s best-known archer—the dashing Legolas of the Lord of the Rings movies, who launches arrows on the move and from all positions—but the Olympic Games reward consistency. Every archer stands the same way, the same distance from the same target. “Archery is a sport of accuracy and repetition,” says George Tekmitchov, an engineer at Hoyt, a bow manufacturer in Salt Lake City. The goal for engineers, therefore, is to design bows that behave the same way every time; an archer who trains in an arid climate, for instance, shouldn’t have to adjust his form to account for Beijing’s expected humidity. As a result, today’s top bows typically have a core of syntactic foam. This material is light and strong, made up of tiny, hollow spheres that don’t change volume when the temperature spikes or drops, thus keeping the bow’s behavior constant. One of Hoyt’s latest bows, the 900CX, aims for a slight edge in the technology race by replacing the typical fiberglass outer coating with a much lighter synthetic polymer and using a higher percentage of carbon fiber inside. The advantage of the new bow, Tekmitchov says, is higher efficiency. “It transfers more energy to the shot instead of wasting it on bending the thing.”
But the best bow in the world won’t help poor form. U.S. team leader Parrish, who is also high-performance manager for USA Archery, the sport’s governing body, says the group recently brought in a high-speed video camera that captures 1,200 frames per second. This is hardly overkill, given that the arrow flies from the bow at 220 feet per second; it moves two inches from one frame to the next. The new camera allows coaches to analyze minute errors in an archer’s technique. “You can actually see the arrow coming out of the bow,” Parrish says.
Tennis: watch for . . .
The close calls. Twice in each match, players will be allowed to challenge the human judge’s ruling and leave it up to artificial intelligence.
Tennis
They may as well just start calling it nanotennis. At Beijing, the players’ rackets will incorporate materials that filter vibrations, allowing only certain frequencies to flow through to their hands, and titanium nanofibers that impart extra strength without adding weight. Dunlop and Head, two major racket manufacturers, are also touting the use of aerogel —the incredibly low-density solid that NASA used to collect comet particles as part of its Stardust mission—in their latest models. The material is supposed to impart stiffness without increasing weight and distribute the impact of a ball better throughout the racket head. The companies say this translates to more power and better feel.
Nevertheless, the game’s most visible scientific upgrade may not be in the equipment but in the officiating. Tennis at the 2008 Olympics will feature the Hawk-Eye computerized line judge system. Hawk-Eye, which made its Wimbledon debut last year, calculates the flight path of a ball by estimating its 3-D position from a series of snapshots taken by as many as 10 cameras. The system then projects the path forward to the point at which the ball hits the ground, objectively revealing whether it struck in or out.
The lightweight Zoom Victory, made from supertough astrofabric.
Image courtesy of Nike
Running: watch for . . .
How the runners' feet strike the ground in the longer races. The top competitors should barely touch with their heels. Newton running shoes accentuate this form in elite runners and encourage it in those with less-than-perfect technique.
Running
Nike’s Zoom Victory should make the most noise on the track, as the company’s new-tech shoes have at recent Olympics. The lightweight track shoe gets its support from 116 cables spun out of Vectran—the same material NASA used in the air bags that cushioned the Spirit and Opportunity rovers when they landed on Mars. While Nike’s shoes may draw the most attention, though, a small company in Boulder, Colorado, called Newton Running is trying to have a much larger impact on the sport.
Founder Danny Abshire, a longtime running coach and orthotics expert, has been working for more than a decade on a shoe that makes you feel as if you’re running barefoot. He says most runners have poor form: They strike with their heels first and opt for a longer stride instead of higher turnover. When running barefoot, though, you tend to correct these errors, so the Newton shoes encourage a more efficient gait by tricking the foot into thinking it is naked. The forefoot section of the shoe’s sole includes four small rubber blocks that move up and down relative to the rest of the shoe. When you hit the ground, the lugs press against a stretchable membrane below your foot, which then pushes back as you launch into the next step. “It’s basically an energy storage and retrieval system,” Abshire says. Several world-class triathletes have tested the Newton in major races and significantly dropped their times.
