The Technology Olympics

We’re just a few short weeks away from the Olympics. A lot of attention will be on performance enhancing drugs. There are other issues that give some countries and individuals advantages that have nothing to do with steroids and everything to do with technology.

Take, for instance, the new swimsuits that Speedo has developed. They are state of the art and fit the athletes perfectly. Since they have been introduced, swimmers using them have seen their times drop dramatically. New world records have been set. Will every athlete have the opportunity to use one of these new suits?

I saw a documentary on the Australian swim team. They have built a special swimming pool with glass sides so the performance can be captured on video and the efficiency monitored by computer. The members get feedback on their technique that nobody else in the world has access to.

A few years ago, the cycling world was caught off guard by a new spoke design where the weight shifted towards the perimeter as the bicycle went faster. Another innovation was wheel covers that cut down on the wind resistance. Teardrop helmets did the same. When things like this happen, the performance of an individual athlete may not determine the outcome. Access to the technology me be the difference between a gold medal and none.

Some bobsledding teams have major automakers improving their sleds. Some of the poorer nations buy the used sleds that have been tossed to the side to make way for the new ones.

Skiing is another sport where some countries seem to get the technological advances before others.

What I find interesting is that the International Olympic Committee seems to turn a blind eye to performances enhanced by technology, unlike their position on drugs.

Another factor in the success of some countries is the money they put aside for athlete development. Countries reward performance in different ways. For some there is very little reward. For example, Australia used to spend, and probably still does, far more on its athletes than Canada, even though it has a smaller population. There are certainly the haves and the have nots when funding is concerned.

What you end up with is a system where there are often many other factors in the result than the athlete’s performance. In spite of this, sometimes you end up with somebody like Britain’s Daly Thompson, who won two gold medals at the Olympics in 1980 and 1984. What is remarkable is that he was his own coach and did everything pretty much on his own.

You know something is funny when India, a country with over one billion people has won only seventeen Olympic medals ever, eleven of them in field hockey. Australia with its current population of just over twenty million has won 386.