Running Away from Reason

As expected, the Beijing Olympics has again brought the world of sports to the forefront of media coverage. The other day, I was mildly surprised to come across an article called “Innovation of Olympic Proportions”, which talked about technological breakthroughs leading to the creation of sporting equipment that are going to change the face of sports forever.

Indeed, the continued development of technology has led to some much-needed developments in the way athletes train and get better at their respective sporting fields. Because of technology, not only are athletes able to view past performances in order to see what mistakes they are unconsciously making, but they are even able to stream these videos to corresponding computer software which are able to do highly sophisticated computations. These computations prove vital to reaching a marked improvement in an athlete’s sporting record. After all, physics is very much intertwined with sports.

But the article I am referring to really blew me away, in that they really did purport to change the way we see and do certain sports. Nike’s Flywire, the most modern pair of track shoes to date, use only “the barest exoskeleton of wispy, high-tech filaments affixed to an ultrathin fabric scrim”. The shoe design revolutionizes not only the way sport shoes are designed, but also the way sport shoes are produced. It disposes of the traditional analog-stitching procedure, letting a designer’s imagination “flow through a computer chip” and creates a shoe prototype in a matter of seconds. Not to be outdone, Adidas’ newest track shoe – the Lone Star, boosts its wearer in a different way: it lists to port. (the article explains that most middle-distance races are won in the turns, and track runners never, ever turn to the right. So Lussier's 50 biomechanical engineers, industrial designers and electromechanical experts set about making asymmetrical spikes which would redirect the line of force that loads on the outside of his right foot and send it inward, toward the big toe. In other words, the right shoe would accelerate to the left.) Speedo’s LZR Racer swimsuits circumvent sporting rules (prohibiting suits that create buoyancy and suits that “lift” a swimmer”) by creating a fabric that molds and streamlines a swimmer into a “more ideal hydrodynamic shape”, allowing its wearers to be faster than their competitors, even though they may be of equal power.

All these new developments, while being truly impressive, seem to defeat the purpose of the Olympics, and the purpose of sports as well. With the creation of these high-tech innovations, athletes better funded are given an undue advantage over their competitors, turning the sport and its higher objectives into a mockery. What about getting better for the sake of getting better? When Olympics came into existence, the premium put on actual physical ability was so high that its participants were forbidden to wear clothing to ensure that there would be no unfair benefits utilized by any of the competitors. Now, it seems, in the fields of running and swimming in particular, it is a competition of who has access to the better technology. The stakes at this level are so high, that athletes are leaving their sponsors in order to don these swimsuits. They can’t afford not to. The article says that 41 world records in swimming had been set since the LZR Racer was introduced: and 37 of those swimmer were wearing it. Naysayers call the use of these enhancements “technological doping”. And we cannot help but admit that this is just the beginning. If this continues, in the long run, it is the loftier goals of the world of sports that will suffer. The danger of us becoming too reliant on technology to do the work us is incredibly appealing. If these developments continue to be unregulated, I can only imagine the backlash that will be waiting for us. Perhaps this is one of the few cases where we need to go back to the basics in order to truly appreciate the experience.