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Well, 2012 is here. At last. It’s been a long wait and it seems like we’ve been talking about 2012 forever. For anyone involved in elite sport it is like a switch has been thrown – I’m only on the periphery and it’s manic so it must be crazy for those at the centre of it all. As part of the celebrations of the role of science in sport, I’ve been working with the Royal Institution in London on a project funded by Research Councils UK (RCUK) to put on a series of 6 events to showcase the UK science community’s efforts behind the scenes. Opened by David Willets MP (the UK Minister for Universities and Science), the first event was held on 25th January at the Royal Institution on the topic of wheelchair basketball (as far as we know the first time wheelchair basketball has featured in the famous Faraday Lecture Theatre).
Not only did the audience learn something new, we found out what the audience thought of science and sport.
Tyler Saunders shoots a perfect basket in the Faraday Lecture Theatre at the Royal Institution.
Over the past couple of years I have been quite busy speaking about the role of technology in disability sport at numerous science festivals and conferences. South Africa’s ground breaking decision to select the bi-lateral amputee, Oscar Pistorius, to compete at the IAAF World Championships in South Korea has prompted me to finally write a new blog post on the topic.
I am a huge supporter of disability sport and have been privileged to attend the past two Paralympic Games. I also lead a major Cultural Olympiad project called Extraordinary Moves that aims to challenge perceptions of disability through the creation of a new body of provocative artworks. Furthermore, through academic research I have tried to understand why some performance enhancing technologies are permitted, whilst other are prohibited. Perhaps I am somewhat qualified to comment on this highly emotive issue.
South African Paralympic runner Oscar Pistorius taking part in the Landsmót ungmennafélags Íslands, the largest sporting event in Iceland.
Sports engineers never seem to be that far away from a controversy. Just as one ‘issue’ is put to rest, you can be sure that a new hot potato is on the horizon. I’d argue that this is no bad thing; it is just a symptom of people’s natural resistance to change, and as long as sport continues to evolve, it’s probably in good health. Of far greater concern is the issue of stagnation, when nothing new is happening and your sport slowly but surely fades away into obscurity. The list of sports that were once in the Olympics but now only reside in amusing archive footage is surprisingly large. I am sure that in its day, underwater swimming was a highly competitive and exciting event, but can you really see it making a comeback anytime soon?
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