The marathon event, is the longest running event held at the Olympic Games, where competitors race over a distance of 42.195 km (26.219 miles) on a set road course. The marathon distance became standardised in 1921 but a version of the marathon event was held at the first modern Olympic Games in 1896. The women’s marathon […]
Football and skill: why you’re not as individual as you think you are
As much as I hate football (for explanation – I’m a Blackburn Rovers fan; enough said) I’m enjoying my holiday read. It’s The Numbers Game by Chris Anderson and David Sally and is subtitled “Why everything you know about football is wrong”. It’s not actually the best thing to relax to as I keep jumping […]
How does a smart floor work?
As sports engineers we develop lots of systems to help athletes perform better. Many of these system help by giving the athletes and their coaches more information about the way they move whilst they perform a sporting action. This includes measures such as speed, direction and many other specialised measurements for biomechanical analysis. An example […]
Sprinting’s latest performance enhancer: Usain Bolt.
The following article is a synopsis of “Material Advantage” which was published in Physics World in July 2012. It can be found here. — When I went into the field of sports engineering, people would say to me “it’s ruining sport, it’s just about who has the best equipment”. This put me in a dilemma: […]
Swimsuit ban will affect world record progression
FINA changed the rules on swimsuits on 1st January 2010. This effectively banned full body polyurethane swimsuits which had been blamed for the overwhelming number of world records in the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2009 Rome World Championships. Nunzio Lanotte wrote a guest blog on this very subject and concluded that perhaps we shouldn’t […]