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Researchers are increasingly focusing their attention on how to make sport a faster, more accurate and more entertaining industry, integrating smart technology into everything from bowling balls to compression garments.
In the future, it will be a given that your sports clothing will accommodate an army of devices including a GPS, heart rate monitor, digital compass, gyroscope and accelerometer to feed scores of performance data direct to your smartphone. Meanwhile, the particular fabric you'll be wearing will be very quietly regulating the movement of your sweat from the surface of your skin through the garment to the atmosphere, to ensure your comfort levels are at their peak.
It's not about manipulating technology to give one athlete an advantage over another; it's about optimising the individual athlete's energy output and obtaining more accurate data for training.
Late in 2010, skier Scott Kneller claimed Australia's first Ski Cross World Cup gold medal, after having taken part in a research project in Innichen, Italy, and in Melbourne. Drag and lift forces were measured and used in a mathematical glide model to quantify the distance advantage of different types of skiwear and positions which would later influence the tactics of the Australian team.
Of particular interest to Franz Konstantin Fuss, team leader of the SportzEdge program in the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) Platform Technologies Research Institute in Melbourne. when examining the team's racing positions was what they were doing with their elbows. "The athlete is slower even if he produces the same [amount of] energy because of aerodynamic drag. So we need to mend energy leaks through racing positions, for example, deep tuck, medium tuck, upright flexed and so on. A trainer once told me that extended (as opposed to flexed) elbows were better," he said.
"If you watch a video of the race, Scott is about 2 or 3 m behind (silver medal winner, Switzerland's Alex Fiva), and then you look at the difference in their elbows - this is why Scott is able to make ground. It's simply the aerodynamic improvement, and some other factors," Fuss added. "We found that changing the choice of garments and altering the stance taken by the skiers measurably reduces the aerodynamic drag, giving them a valuable advantage in a sport where every millisecond counts."
This year, the RMIT sports science researchers worked with snowboarder Alex 'Chumpy' Pullin, who became the first Australian snowboard cross rider to claim a World Championship and World Cup title in the one year. Preliminary testing saw him choose a racing garment that made a difference of 0.5 m on a simulated 100 m glide in a wind tunnel - an edge which helped him to secure the simultaneous titles.
Knowing the body's most aerodynamic positions is vital for elite cyclists too, as their races can often be won or lost by mere parts of a second. Scientists from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand with New Zealand's National Cycling Federation, BikeNZ, are trying to pinpoint exactly what these are.
Earlier this year, test cyclists performing in the university's wind tunnel shaved 0.40 seconds off each lap after an analysis of drag force, airflow changes and body positioning. By adopting lower hand positions and a combination of a lower body position, a disk rear wheel and a body suit, the researchers were able to reduce the total drag effect by 0.45 kg.
