Balancing Tradition and Technological Innovation

For years, two hours was the number that haunted marathon runners Not a record Okay Runners train their entire careers to crack it And every time it held until one day this year when it didn't It's may twenty twenty six Day of the London Marathon Roads are shut, crowds run ten deep Nearly seven hundred fifty thousand people line twenty six miles of Tarmac in the city Waving signs, screaming at strangers clad in lycra And among them twoo Germans looking at their phones. We were watching as small as spectators alongside the track Mainly, though, They were watching the numbers come in We alwaysways with like one eye on the phone in terms of like where do we look like from a timing perspective, all huddled around one moile W. Yeah We were about kilometer forty something like that This is Mark Mkowski, Head of Innovation and Patrick Noavva. Head of running at Addidas They'd spent the last few years developing what's called a super shoe And they've flown to London to find out if their shoes could make history. using specially designed feather like foams. Carbon fiber. They have an astounding ability to return energy to the runner with every single stride gives you that feel of Literally at every step, you have got that springy effect that kind of like is delivered fromom the shoe into your kind of movement and into your stride Mark and Patrick were watching a small group of runners who were wearing their latest super shoes They've been locked in a head to head race with Nike over who could beat the two hour barrier first It had been tantalizingly close for years. Break it And the runner becomes a im mortal and the shoes on their feet brand gets written into the record books forever. Kenyan runner Sebastian Sawe was wearing the Adidas super shoes and leading the pack. Sebastian's predictions from round about half marathon still on slightly under two hundred one, it started strong. Can he find a little bit extra just to squeeze that last little bit out? And then they accelerated. Run outside, folks, grab anybody you can and say there's a bit of history maybe in the offing here well be going for this world record. We know we're like in world record time, but the world record before was two hours and thirty five seconds. St thirty five seconds to claw back In the final stretch, Mark and Patrick check their runers timings again. Cannie break the W record? Canny get close to two hours really solidified, I would say almost in the last kilometer C on, Sebastian You can get this. History in the making In two hours, noobbody has ever done this. They said it couldn't be done. Sebastian Sway crossed the line. One hour fififty nine minutes thirty seconds. barrier was gone And right behind him, Yomth Kajelcha, another Adidas athlete wearing the super shoe, alsoso sub two hours. Not one runner, but two. Absolutely incredible. I've never seen anything like that. What a finish. And then just we erupted and joy and like people started looking at us and then to be honest, we headed for the first pub and got whatever' parking mind they had there and like popped a few buckars There are many factors that contribute to moments of sporting greatness raaw athletic talent. Years of training and dedication and great coaching. but in the fine margins of elite sport when the difference between success and failure can be measured in a few millimeters or a few seconds, The latest technology can be the thing that makes the difference Fets once thought impossible and suddenly become achievable Patrick and Mark Sebastian Saway's marathon record was the culmination of years of work But they say this is just the beginning I can tell you that we're already working on the next iterations and I'm making it plural intentionally because you were just not stopping. Breaking the two hours is a watershed moment. There's the industry before and now there's the industry after. This is Tectonic from the Financial Times I'm FT spports editor, Josh Nobble In this season, I'm exploring how technology is rewiring sports I'll find out how it's changing the way athletes train and compete And I'll be asking These technological advances are making sport better or worse for both players and fans In this, the first of our three episodes, I want to find out what tech is doing for the athletes both for their careers and for how they compete Episode one The athletes Best out Let's start with a simple but important question. Are athletes today performing better than athletes in the past I'm Steve Haake. I'm from Sheffld Helm University. I'm professor of Sports engineering and also I like tech and I like sports tech Steve says if you step back and look at the first official Olympic records we have and how they've been broken over time You can actually see something quite interesting You get back to eighteen ninety six, the first Olympic Games. And if you look at performance since then, you see a rapid improvement in performance, really huge improvements of performance in the first kind of fifty, sixty years. And then you see this plateauing off that starts to occur in about the sixties. Look at the marathon records In eighteen ninety six, the top marathon time was two hours fifty eight minutes By nineteen sixty, the best runers got it down to two hours fifteen minutes It's taken another sixty years to get to the two hour mark you heard about at the top of the show. fifteen minutes in more than sixty years Some of the early twentieth century gains came down to better nutrition quality of life But after that It could just be a matter of the growing number of people on the planet. The first thing Most important thing is the size of your athlete population So the more really good athletes you have, the more likely you are to have a really good performance and more records. So that's what's driven most of the performers. You have globalization, so you have more people having access to facilities, maybe gone on scholarships to America or Britain or whatever. So then you have people with more access to, say, sports science. rightight at the end of that is the tech. So once you've got large populations with all these things available, you then have the tech, which is the icing the icing on the cake Like the new super shoes developed by Adidas to break the Marathon worldld record, offers athletes the smallest advantage icing on the icing on the cake. Performance has leveveled off in many, many sports, most sports, in fact And what you'll see is they're kind of in equilibrium. And if something comes along to disturb that equilibrium, you get a change And those new super shoes are just something that's disturbed that equilibrium We've got a little bit performance improvement, but enough to get you over that to hour mind Although each new technology might only give athletes a tiny advantage taken together, they can add up to a huge improvement in performance About a decade ago, our sports engineer Steve actually tested the impact of technology on competition spepecifically for the hundred meter sprint What difference would it make if you took a modern athlete and made them use the running shoes and equipment of Yestero Jes the Owens in the hundred meters The world's most superb runner makes the others look as if they're walking. he wins the final and equals the world's record time. Steve wanted to recreate the conditions from the nineteen thirty six Olympics when American sprinter Jesse Owens won one hundred meters gold S. He enlisted a sprinter named Andre dee Gras to run the test. And he just w three go medals at the Panam Games in Canada. He's only twenty. he was just hitting stardom. On the Friday he was competing in the stadium with everyone shouting his name. and then the Saturday morning he was at Pickering High School on an old kind of Cinder track. And so we gave him some old fashioned shoes that were made by a professional shoemaker that replicated what Jessie Owens had with spikes on them, made out of leather, quite soft And then we put some kind of baggy shorts on him, a cotton t shirt. So nothing like modern running shoes or aerodynamic running gear. And then back in nineteen thirty six, what you were running on was kind of a natural track made out of cinders It could be quite hard, it could be quite soft if it was really, really wet And there were no starting blocks and you've got images, if you look online, you can see images of Jesse Owens with a gardening trowel, literally a gardening trowel and he's down at his starter's end and he's digging a hole to create his very own placements basically his own starting blocks. Digging your own starting mounds went on until nineteen forty eight when the first standardized starting blocks were introduced at the Olympics And it wasn't until the nineteen sixties that running tracks started to be made out of new synthetic materials that had a good, even bounce. You would have the starter's gun Betty on marks get set Banged And on the bang there would be a bit of smoke and down the opposite end of the track, we'd have someone with a timing watch, which I've got one here and it's accurate about a fifth of a second, which it was about in those days. So we replicated this and I had to be the tim So I had to be the timer. Andreu de Gras ran down as fast as he could and there was just like bits of gravel just spurting everywhere. Then he got down and a pressed stop I it was like Eleven seconds. Oh my God, eleven seconds. That's terrible. Like the day before he done ten seconds Who knows what it was that slowed him down Was it the crude leather shoes or the uneven cinder block track Or was it the old fashioned stopwatch that made it impossible to record a decent time? Whatever the case De Gras with his modern day gear would go on to win seven Olympic gold medals including two at the last summer games in Paris. But it's not just on the day of a big race Technology can have an impact much earlier in someone's career For example, the hyper competitive world of American football where hundreds of thousands of high school kids dream of making it to the NFL I kill him because they was to What you've just heard is a highlight reel of big hits, touchdown plays, and improbable passes all put to pumping music But these aren't professional athletes. These are high school kids hoping to get spotted plloading clips to social media is now part of the ritual as promising players look to get recruited by college football teams, the key pathway to elite sport in America. There is entire social media crews that are following the athlete to every practice, journaling their entire story from training to games This is Lurissa Horton I'm the CEO here at Sumer Sports Suma tries to help young athletes make it in professional football And over the past few years, getting spotted has only become more competitive All across the country, highlight videos are uploaded and sent to colleges in the hopes of catching a recruiter's eye. Typically what a kid submits is thirty seconds of film that a recruiter will watch a view to decide if they're going to now invest the next two to five minutes to watch more film to then decide if they're gonna to invite you to a practice Larissa says that technology has already transformed the recruitment process in football But there are two problems. High school football is hyper competitive. And getting notice can be incredibly expensive That includes both the highlight reels, which require costly videographers and the summer camps where teenagers go to get timed, measured, and spotted by teams. When you go to these camps, there will be a subset of scouts or recruiters that will show up and then you can go and get measured. These measurements then get posted to a public website Iice of these camps are becoming more and more of a, I would say, a difficulty for everyone to get measured to get seen How much when you mention the sort of cost of going to a camp, I mean, how much are we talking about here We've heard from many families average cap costs being about five thousand dollars US So it's definitely our biggest concern is the pay to play that is happening in the market If you want to have the best pro sport, you want to make sure you're finding the best athletes. but what if you're filtering them out too early just because you can't see them since the places you're looking are now becoming pay to play Larissa has come up with a workaround An app that can help athletes measure themselves and their potential for a much, much lower price. We actually start by ingesting raw data like film and we turn that film into insights for the player, the coach, everyone in the sports ecosystem. Suma trains an AI model on video data and pairs it with tech enabled measuring tools Kids can actually download this app. They can measure themselves for wingspan, hand size, height, and even they their forty time The key measurement in the world of American football is the forty yard dash. Using Sumer Athletes can gather data and get recommendations on how to gain an edge in training All through the use of their smartphone. Looking at your measurables and then also looking at what are areas that I can improve. For example, if you can put on some weight, but keep your time, your forty time. does that boost your chances of going from looking like a D two athlete to a D one athlete? A quick bit of jargon here, a D two athlete would be someone at a division two school, which is less prestigious than a D one or a division one school SumA's recruiting tool has been made possible by advanced camera technology, better video analysis and the use of AI And that's all been helpful for people like Cari Darlington. I spent sixteen years in the NFL as a scout traveling the country and most recently I was working as a general manager with UCLA Bruins. Tari's professional career has focused on recruiting athletes. He's done that by traveling around the United States sometometimes staying in hotel rooms for as many as two hundred nights a year Be this is, historically, how football recruitment happens He goes to camps, he meets players And he gets a sense of a young athlete's potential When you first started, it it was a gut reaction. You would sit around the table and you would argue your point and have convictions based off of things that your eyes have actually physically seen. And a lot of I guess you would call football purists you know, we just didn't believe numbers by themselves. I could show you who somebody is Kari says that the trend towards tech enabled scouting that Sumer and others have brought about is rapidly changing the way future athletes are being discovered Tech has changed the entire approach I'd say probably over the past two to three years. it is a it's everyday. part of recruiting it and would use technology as a tool to either like streamline your process some, start to sort the type of players that you need that would fit your program or your style of offense, your style of defense, but also just starting to like track where certain players and certain positions that have success come from. Thanks to the move towards technology in the world of recruiting. Caring has a lot more data. and a lot more chance of finding undiscovered players that have that slight edge But from an athlete's perspective, all this tech and data can be a double edgeed sword Apps like Suma can replace going to a camp or sending a fancy video, yet it can also heap pressure on young athletes without the expert advice that comes from experienced coaches kids are over training, you're starting to see an increase of injuries coming in Burn out's a real thing now pressure from it. has that impact too. I think the information if not used properly. hurt you If that information is put in the right hands You can have coaches, printing aitioning, staff kind of teach you how to best optimize the information and data they've gathered. I think it's a beautiful thing, but if it's in the hands of somebody who doesn't understand the recovery piece of it. It could be a hindrance At the start of an athlete's career, access to small, tech enabled gains can be massively consequential For older athletes, it can also help them stay in the game for longer We'll find out how after the break sububurban Las Vegas F away from the casinos in the nightlife inside a big air conditioned building There's a robot that likes to fight. This is a jiu Jitsu robot. Basically it lights up if you choke or you do a joint submission. It moves very much like a human. It's not just a rag dooll This is Dunkan French Senior Vice presresident of Performance at the Ultimate Fighting Championship The UFC It's a sport league for mixed martial arts. And Duncan is on the ground demonstrating his moves on a robot. You can start to put him in armbars and then know you're going to get in certain postures where it'll light up and set off an alarm and then you know it's just more of a technique drilling toy This is an example of how technology is finding its way into the UFC One of the biggest combat sports leagues in the world Duncan helps run the UFC Performance Institute in Las Vegas The League has facilities like it in Mexico City and Shanghai All free for the UFC's more than seven hundred fighters They provide coaches and high tech equipment in the hopes that they can give their athletes a competitive edge We have anti gravity treadmills and they wear some kind of shorts that look like a wetsuit. we zip them in and this blows up like a bubble so you're like walking on the moon. And we can then get the mechanical, the biomechanics functioning again without the same impact on the joint that's just healed. We've also got some really cool VR capabilities for managing brain health if someone has a brain injury or concussion And then we can look at using that type of technology for eye tracking Tracking eye movement is one way to diagnose traumatic brain injuries and concussions There's also a new machine that uses sound waves for muscle recovery. yeah, it's like a subwoof in a car and you know if you put your hand on it, you can feel it vibrating The question is, is it possible to take the oldest sport in the world Two guys punching each other in the head and give it a tech makeover. We are essentially working with fighters. It's heart, our sport is very, very granular. It's very basic and fundamentally simple to understand. It's a fight If you think about most boxing gyms or MMA gyms in the world, they're pretty spit and sawdust. So athletes want that information, but where do they go and source it? Well, they can come to the PI and we can do all that and we can take care of it Interestingly The thinking behind the pererformance Institute is less about throwing bigger punches. and more about regulating size and weight in a healthy, sustainable way. We're a weight classification sport. so our athletes have to actually make a particular weight class before they can compete. And usually that means them modulating or changing their body weight a little bit prior to fights. Duncan says that UFCs move into more sophisticated training came out of a weake cut incident that happened twelve years ago Brazilian named Hennan Barau was preparing for a big UFC fight. Bru who will get his rematcher this Saturday night as the two walk into teeam Alpham Mail territory in Sacramento. One of the fighters in the main event unfortunately had a bad weight cuts and he had to drop out of the fight because he missed weight and he had to be transported to hospital Barrll had been sitting in a bathtub in a Sacramento hotel room trying to sweat out weight But when he stood up, he fainted, hit his head and was rushed to hospital Rpidly losing weight can have all sorts of side effects on the body That was actually only one of several incidents that year where fighters were drastically cutting their body weight and ended up requiring medical attention. No Oh my go. Oh. What happened? Oh So The UFC developed these high tech gyms specifically to counteract this exact problem with machines that can help cut weight We've got things like you know this metabolic cart, which people lie flat and we put this hood over their head like a spaceman's helmet. ultimately what that does is measure your basal metabolic rate, how fast you burn calories basically. We can then start to understand how long you need to reduce weight or change your diet for over a number of weeks prior to the fight So it's a math equation, basically. but without these high level technologies, we don't get that ability to really understand what's going onside the body physiologically. And it's worked. And we've reduced that The rates of missed weight significantly be about sixty eight percent reduction in missed weeights over the last nine years Duncan is pretty explicit about why this new technology also benefits the UFC's business model It's a events and promotions company. It sells tickets to a traveling circus. Yes, we have a global roster of athletes, which we do see as our assets. You know withithout the fighters, there is no UFC, there is no fight. We don't own the rights to those fighters like Liverpool FC or the Raiders here in Las Vegas. These are all independent contractors. Now I use him because everybody knows him. But if Connor McGregor was unable to fight. We can't book him to fight, then that fan base is going to go away, right? So we need to have our superstars healthy and being able to compete. And when they do compete, we want them to perform optimally There are plenty of examples where Sports teech has kept fighters performing optimally even as they get older. Fighters Like Andre Fey They call me touchy Fey. I mean, I know I wanted to be in the OC by like eight grade. So this has just been my focus for A long time now. He actually moved from California to Nevada full time a few years ago because of this facility He's had some ups and downs in his career. He's won a lot of fights He's also been choked out and had to pull out of fights because of injuries. I like to put on exciting fights. I've never been in a boring fight. I'll never be in a boring fight. And I think that's part of what contributes to my longevity, you know? At thirty five years old, Andre' actually not that much older than the average UFC fighter In general, experience counts for a lot in mixed martial arts But he's been around long enough to see the changes over time It's like going from the stone age, you know, like to modern times the way we used to train, the way we used to do strength conditioning. Everything in the sport has evolved Mixed martial arts is still a young sport And Andre says that technology is helping it professionalize and ultimately reach a bigger audience. Whether people realize it or not fighting is everyone's favorite sport. If you're at a basketball game, you're watching the best basketball players in the world play basketball and a fight breaks out in the stands, you'll stop watching the best basketball players in the world to watch two slobs fist fight. It's in our DNA, fighting is everybody's favorite sport. So as the sport grows, it's cool to watch it become kind of a mainstream thing I think it's going to head that direction Not every sport is about raw physical combat like the UFC But across the world from Cristiano Ronalda to LeBron James. We're seeing athletes able to compete at the highest level for longer thanks to a more modern approach Technology is helping find undiscovered talent. breaking world records, and it's also extending athletes' careers But when sport opens the door to technology, it doesn't always go as planned And sometimes, well the door gets pushed shut again. H's academic, Steve Hake So there's this balance between tradition and technology And some sports like cricket just go, no, it's a wooden bat That's all you're going to get, you're never going to get a carbon fiber b. Tennis goes, okay, we'll allow carbon fiber, but they can only be this long can only be this wide. They can only do certain things So having a good set of rules is the way to control what is allowed So the rule of phhysics says, we can do all of this. We could put wheels on the bottom of someone's running shoes if we really wanted to do a rocket pack. All these things are all possible So the rules of the sport define how much technology is used and once you've made that definition, you go for it. In the coming decades, Steve reckons sports rules will have to keep changing in response to new tech The use of super shoes like the kind designed by Addidas AI driven recruiting tools and recovery technology used by the UFC are all evidence of the subtle ways in which sports are progressing. for better. but beyond athletic performance There were also changes to the way that fans and spectators interact with sports the way that sports are broadcast and consumed And that's led to some tension That's next time on Techtonic This episode of Teecttonic was hosted by me, Josh Kobble The producer was Josh Gabbt Doyan Edwin Lane is our senior producer and Topha Fhez is executive producer Sound designed by Brene Turner and Sam Givinco Original Music by metaphor Music