In 2017 Rayvon Fouché published a valuable meditation on the roll of technologies in sport that remains useful today. On its cover we see a cyclist head bowed to show only the streamlined helmut, crouched and famed inside a bicycle wheel. Fouché's subject is familiar to every sports far, whether it's improvements in racing bicycles, new composite bats in baseball, new kinds of shoes for runners, continual improvements in automotive equipment for racers, and much more.
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| Jim Brewer, clearing 15 feet using a metal pole in 1957 |
It is hard to think of a sport where new technologies have not affected the abilities needed to win. The pole used in the pole vault was once rigid. A century ago it was made of hardwood, and it was heavy. During the 1940s and 1950s some athletes adopted an aluminum or steel pole, but few records were made using them. The new world records were made with bamboo poles, which were a lighter alternative, but they could break or splinter. Using any of these earlier poles required great physical strength to lift the body over the top of the pole, as Jim Brewer does in the photograph above.
When fiberglass or carbon fiber composites made possible springy, flexible poles c. 1960, the event changed. Suddenly it called for taller, agile competitors more than the bulkier and shorter vaulters using rigid poles, whose sheer strength pushed them over the bar. The fiberglass poles first bent and then launched the competitor over the bar, and the faster one ran, the more energy could be transferred to the pole when planted, bent, and sprung. The highest jump with a wooden pole was 4.25 meters, in 1925; with a bamboo pole 4.77 meters in 1942, and with a steel pole 4.81 meters in 1960. The flexible pole enabled a vault of 5 meters in 1963, 6 meters in 1985, and 6.31 meters (more than 20 feet) in 2026. Changing technologies transformed the event and facilitated huge advances.
Fouché cannot discuss every sport in 222 pages, and indeed leaves out the pole vault, but he examines many famous athletes, including the swimmer Michael Phelps, the runner Oscar Pistorius, and the cyclist Lance Armstrong. He looks at a wide range of sports equipment and enhancements, including many pages discussing designer drugs, whose use forced competitions to introduce drug testing. Because there are so many technological aspects in sports, he argues, "leaps in performance are no longer looked at with awe and admiration but are examined critically." (221) The era when success was attributed entirely to the athlete, not to the equipment, coaches, nutritionists, and new techniques, is over.
But Fouché is not telling a story of decline and loss. Rather, he argues that sport technology needs to be studied more thoroughly and better understood, so that regulations maintain a level playing field. Fouché argues for the value of instant replay, for example, which does not impinge on an athlete's performance. But he does recognize that using instant replay, notably in football, requires a trade off as the flow of play is interrupted. In short, this is not a book that yearns for an impossible return to the pastoral simplicity of a pre-technological era, but rather an argument for careful adoption and regulation of new technologies.
The sports fan will be happy to know that Fouché's arguments are illustrated by short case studies, including many famous controversies. Game Changer is clearly written and it still deserves a wide audience.
Rayvon Fouché, Game Changer: The Technoscientific Revolution in Sports.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017, 262 pages, including notes and index.
