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Read more: “Instant Expert: Sports engineering“

Most talks I give on sports engineering end with the question: don’t state-of-the-art technologies amount to cheating? A cheat is someone who acts dishonestly or unfairly in order to gain an advantage. The crux, then, is to know what constitutes being dishonest from a technological point of view for a particular sport. Technology and its possibilities are grounded in Newton’s laws and the manufacturing techniques of the day. The definition of dishonesty, on the other hand, is enshrined in the rather looser rules of sport. What cheating in sport amounts to, therefore, is the mismatch between what is possible with current technology and what the rules allow. Both of these change over time, so any sports ruling body has to be pretty sharp to ensure that their rules match the possibilities of the day.

Sometimes both sport and the rules evolve in unison, at other times they are out of sync. In tennis, for instance, no rule for the tennis racket existed before 1978 because wooden rackets had remained largely unchanged for over 100 years. But the development of the “spaghetti” racket that produced extraordinary amounts of spin threatened to change the game and it was duly banned. This was followed by successive rules to limit racket size as new materials allowed longer rackets.

An important turning point in athletics came in 1984 when Uwe Hohn of what was then East Germany threw the javelin an enormous 104.8 metres. One of the main issues with the javelin – apart from running out of space in the stadiums – was the ambiguous flat landings, where it was unclear if the javelin had landed tip first. A technological solution was found; the centre of mass was moved forwards by 4 centimetres to ensure the javelin tip always landed first. As a result javelins travel dramatically shorter distances, less than 100 metres and Hohn’s record stands as the ultimate “old rules” javelin record.

More recently, the world governing body for swimming, , banned the use of all-in-one polyurethane swimsuits. Athletes were breaking an unseemly number of world records because of the reduced drag and extra buoyancy the suits gave them. New rules were introduced to nothing above the navel or below the knee for men and nothing extending past the shoulder or below the knee for women. Their buoyancy is also limited to a maximum of 0.5 newtons (equivalent to the weight of a small coin). It remains to be seen if these rules will stop the rapid rise in performance.

Sports engineering and technology have an important role to play in sport. New technologies can keep a sport alive and relevant, but overuse can cause a sport to lose credibility. Whose job is it to keep the correct balance? The ruling bodies of sport have to step up to the mark. They need to keep an eye on current and future technologies and acquire the skills to understand the implications. If they don’t, they will always be playing catch-up.