Sport and the technological and financial arms race: Back to the grass-roots

The Vancouver Winter Olympics, already acknowledged as “the Olympics of Engineering”, proved the impact of technology on sports. Most innovations seen in Vancouver were introduced in the field of aerodynamics, such as ridged helmets helping to push the separation point further backwards and reducing drag, high-compression garments reshaping the body by minimizing the frontal area, and micro-structured fabrics reducing the critical Reynolds number. The engineering shopping list also included piezo shunt skis (developed by Head for various sports equipment such as racquets, skis and snowboards) with improved stiffness and damping properties. Lindsey Vonn and Bode Miller, equipped with these skis, won five medals. The negative effect of hi-tech sports equipment is that such high-level advancements typically result in increasingly high prices, culminating for example in bobsleighs worth $100,000. This gives financially strong national teams an edge over poorer teams and countries. It therefore does not come as a surprise that the International Paralympic Committee has adopted a more altruistic approach by aiming at sports equipment under the fundamental principles of universality (equipment commercially available to all and not just to selected athletes or countries) and physical prowess (“Human performance is the critical endeavour, not the impact of technology and equipment”: Van de Vliet, 2010).

After two years of successful publishing, Sports Technology has changed publisher for good and will be published by Routledge (under Taylor & Francis) from 2010 onwards. This is a strategic move as we aim to consolidate all our sports technology-related research publications, including journal, conference proceedings and books, with Routledge. We are in the process of establishing a significant and unique publishing portal in the sports technology discipline field with an aim to grow the visibility and accessibility of our publications worldwide and, with that, citations and impact factors for the benefit of contributing authors.

The journal's new website is: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/RTEC.

Sports Technology will award two prizes each calendar year, starting in 2010: namely, the Best Paper Award and the Young Investigator's Award. The latter is reserved for students' projects up to the level of PhD theses with the student as first author. The winners and runners-up will be announced and featured in the first journal issue of the following year under a special section, including their photo and bio. Sports Technology aims to publish at least one special issue per year related to a specific topic such as sports equipment or events. The first issue of 2010 comprises the first special issue of Sports Technology, dedicated to the topic of sports surfaces.

The Austrian ski jumper Gregor Schlierenzauer, featured on the cover of Sports Technology 2 (3–4), 2009, won one gold and two bronze medals at the Vancouver Olympic Games 2010, as well as one gold and one silver medal at the Ski Flying World Championships 2010.