The Future of Sports Engineering

GEORGE IMAFIDON

Well, I have just finished another 5k run training for the London Marathon and I have just hit a PB. I am on track to beat my target so couldn't be more excited. What a life. Let's go.

DR THOMAS ALLEN

I think that sports engineering is really about applying technology to understand problems in sport, whatever they may be

PROFESSOR STEVE HAAKE

With all the best sports technology in the world, if people don't pick it up, then what's the point?

GEORGE IMAFIDON

I'm George Imafidon and you're listening to the Create the Future podcast from the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. In this episode, I'm joined by Professor Steve Haake and Dr. Tom Allen as we explore the endless possibilities of Sports Engineering.

Steve established Sports Engineering as a global discipline. But, not only that, he also set up the world's largest academic research group in the world, which Tom eventually joined as one of his Ph.D. students.

PROFESSOR STEVE HAAKE

Suddenly we start to be able to collect data in the field, which is something we've been trying to do for like 150 years. So there was a revolution there.

GEORGE IMAFIDON

And Tom is a mechanical and sports engineer who specializes in metamaterials.

DR THOMAS ALLEN

Materials have basically completely transformed sport, particularly it’s allowed new sports to come in that maybe we didn't even have before.

GEORGE IMAFIDON

They've been able to work with some of the best athletes in the world and major sporting brands. Since 2008, Steve has been working with UK Olympic teams, supporting them win over 100 medals at London 2012, Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020. Together, we look back at the rich history of sports engineering and its latest developments and understanding who is responsible for that change.

PROFESSOR STEVE HAAKE

I think as Sports Engineers, if we can improve the equipment, make it perform better, make it more durable. The technologies that people are using, I think they’ll enjoy what they're doing and then they'll be more likely to go out. And I think that's our responsibility to make it as good as possible.

GEORGE IMAFIDON

Join us as we unpack all the ways we're sprinting towards a new future of sports

GEORGE IMAFIDON

So as we kick off, it will be great to just get some brief introductions to yourself.

PROFESSOR STEVE HAAKE

Hi, my name's Steve Haake. I'm from Sheffield Hallam University. I'm a physicist by training. I did it, a hundred years ago at the University of Leeds. When I left there, I went and did a Ph.D. on mechanics of golf at an interesting place called the Sports Turf Research Institute. It had nothing that a physicist would need, but everything that a golfer would need. Grass and golfers. So, that was a very interesting period of my life doing field work. I then became a lecturer in University of Sheffield Mechanical Engineering and during that period of setup, a Sports Engineering Research group. After about 15 years, we moved to Sheffield Hallam University down the road and I set up the Sports Engineering Research group and it kind of grew into the largest one academic group in the world and Tom Allen joined as our first Ph.D. student at Sheffield Hallam University and is my only Ph.D. student ever to have finished within three years.

GEORGE IMAFIDON

Amazing! Thank you Steve. Tom?

DR THOMAS ALLEN

I'm Tom Allen. I'm a reader in Mechanical Engineering at Manchester Metropolitan University. So, after I finished my undergraduate degree in Mechanical engineering, I moved to Germany where I worked in the Adidas Innovation team. I was working on projects related to the design of trainers and when I was there I met a Ph.D. student called Bob Kirke. And he said, if you're interested in doing a Ph.D then come to Sheffield and speak to Steve. So that's exactly what I did and I moved from Germany to Sheffield. My Ph.D. was sponsored by a tennis racket company called Prince, and I was modeling tennis rackets. So, we spent a lot of time going over to Italy, learning about the industrial side as well as the research side. I stayed in Steve's group for a couple of years, and then I moved across into the Engineering department in Sheffield Hallam University leading an undergraduate course in Sports Technology. Then, after a few years of doing that, I moved across to Manchester Met. So, leaving Sheffield Hallam with its very established reputation in Sports Engineering, to kind of go out on my own. We’ve worked on World Rugby, looking at regulations for padded clothing to increase safety. That's a key part of what I do, working on standards for wrist protectors to prevent wrist injuries when people fall over when they're snowboarding. I recently co-authored a policy report on Sports Engineering, thinking about really some of the things that are the future in modern society, such as inclusivity of Sports Engineering, how we ensure that sports technology meets the needs of many people. And sustainability. And one of my key areas as well is metamaterials. So, I’m the health lead of the UK Metamaterials Network and we're really looking to bring metamaterials into various areas related to health and including sports equipment as well.

GEORGE IMAFIDON

And for yourself, Steve, briefly, in terms of what your motivations were to get into the field? Because you are one of the founding fathers in some ways of Sports Engineering, so your motivation must be pretty huge.

PROFESSOR STEVE HAAKE

So, I did my Ph.D. in the eighties. The 1980s, not the 1880s. And when I went to start looking for jobs, middle of the 1980s, it was Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan era. So, it was all about Star Wars. It was the end of the Cold War. So, all the jobs I went for seemed to be about making military equipment and that wasn't really my raison d'etre, you know. And then I saw this Ph.D. saying, “physicist who likes sport.” And I thought, “Ooo, well, that's me. I'm a physicist. I like sport.” And, unfortunately it was in golf, which I'd never, ever played before. And lots of people told me not to do it. And then I came out of that, having done that Ph.D., and then got what my friends called a proper job. I went and taught Mechanical Engineering. But then it was like, “what's your research area?” And as Tom just said, you can kind of make it whatever you like as long as you bring in money and whatever. So, Sports Engineering didn't exist and I did a tentative one day conference and then had a tentative three day conference. I called it International Sports Engineering Conference. And then, like, all these people from the world came and then it's like, okay, why don't we set up an association? So, I set up an association, and then we set up another conference and someone said, “can we do it in Sydney?” So, it was one of those things. It got the momentum of the time, the materials revolution of the eighties and nineties which was driving new sports equipment. So, it was one of those things. Once that starts to happen and companies start to say we need some research, then you have academics going, I can do that research for you. The group grew. We made our way to the Olympic Games. We worked with Olympic teams. We worked with the likes of Nike, the International Tennis Federation, Adidas. And then after the Olympic Games, I realised that, with all the best sports technology in the world, if people don't pick it up then what's the point? So, I then transitioned into kind of a role of public health, how to promote physical activity. And that led me to found the Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre. The idea behind that is to take all our learnings from elite sport, professional sport and apply it to population health.

GEORGE IMAFIDON

That is a great segway onto the next section, in terms of what do you actually mean by the term Sports Engineering/Sports Technology. What does that actually mean Tom? Maybe we can kick off you?

DR THOMAS ALLEN

Yeah, it's an interesting one that I often get asked and sometimes people kind of interplay Sports Engineering and Sports Technology and I think they are essentially the same thing. But, I would maybe think of Sports Engineering as a bit more of the traditional engineering, whereas Sports Technology might be more the digital side and might encompass websites, you know, and apps and some of the other things. But, I think that Sports Engineering is really about applying physics, maths, technology to understand problems in sport, whatever they may be. So, the obvious one that we tend to think of is designing and testing and sort of bringing into the market sports equipment. But there's other problems as well such as, understanding injuries and the relationship between equipment and technology and how we can reduce those, for example, or sustainability or inclusivity.

PROFESSOR STEVE HAAKE

When we set up Sports Engineering back in the nineties, we tended to split things up into disciplines. So, what it was is things like design, mechanics, dynamics, kind of traditional engineering things might be technology, but then it kind of transitions into sport science. So, you've got the bits of kits, but then you've got the interaction with the athletes. So that bit is kind of also included. What it tends not to be is just analysis of athletes. That’s Sports Science. So, we had that problem of definition quite early on. I can tell you what it definitely isn't. What we tend not to, we try not to be is Motorsports. Motorsports is it’s very own discipline -

GEORGE IMAFIDON

I'm in motorsports. It doesn't feel as great now. I thought I belonged in the crew. Now, I don’t feel -

PROFESSOR STEVE HAAKE

Yeah, I mean, you know, it's…Motorsports is so big, you know, and it has its own disciplines, its own researchers. They kind of get on without us really. 

GEORGE IMAFIDON

Definitely, and what would be useful if you could just give an example or two in terms of what early Sports Engineering actually is?

PROFESSOR STEVE HAAKE

There’s so many examples, aren't there? You know, footballs themselves, you know, they've changed quite dramatically. 40 years ago, you know, they were something made out of leather. Now they’re a complex, molded shape with very defined patterns on the outside to make them fly in a particular way through the air. Tennis rackets…tennis…Tom and I can talk about ad nauseam about this transition between wooden rackets to carbon fiber rackets, to longer rackets, wider rackets. Again, they all need designing, all need engineering in some way. So, there's this kind of balance between what's possible to create and what's possible to make.

GEORGE IMAFIDON

And as we speak about materials Tom, my friend, this would be a great point to also get you into it. So, how did the discovery and incorporation of all of these new materials, as we discussed from leather to this complex, you know, composite of materials, actually transform the potential of the sports that we can now play?

DR THOMAS ALLEN

So, materials have basically completely transformed sport. When we think of Sports Engineering and sports equipment, it often does come down to materials. As Steve was saying, with the tennis racket changing from wood to composites and the modern rackets now. And it just changes everything in a way. And one of the really nice things about sport is that it means lots of different things to different people. Everybody has their own interests and their own sports, which they're involved in. Some people multiple sports, some specializing in a particular sport. But that means that we can all relate if we think about sports which we're interested in. And one of the things that materials has done is allowed new sports to come in that maybe we didn't even have before. So, sports like mountain biking, snowboarding, these all developed because of technology and engineering which is coming through. So, the area of Metamaterials is the area that I'm really interested in now. And a big kind of research area for me. And Metamaterials are materials which have unusual and enhanced properties. So, we take a conventional material, just plastic for example, and then we might structure it in a specific way that gives it unique properties. So, originally we might have this for a material that's just in a block. So, you might have a block of plastic. It has certain properties, but if we structure it in a certain way to give it a certain honeycomb or lattice, it then changes its properties. That structure could be the same all the way through the material. Or it could have a gradient, so it could change from one area to another and have unique and unusual properties. This allows us to really kind of do different things like better helmets, better equipment, safer things which adapt and fit to more people. So, that's enhanced in the sports we're currently doing, but that might lead to new sports that we can't even think of. What's going to be the sports that kids are doing in 20 years time?

GEORGE IMAFIDON

The next question is probably for both of you, in terms of, what are some of the most recent and transformative developments that you've seen our listeners might be interested in?

PROFESSOR STEVE HAAKE

In a general sense, we've gone through a few revolutions over our time. You know, if you go back far enough back to Victorian era, it was just like: rubber, wood, guts for stringing, leather for gloves and shoes and things like that. It was all kind of natural substances. And then you get through to the kind of the 1930s. You start to have aluminium products and then in the sixties you see glass fibre appearing and then the eighties you've got carbon fibres appearing. So, most of those things were all material revolutions. Then I would say, from 2000s onwards, Apple brought out the iPhone and it wasn't that phones didn't exist. They did. There was very good phones out. But they created an interface and as soon as that phone came out, suddenly all our teams were going, “can you start collecting data for us?” And some of these phones also had sensors and things and all the things we used in mechanical engineering: accelerometers, rate gyros, GPS, all these things start at a pace. So, suddenly we start to be able to collect data in the field which is something we've been trying to do for, you know, like 150 years. So, there was a revolution there which was the ability to capture data and that was like in the really early noughties. And then, after that, now you start to get all this data, we're now getting this AI revolution which is, now you've got the data, what are you going to do with it? Now you've got enough data and big data. So, I would say that the things we’re starting to see now, as a consequence of all of that, is kind of the AI machine learning revolution. I've got lots of information about you as an individual or you as a population. So, therefore what does that tell me and how can we change things? I would say that's the biggest revolution I've seen in the last kind of, you know, 20 years.

GEORGE IMAFIDON

Thank you for that Steve. So, that is a great overview in terms of, you know, the developments. And I think that's perfect because it sets the scene for you, Tom, in terms of some examples that you may have seen in a particular sport. So, take tennis or football or any sport that you feel comfortable with. Maybe it’s snowboarding now, you know for example, and what that change has been in terms of the development?

DR THOMAS ALLEN

So I can think of two very, very clear examples. The first is running shoes and the second is e-bikes.

GEORGE IMAFIDON

Tell me about running shoes. I've got a marathon coming up, so I’d love to know all about that as well.

DR THOMAS ALLEN

So, unless you've been hiding under a rock, you will have obviously heard of the super shoes. So, you need to get yourself some of them, I think, if you want to run a bit faster. So, that would be my suggestion…is, for your marathon, get some super shoes.

GEORGE IMAFIDON

How much do they cost? That is the question.

DR THOMAS ALLEN

A lot of money. Several hundred pounds a pair. And reportedly they don't really last too long either. So, there are even claims that some are only designed to do one marathon. How true that is, I'm not sure. But we can say for certain that they’re designed primarily for performance rather than durability. And that then raises questions about sustainability. But yeah, super shoes, this has come in I'd say the last few years. I've been talking about this quite a lot in the media and it's about, okay, we've got these new shoes, they're lighter, they're got stiff plates in them they’re curved, they’ve got very resilient foam which allows you to run more efficiently. And there's all these debates around, okay, are these allowed? Are these fair? How do we regulate them? So it's a really interesting topic. For me, I like it because it really raises the profile of Engineering and Sports Engineering within the media. That's a great example. Also very topical as well, because as we go into the Olympics, you know, what's going to happen? Are we going to see the two hour marathon barrier broken at the Olympics? Someone wearing some super shares and then a big advert coming out afterwards from the company that's sponsoring them? So, there's going to be a lot of interest, I think. The other example is e-bikes. They're really getting to the point now where they're really good, they work really well. When I go mountain biking, I'm riding up the hill on my bike nice and slow. Someone comes flying past on an e-bike up the track and then they come down and they're getting four laps, you know, for every one that I'm doing. And I think this is a real change. So, mountain biking now is more like you have maybe a quick track to get to the top of the hill and then loads of fun coming down. And also just general commuting around town and getting more people into cycling. So, I think that's a huge thing. I think there's some real challenges around sustainability and, you know, what's going to happen to these bikes? Do they get chucked away with the batteries still in them? And all these kind of questions. I think they could be absolutely transformative for how we move around and travel.

GEORGE IMAFIDON

And that is engineering, right. A lot of the engineering we see everyday looks so simple that it's often not celebrated because it just always works, right? So, on to you, Steve. You mentioned the developments in terms of digital technology and how that has changed Sports Engineering, particularly with mobile phones. You know, will we see more cameras/less AI developments in the future? How do you see that kind of impact in the field?

PROFESSOR STEVE HAAKE

Oh, goodness, yes. Video is key in sport actually. We thought it was quite trivial when cameras and digital cameras came out, but actually when you collect data on your athletes, supplementing it with video is kind of everything. That's what people want. So, we have little accelerometers we can put on people's feeds and put it on the back. We can measure accelerations and gait, you know, quite complex patterns using that. But then what people want is they want to see whatever those patterns are on top of a video of them running or walking, whatever the activity is. And we spend a lot of time doing that. Collecting some video and then supplementing it with maybe force data, acceleration data and so on. So, that's kind of this amalgamation of different datasets. And then you've got things like, you know, heart rate. You know, if I was going to give an example of something that's really changed the world, it's the development of the heart rate monitor. You know, originally it was a strap around the chest, I don’t know if you ever wore one of those?

GEORGE IMAFIDON

I haven't worn one yet, to be fair. I've always wanted to feel like an elite athlete and wear one of those but I haven't quite got there yet. I've only got these ones, the Apple Watch, yeah.

PROFESSOR STEVE HAAKE

That is absolutely fine. So, that heart rate monitor you now have on a watch, that watch is good enough for you to use during that marathon to tell you how to perform. So, that technology there has changed. And, if you really want to, you can train to heart rate and you can compete in your marathon and know exactly what time you're going to get while you're running

GEORGE IMAFIDON

So, for yourself Tom, how can we kind of ensure that these technologies that we're developing are as accessible as possible to all genders as well as those that have disabilities? You spoke about, you know, it being inclusive and so forth. So, I think that would be a great perspective to get as well.

DR THOMAS ALLEN

The technology and the sports equipment should be accessible to everybody. We talked about the super shoes just now. That's great it’s trickling down from the elite. But we also talked about the price as well. And you know, there's some questions around that. But I think that what happens is, over time, whilst this technology might not immediately appear accessible over long periods, the whole kind of sports equipment and technology which is available improves based on the elite level. In terms of what you're saying about accessibility, that is really important as well. We have issues around, you know, females and sports equipment, whether the sports equipment is actually really targeted for them. Or do we just take a male version and just scale it? Maybe colour it some kind of stereotypically feminine colour? So, we need to be moving away from these things. It's quite challenging because it does depend, you know, on the size of the market and the companies ultimately wanting to make money. So there are arguments that, you know, they will make and sell what is profitable. But there are also, you know, companies which are coming in and filling that niche and purposely targeting their products in that direction. I do think the metamaterials have a part to play, though, as well. So, we can make materials which adapt and conform and react to their external environment and fit to the person. Maybe rather than thinking we're going to make lots of different sizes of football boots and lots of different shapes, we have one football boot? So, that's what we're really thinking. Yeah, that's the future that I see.

GEORGE IMAFIDON

And what would a more sustainable Sports Engineering space look like, in terms of, recycling materials to utilising the scraps that we have on the production line?

PROFESSOR STEVE HAAKE

The ruling bodies of sport seem to be taking notice of this and thinking about their responsibility. So, an example I would give is the International Tennis Federation. They're kind of looking, doing a lifecycle analysis of tennis as a whole and there are, you know, some easy wins. So, for instance, there are millions and millions of tennis balls going to landfill every year. They don't go to landfill, and I say, because they're worn out. Because the felt’s worn out. It's because they've lost pressure. Pressurised tennis balls have a small amount of pressure in them. So, when you open a tennis ball can it kind of goes “psss.” You know, it's that delightful explosion of gas when you open it up. And then these tennis balls come out and they're all hard and quite, quite bouncy. And what happens is that pressure leaches out over time. Now, what you can do…if that can had a sealable lid and you just had a little kind of a valve on it, you could just stick a normal foot pump onto that, pump it up and, hey presto, you don't have to throw those balls away. So, simple things like that and asking the manufacturers to spend maybe 10 pence on putting a valve on the can with a screwable lid, you know, is something that could save millions and millions and millions of tennis balls going into landfill. So, the ruling bodies are looking at things like that. And there’s some easy wins.

GEORGE IMAFIDON

Who do you think is responsible for ensuring these changes happen in the cultural shift?

DR THOMAS ALLEN

These are the sort of debates and questions that we often have about students and ultimately I think everyone's responsible. It can't purely be the responsibility of one person. As consumers, we have to be pushing for that. The companies need to be taking their responsibility. The governing organisations of the sports, so the companies and the organisations which run the sports, should they be saying “at our tournaments we will only be using products which have been demonstrated to be sustainable?” But then how do we define that? Or do we need some kind of independent auditing? So, it's everybody's responsibility, really, and it requires a complete shift. If you just design something, hope it's going to work, give it to the athlete that might have worked 50 years ago, but nowadays that's not enough. You need to be confident that that is going to work. If you've got some new super shoes, you need to be confident they're going to give that athlete the advantage. And the way to do that is through rigorous scientific testing. Sometimes that's within the companies themselves, but it's also important to do independent testing as well. So go to a university, get independent tests, have those results. The more you understand, the more improvement you can make. I think as Sports Engineers, if we can improve the equipment, make it perform better, make it more durable…The technologies that people are using, I think they’ll enjoy what they're doing and then they’ll be more likely to go out. And I think that's our responsibility to make it as good as possible.

GEORGE IMAFIDON

Agreed, 100%. And now, as we close, I want both of you to dream as much as possible. The question I have for you is what is the most radical change you'd like to see in the future of Sports Engineering? I want to look back, you know, in a few years and say, “Tom said that” or “Steve said that” and it's happened, right? So, yeah, what is the most radical change you'd like to see in the future of Sports Engineering?

PROFESSOR STEVE HAAKE

Wow, what a question. One of the things I've come across recently is that things like the wearable sensors and the things we can measure are kind of going from the outside of the body to the inside of the body. So, you know, transcranial magnetic stimulation, for instance, you know, there are helmets that you can wear that use a version of that that can change basically the voltage in your brain to help you learn to do motor activities a little bit better. So, these things exist already, they’re a set of headphones called The Halo. And then you've got things like wearable sensors that you might have in a gum shield or a wearable sensor on your arm that might be detecting something under the skin, blood lactate levels and so on. So, I think what would be nice is that those things give us some things that are really functionally useful. Not just for sport but for physical activity, because if it's physical activity per se, then that also helps us with health because that takes you right into health monitoring. I'd like to see these Sports Engineering products, you know, translating into that health sphere. So, I think that's what I'd like to see. Sports as the kind of early adopter, proving it and then coming into the health sector later.

DR THOMAS ALLEN

And, for me, it would be about field labs and bringing the Sports Engineering to the leisure centres and the places where people are practising sport. So, we would see like a state of the art facility where you may have companies and researchers and universities coming together and working on a common problem in the public eye. People can come and they can test and they can see it what we're doing. So, an example could be, if you had, you know, a ski lift where people could take their mountain bikes up and come down the track. And the track had cameras and the bikes were instrumented, people could test them there. Companies could come there with the state of the art facility, but people could also just come, come for the day, ride, see what the engineers are doing…talking to them. So, that's what I would really like to see. More of this moving from the lab out into the field, in specialist facilities. So, the public would benefit from the amazing facility and then the researchers and the companies could go there and develop their products.

GEORGE IMAFIDON

Amazing. Well, those are both phenomenal visions for the Future of Sports Engineering and show that Engineering is really about the people. It means more than, you know. So no, thank you both for driving that. You've been listening to Create the Future, a podcast from the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering and Peanut and Crumb. This episode was presented by me, George Imafidon, and produced by Tess Davidson. If you enjoyed this one, make sure you listen to future episodes with conversations from pioneering engineers, designers, technologists and thinkers. To find out more for the QEPrize on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Thanks for listening.