Success requires great individual strength and determination. But, after all their hard work, there might still be room for slight improvement. That is where engineering comes in, fine-tuning clothing and equipment to help shave off potentially vital milliseconds.
Greg Stevens is one of those engineers. Performance innovation consultant at the UK Sports Institute, Stevens uses his aerospace expertise to support Team GB athletes in events such as the triathlon.
As we look back at the Olympics and ahead to the Paralympics, we spoke to Stevens about the rise of sustainability in sport, the difference between custom Olympic kit and mass manufacturing, and the use of 3D-printed metals.
Were there any engineering approaches that became more prevalent at this year’s Olympics?
There was a lot of talk about sustainability at this Olympics. France prioritised the sustainability of everything, reusing venues, and certainly the athletes have been speaking about the sustainability of everything a little bit more.
I think a lot of what you might see in the future is [a focus on] the provenance of some of the materials. Whether it gets to the point of athletes willingly taking a performance hit to make sure that they're being sustainable remains to be seen. But it's definitely moving up the agenda a lot.
Adidas were also talking about the sustainability of our kit. You would have seen it is quite different from previous Olympics. It was all one block colour, that dark blue ‘legend ink’ as they call it. That's more sustainable than having multiple colours, because you're using less ink.
That makes all of the kit, not just what we do for triathlon, but all the kit that Adidas are producing for all the sports and all the athletes, more sustainable. So that sustainability piece is, I think, only going to grow.
Is there a significant difference between making Olympic kit, compared to mass production?
Even for our biggest sports, we're nowhere near mass production. Because of the number of units that we need, we can’t really tap into those economies of scale of getting them done in the Far East, to do thousands of units.
So it kind of helps, with what we're doing in the innovation space, that we're only ever dealing with smaller numbers anyway. But it does change where we can get stuff sourced. Sourcing of fabrics from different sides of the world is getting more difficult – not just from a costing point of view, but obviously Brexit didn't help with a lot of fabric mills being in Europe, Italy and the like. The rest of them are Far East.
But what we're trying to do is cultivate more of our homegrown talent, and using all of the network that we've got locally. So I think from what we're already doing from a sustainability point of view, it's quite good, but I think that's going to be a big impact on what will come for LA and definitely beyond that.
What other trends do you expect to see in future?
If you look at all the athletes across the world competing in the Olympics, they're getting more and more elite. The Olympic athlete doesn't fit into that normal bell curve of distribution, which means that what works for mass production probably isn't good enough for an Olympic athlete.
As we’re not talking about large athlete numbers, that individuality that we’re able to get – either from requirements from an athlete or from what we're able to do – is going to increase. That lends itself to the manufacturing routes of 3D printing, small-scale manufacture, as opposed to the typical ‘Let's make a mould, let's pump out thousands of these things.’
I think the very nature of the rapid prototyping industry as it goes on – where it started with just plastics and now we're getting fancy plastics with carbon impregnation, you've got titanium, scalmalloy, aluminium, all the rest of it, being printed – I think those type of things we’re starting to see more and more in use, especially in the Olympic space where you only need two or three of [these components] for your squad.
The individual unit costs go up obviously, but when you only need five, as opposed to 5,000, it then suddenly makes it achievable for different nations to be able to be doing different things and playing in that innovation space, which is exciting. Hopefully it keeps us innovating through LA and Milan Cortina [Winter Olympics], and the rest of them that come up.
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