Sport Technology And The Body

What is the nature of athletic performance? This book offers an answer to this fascinating question by considering the relationship between sport, technology and the body. Specifically, it examines cultural resistance to the enhancement of athletes and explores the ways in which performance technologies complicate and confound our conception of the sporting body. The book addresses concerns about the technological "invasion" of the "natural" body to investigate expectations that athletic performances reflect nothing more than the actual capacity of the untainted athlete. By examining a series of case studies, including Paralympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius, Fastskin swimsuits, hypoxic chambers and an array of illicit substances and methods, the book distinguishes between internal and external technologies to highlight the ways that performance enhancement, and public reaction to it, can be read. Sport, Technology and the Body offers a powerful challenge to conventional views of athletic performance that stand authenticity against artifice, integrity against corruption, and athletic purity against technological intrusion. It is essential reading for all serious students of the sociology, culture or ethics of sport.

What is the nature of athletic performance? This book offers an answer to this fascinating question by considering the relationship between sport, technology and the body. Specifically, it examines cultural resistance to the enhancement of athletes and explores the ways in which performance technologies complicate and confound our conception of the sporting body. The book addresses concerns about the technological "invasion" of the "natural" body to investigate expectations that athletic performances reflect nothing more than the actual capacity of the untainted athlete. By examining a series of case studies, including Paralympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius, Fastskin swimsuits, hypoxic chambers and an array of illicit substances and methods, the book distinguishes between internal and external technologies to highlight the ways that performance enhancement, and public reaction to it, can be read. Sport, Technology and the Body offers a powerful challenge to conventional views of athletic performance that stand authenticity against artifice, integrity against corruption, and athletic purity against technological intrusion. It is essential reading for all serious students of the sociology, culture or ethics of sport.

What is the nature of athletic performance? This book offers an answer to this fascinating question by considering the relationship between sport, technology and the body. Specifically, it examines cultural resistance to the enhancement of athletes and explores the ways in which performance technologies complicate and confound our conception of the sporting body. The book addresses concerns about the technological "invasion" of the "natural" body to investigate expectations that athletic performances reflect nothing more than the actual capacity of the untainted athlete. By examining a series of case studies, including Paralympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius, Fastskin swimsuits, hypoxic chambers and an array of illicit substances and methods, the book distinguishes between internal and external technologies to highlight the ways that performance enhancement, and public reaction to it, can be read. Sport, Technology and the Body offers a powerful challenge to conventional views of athletic performance that stand authenticity against artifice, integrity against corruption, and athletic purity against technological intrusion. It is essential reading for all serious students of the sociology, culture or ethics of sport.

How have science and technology helped today's athletes and sportspeople perform better for longer? And how could this change in the future? From the development of carbon fibre composites for para-athletes to improvements in sports nutrition, our performance in competitive events has been vastly improved by contemporary science and technology. This book looks at historical, current and emerging examples of sport technology. We look at technology in training, athletic performance, sports nutrition, sports equipment, sports medicine and how sport is shown on TV.

Sport technology has to be seen from the holistic, as well as inter- and transdisciplinary point of view. Product development requires close collaboration between engineers, athletes, sports scientists, and business managers. It requires an in-depth understanding of engineering disciplines, life and sport sciences, as well as economics. The Impact

Looks at the latest developments in sports technology, examining the debates around new technology, and what kinds of sports technology are likely to be developed in the future. Suggested level: intermediate, junior secondary.

This book investigates how desires to transform our bodies can bring utopia to the present, and how utopian practices often lead to distinctly dystopian or anti-utopian outcomes. It is the first comprehensive study to address the paradoxical relationship between bodies and utopianism. Franziska Bork Petersen discusses doping, bodybuilding and cosmetic surgery alongside practices such as retouching the ‘body as image’ on social media, and looks at how fashion modelling and performance ‘estrange’ the body. Techniques and technologies to transform our bodies are increasingly accessible and suggest an excessive identification of the body as lacking. To ‘be a body’ in a culturally meaningful way, we incessantly improve our bodily appearance and capacity. The book therefore addresses the utopianism inherent in a cultural understanding of bodies as increasingly controllable.

Wearable devices are being used by an increasing number of elite-level sports teams to manage and control the health, performance, and productivity of their athletes. Drawing upon a wide range of interdisciplinary resources, Wearable Technology in Elite Sport reveals how wearable devices are used to quantify athletic bodies in ways that have a number of undesirable consequences for the embodied subject. This book identifies some of the problematic consequences of excessive ‘dataveillance’ in sport by interrogating the process by which wearable data is produced, represented, and enacted in the governance of athletic behaviour. The book provides a set of conceptual resources for thinking critically about the powerful role played by measurement systems in shaping athletic embodiment. The themes that this book examines include an exploration of how technological devices serve an important disciplinary function in elite sport and how wearable-derived data might act to affect high-level athletes. The book is written in a lively and accessible style and appeals to a broad academic readership including undergraduate and postgraduate students in a range of fields including sports science, coaching, digital health, sociology, information studies, and science and technology studies.