Science meets sport to bring Canada gold
Posted January 8, 2010 8:59 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – The scientific community is meeting the sporting world and the results will benefit our Olympic athletes. Maclean’s magazine is uncovering project Top Secret, an $8 million dollar program funding technological advances in training, performance and equipment.
Performance-enhancing plates for snowboards and a human sling-shot to propel speed skaters are a couple of the advancements developed to put more Canadians on the podium. Ken MacQueen with Maclean’s has been uncovering the details 55 different projects happening at 17 different universities all over the country, including UBC. He says scientific minds have also been looking into the properties of curling, checking out if all the sweeping actually does anything, “Turns out that no, the sweepers aren’t melting the ice in front of the stone, but they are raising the temperature sufficiently that it does alter the rock’s momentum.”
Not all the inventions will debut at the 2010 Games due to regulations, but MacQueen says there’s no doubt some, like an incredibly water phobic compound, have many other applications.
