A HawkEye decision in tennis
Technological advancements are most visible in areas of high interest, naturally, with sports of all shapes and sizes capturing our attention for increasingly large amounts of time. With that, let’s take a look at how innovations, be they technical or digital, are changing things.
The most obvious improvement to sport that modern technological advancements have made is actually how we experience it as a spectator.
Pretty much every sport around can be streamed online now, with social media on the day of a big football game, for example, dominated by trending tags, tweets, Vines, status updates and infinite messaging.
Technology in audience
Now fans can gamble on outcomes with an app, critique managers and players ‘directly’ by commenting on their social media accounts and even receive relentless alerts to tell them what’s happening to their favourite team this very second.
TV coverage, too, has evolved dramatically in recent years. From as far back as the ‘run it on there, lads’ running joke on RTE’s football coverage in the 1990s, to a bizarre, Football Manager façade on Sky Sports news today, pundits have upgraded their pads for iPads and anecdotes for live stats.
Technology in sport
On the field, court or wherever, there have also been stark changes. Hawk-Eye has vastly improved cricket and tennis decision making, the TMO adds some drama, and accuracy, to rugby, and timing devices have made measuring races accurate to almost infinitesimal levels.
Managing players’ health is improving all the time, with the greatest example of this the moment you get an injury similar to that of a sports star you envy. How come they can come back in six weeks, while you’re out for six months?
That’s before we even get to look at the engineering behind racquets, footwear and swimsuits, which, between them, have helped dramatically improve standards and drastically reduce world record times in sports.
Below is an infographic from Conosco that tells the story very well. You can click on it to view it in a larger format.
Main image via Shutterstock
