Swim dummies tested for drag, running shoes that think, and lasers that zap an athlete's body to tailor the tightest fit to slip through wind and water. The Olympics are more high-tech than ever.
There was a time when all swimmers needed was a suit and some goggles. But now the U.S. swim team packs a laptop, too. A computer program called "Dartswim" lets a swimmer see a start that could use a tweak, or a relay exchange that needs work. He can compare side by side his swim just minutes before with, say, a gold-medal-winning swim from the computer's archive ... then pinpoint the problem, and fix it.
"They're going to get that hundreth or two-hundreths of a second that's going to mean the difference between gold and silver," says USA Swimming's John Walker.
Dr. Peter Davis of the United States Olympic Committee's Sports Science division sums it up:
"It's really an arms race between countries," he says.
These days, high-tech tools can be the real world difference between gold and a bad plane ride home.
"Every advantage and every rock has to be overturned to look for success," says Davis.
Some of the tech toys are pretty wild. One of them helps prepare athletes to be their best down at sea level where the Olympics are being staged, but they have to trick their bodies to do it.
Take Canadian triathlete Laura Redbeck — she trains at sea level, often in the sea — but sleeps at night on a virtual mountain top tucked inside a plastic tent.
"It feels like you're camping inside. No bugs," Redbeck says.
With a flip of the switch, a gadget thins the oxygen inside Redbeck's tent bed. She'll snooze for the next nine hours as though she were at 11,000 feet — every night for a month. Why go to such extremes? Breathing the skinny oxygen in the tent triggers the body to produce more red blood cells. More red cells mean more oxygen carried to the muscles and better endurance.
"It's definitely, probably, half a percent to my racing, which is the big deal," says Redbeck.
High-altitude tents sell for $8,000 to $12,000 a pop, but are they a high-tech version of blood-doping?
"It's the body's natural response to an environmental or physical demand placed upon it. So if this were cheating, then training is cheating," says Larry Kutt of Colorado Altitude Training.
More wild stuff is coming. Adidas claims it's developing a shoe that can think, equipped with a microchip and processor. Its handout video shows it actually changing the shape of the shoe, to better fit your foot while you're running.
But on the big day, it's still athlete against athlete — and the high-tech tools they used, will just be a footnote when the first hand hits the wall.