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When is sports gear so good it’s actually cheating?
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There is a ton of cool sports gear that’s banned from sports for making athletes too good. Swimsuits that make a swimmer too streamlined, gloves that make a receiver’s hands too grippy, bats that let a player hit the ball too hard, and shoes that help a runner go too freaking fast…
They call it “TECH DOPING,” using physical gear to gain an unfair advantage. In this video, I’ll show you the banned gear you won’t see at the Paris Olympics, and the cutting edge tech you will see that’s on the very limit of what’s allowed.
You might be thinking, hold on, no gear should give athletes an advantage! But… we don’t run barefoot anymore. We don’t swim naked. We use tech to play sports. And that tech is always improving, pushing forward what humans can do.
So… where’s the line?
This is about way more than sports. In every part of our lives, technology pushes forward what we can do! And it’s up to us to decide what we want from it. This video is about that question.
We talked to athletes, looked at the world’s best gear, and even went all the way to Nike’s test lab to try on the real Team USA Olympic uniforms. This is the cutting edge of sports tech, explained.
Chapters:
0:00 What is “technology doping”?
1:48 What gear should be banned?
3:10 The world’s fastest swimsuit
4:23 Should this be allowed?
5:24 The world’s fastest shoes
6:28 I cut open a supershoe
8:32 What makes supershoes so fast?
9:28 I try the Team USA Olympic uniform
11:36 Should these shoes be allowed?
12:42 Should prosthetics be allowed?
14:01 Why Blake Leeper was banned from the Olympics
15:46 What is fair?
16:38 😉
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Bio:
Cleo Abram is an Emmy-nominated independent video journalist. On her show, Huge If True, Cleo explores complex technology topics with rigor and optimism, helping her audience understand the world around them and see positive futures they can help build. Before going independent, Cleo was a video producer for Vox. She wrote and directed the Coding and Diamonds episodes of Vox’s Netflix show, Explained. She produced videos for Vox’s YouTube channel, was the host and senior producer of Vox’s first ever daily show, Answered, and was co-host and producer of Vox’s YouTube Originals show, Glad You Asked.
Additional reading and watching:
– Grab and Go: How Sticky Gloves Have Changed Football, NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/20/sports/super-bowl-nfl-gloves.html
– Space Age Swimsuit Reduces Drag, Breaks Records, NASA: https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2008/ch_4.html
– Swimming Bans High-Tech Suits, Ending an Era, NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/25/sports/25swim.html
– FINA LZR Racer Ruling: https://www.pvswim.org/official/rules/FINA_Swimsuits_2009-07.pdf
– Nike’s Fastest Shoes May Give Runners an Even Bigger Advantage Than We Thought, The Upshot: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/13/upshot/nike-vaporfly-next-percent-shoe-estimates.html
– Supershoes Are Reshaping Distance Running, MIT Technology Review: https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/06/25/1093520/supershoes-running-kenya-carbon-plate-shoes/
– The Controversy Behind Nike’s Vaporfly Running Shoe, Explained, WSJ: https://youtu.be/wVXrIaPuP7c?si=btJyElVpQjbUpzaQ
– The Science Behind The World’s Fastest Shoe, Cheddar: https://youtu.be/Mm61IkzyJxI?si=py7XHYQGOwgP4TYQ
– How Eliud Kipchoge Ran a Sub 2 Hour Marathon, Mike Boyd: https://youtu.be/A73HQwEct-o?si=uUk3mSj1YRR6KLXM
– He Could be the First American Amputee in the Olympics, Blake Leeper, Great Big Story: https://youtu.be/_P9GXINym4s?si=_y8JL-7n9qw2x6_J
– The Shoe So Good the Olympics Declared It Cheating, Half As Interesting: https://youtu.be/JRyqd0Z6kZI?si=8m1tfbmprNcRKOPl
Vox: https://www.vox.com/authors/cleo-abram
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm10108242/
Gear I use:
Camera: Sony A7SIII
Lens: Sony 16–35 mm F2.8 GM
Audio: Sennheiser SK AVX and Zoom H4N Pro
Music: Musicbed, Tom Fox
Follow along for more episodes of Huge If True: https://www.youtube.com/cleoabram?sub_confirmation=1
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Welcome to the joke down low:
Which sport is always in trouble?
Badminton.
Find a way to use “trouble” in a comment to let me know you’re a real one who made it to the end of the description 🙂 Read More Cleo Abram
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