Taken together, sports and creative computer-based experiences occupy a significant part of our social world. Yet their common conceptual grounds are much neglected in studies of media and of sports. The previous chapters explained why there is value in theorizing the synergies between these areas of human experience. I now wish to argue that it makes less and less sense to talk about sports and digital cultures as distinct entities, but also to advance the idea that the recent rise of e-sports is indicative of this common future, which becomes apparent when one examines the totality of digital technologies that make sports possible. Increasingly, sports are produced through the utilization of digital technology, and digital environments increasingly rely on the logic and the ethos that are characteristic of sport.
Certainly, sports and digital worlds are experienced in remarkably distinct ways and the richness and complexity of these environments does not easily permit their conflation. Indeed, some fans or practitioners of sports will find little or no value in engaging with sport via digital interfaces. Whether the bodies are powerful or graceful, solitary or clashing, such people would claim that sport’s most salient characteristic is its corporeality, and that digital technology has no place in this arena. Similarly, digital natives may have no interest in getting physically more involved with their desk-based or mobile-based pastimes, or their being gamified. However, these communities of resistance are being compelled to adjust as more of sport is delivered digitally, and the change is coming from both sports and digital innovation.
A good example of this change is how the experience of physical activity is being made central to digital experiences as a result of wearable technologies, which are changing the means by which people engage with and create digital content. Indeed, new mobile interfaces reveal how much can change still in how we design and use digital equipment. For instance, one design feature of Google Glass was its “wink” facility, which allowed the wearer to take a photograph of something just by winking one eye. Until Google Glass, taking a photograph had always involved using some form of hand-based interface and the art of photography had developed around this feature of all cameras. Google Glass, for all its shortcomings, challenged this idea and demonstrated that our assumptions about what photography entails could be different.
The integration of physical movement into our experience of computing can be traced to the early years of digital gaming. Players began to experience physical reactions in their bodies as they moved a joystick in correspondence with what was happening on the screen. Tilting a joystick, even though this had no impact on what took place on the screen, was indicative of the imminent haptic shift within digital culture. In this respect, one can observe how sport and digital technology aspire to similar goals, namely the creation and experience of alternate realities by experimenting with forms of simulation. Indeed, the simulated dimensions of sport run even deeper as, on one interpretation, they are wholly organized to permit a more civilized playing out of what takes place elsewhere in the form of war and violent conflict, which serve to establish hierarchies and power relations.
Today, sports with civilized rules entail the simulation of various tests of human capacity, as a preferable alternative to actual violence. Similarly, digital game players—or e-sports athletes—do not typically wish to train for years before being able to use a flight simulation computer game. Instead, a player’s aspiration is to experience a simplified version of such skill development and acquisition. The 21st-century game-playing world is being defined by simulations, which are becoming indistinguishable from the simulated world they depict. Increasingly, pilots are trained within simulators, the sophistication of which is becoming affordable to consumers. In 2008, a renowned e-sports player was appointed to Nissan’s auto racing team as that company’s first “gamer to racer.” Furthermore, platforms such as iRacing (see iracing.com) are working with official motor-racing teams and competition organizers to create computer-generated models of cars within Games that are accurately constructed in terms of design, physics, and geography.
Yet there is still resistance to such convergence. Typically, people do not regard computer games and sports as occupying the same kind of ontological space at all. Another kind of resistance toward treating sport and digital worlds as similar comes from spectators who reject the value of remote viewing, either through television or the Internet, arguing that the experience is richest when one is live. Yet the digital viewing experience is becoming even more visceral and more engaging than the live experience as 3D high-definition television develops alongside virtual-reality simulators. One future prospect for the convergence of sports and digital worlds is the development of seamless simulation machines, which may digitize participation in sports so thoroughly that the difference between digital and physical participation becomes imperceptible.
Beyond a keyboard or a hand-held interface, the exotic allure of virtual-reality technologies involves the use of three-dimensional acoustics and stereoscopic optical displays, head tracking devices, data gloves, body suits, and telepresent robots to add sensory feedback, ambience, and movement control options. Many of these advanced technologies, as they have been realized, differ from the ways they were imagined in the 1980s. Today virtual reality means something very different from what was expected even twenty years ago, and it will be useful to reconsider today’s VR in a post-digital world (that is, one in which there is more concern with staying human than with becoming more digital). Indeed, the turn away from virtual reality to augmented reality and even “mixed reality” is indicative of the shift away from life in a virtual world and toward a physical world that is enriched by digital artifacts. On this version of the future of VR, it is far better to add layers of content to the physical world than to do away with it completely. We see glimpses of such possibilities in recent prototypes, such as the RideOn augmented reality goggles for snowboarders, which overlay digital gaming content onto the physical world, allowing novel gaming experiences to take place. For example, snowboarders may be able to visit the slopes at a previous Olympic site and bring up the slalom run within digital head displays, allowing them to test their skills against those of former Olympic athletes. When applied to games and sport, VR technology often involves transforming users into virtual players, or the wearer acts as a telepresent agent for robotic players. When life in virtual worlds comes to dominate our daily interactions, playing sports in the physical world may have no or little appeal once new communities of cyberathletes have taken ownership of sport. In this scenario, the future of sport is defined less by resistance to the virtual and more by a lack of interest in non-virtual artifacts or spaces. Whereas once life imitated art, it seems now that life offline is beginning to imitate life online.
The chapters in this part of the book address such prospects from the perspectives of athletes, spectators, and officials—those who are engaged in the production of the theater of elite sport. Yet their trajectories are not wholly about technological change; they are also about understanding what simulation requires of us culturally. For instance, it is not enough to simulate an arena to satisfy the interests of committed live spectators; it is also necessary to allow them to enjoy the social experience of sitting in a sports arena among other spectators. When we are at a sports venue, watching the action, it matters that we can interact with others and that we can interact with all elements that surround us. In this respect, creating good simulations requires understanding the reality of a spectator’s sensory world, of which watching and hearing the competition is only one component. These complex cultural aspects of the sports experience cannot be overlooked when proposing the idea of simulation as a closed system of computer-generated experiences. In short, one cannot simplify sports too much when aspiring to simulate them through digital technology.
Understanding the environmental noise that operates around a sport involves situating sports experiences within their broader social context. It requires understanding what participation in sports involves and how it is valued, which are often intimately informed by our experiences of work and play, as well as to a range of other social categories, including gender, health, age, and ethnicity. Our perspective on which of these factors are most relevant to emulate will differ, depending on our priorities. For those who experience sport as a commercial endeavor, it is an increasingly essential part of the intellectual property rights that surrounded many other creative industries. For those who are focused on sport’s community value, its primary good involves reinforcing bonds within social networks or the family. Understood in such terms, sports competitions and the results that follow from them are of secondary importance to a fan’s social experience, even if the play and the results are the focal points of that experience. Indeed, such a view explains some of the anxiety about certain sports behaviors, such as cheating or the violence that they involve, since these manifestations of action seem to compromise the aspiration for sport to reinforce positive socialization.
These interpretations of sporting and gaming cultures add to the complexity we are presented with when attempting to understand the past, the present, and the future of Sport 2.0. We live in times of new collaboration across digital and sporting cultures. The term Sport 2.0 is symbolic of how these areas of human experience may come together while also denoting the emerging professional e-sports community, constituted by vast communities of sports gamers around the world. Sports gamers are provoking those who are in charge of traditional sports to consider whether they should embrace a new generation of athletes who are digitally constituted and committed to physical activity. Beginning with changes in the experience of elite athletes and then proceeding to consider developments in mobile health technology used by amateur athletes, the chapters in this part elaborate on how the idea of Sport 2.0 reveals a vast digital architecture that underpins 21st-century sport. The ubiquity of digital technologies is the reason for this change, but the desire to inhabit simulated worlds is as much a part of sport as it is a part of digital environments. Taken together, the ideas presented in this part of the book reveal how the present definition of e-sport is still embryonic in its development and that digital gaming is becoming a bigger part of the elite sports environment in many ways.
This chapter considers how digital technology has altered the world of elite athletic performance and what this means for the future of sports. More broadly, it explores how digital technology has become a pervasive—and legal—form of performance enhancement, along with having become a ubiquitous presence in an athlete’s life. In so doing, it investigates how digital technologies have altered how athletes train and how they impact upon the fairness of sports, while also considering how this has influenced the work of those officials who oversee the smooth running of sports.
Today, many sports training programs use various forms of digital data capture to model complex sport movements. Data generated by new digital sensors helps to reveal the consequences of tactical decisions, or to understand the physical limitations of athletes, so as to provide insights that will make it practicable to enhance athletes’ performance. Whereas the different forms of data once were discrete, today digital technologies are increasingly holistic and integrated, involving monitoring all aspects of performance and permitting a more comprehensive aggregation of information that can inform decision making about an athlete’s performance development. It is in this respect that 21st-century digitized sport is part of a wider interest in big data and the desire to exploit it for economic gain.
Despite the value of these achievements to sports performance analysis, trends toward digital ubiquity may be criticized for their potentially dehumanizing impact on sport’s physical culture. For example, “third eye” refereeing has been discussed by academics and sports professionals as having the potential to undermine the role of human judgment in refereeing (Collins 2010). Alternatively, subjecting talent identification to digitally automated filtering systems professed to have the capacity to reveal talent potential as a statistical probability may compromise the role of complex judgments made my talent scouts, diminishing those aspects of sport that rely on an expert’s intuition about what makes an athlete likely to succeed.
Yet there has been considerable progress toward intelligent systems—and a loss of confidence in human expertise—in the past two decades. Moreover, these developments fit within sport’s aspiration to achieve greater precision in the analysis of performance and the development of sport science as an industry, the roots of which may be tied to a wider scientization within sport (Guttman 1978; Hoberman 1992). The increased use of digital technology—especially as an analytical tool—is an extension of sport’s teleology, where less and less about an athlete’s performance is left to chance or human error. Indeed, in this respect, it is presumed that intelligent, algorithm-based refereeing systems ensure that fewer errors are made; however, their merit relies on the intelligence of the model underpinning their design, and that may be where the flaws reside.
For some, the prospect of replacing human judgment with automated intelligent systems’ describe a dystopian view of humanity’s future that entails a failure to recognize the complexity of human embodied intelligence, which cannot or should not be reducible to an algorithm. On this view, such knowledge is important to retain as a form of uniquely human knowledge as it is understood only by experts who have undertaken the necessary encoding into their corporeal memory that such a journey allows. These presumptions about what constitutes sporting knowledge—and knowledge more generally—explain why coaches and managers tend to be former professional athletes: their knowledge is predicated on the embodied insight they derived as practitioners. Moreover, the mythology of sport relies on the belief that the athlete is, in some way, a person with rare gifts whose achievements are attributable to unique and otherwise inaccessible insight into how to perform within his or her body.
Resistance to reducing human judgment to an algorithm is not the only kind of technological resistance in sport. Indeed, the sports community is often noticeably opposed to technological change more broadly, partly out of a concern that new technology will corrupt some aspect of the internal value of a sport. Trabal (2008) takes this idea further, highlighting the complex journey taken by any new sports innovation, where it first meets various structures of resistance before any possible acceptance. Trabal argues that the inherent value of the innovation making a sport better, or a performance more efficient, is not the primary means by which one can explain its success of failure. Rather, there are different, dynamic factors that can play a part in the success of any given sport technology, which includes the readiness of its supporting infrastructure, or the political support it receives within the practice community. Nevertheless, the concern that technology may jeopardize something that has been created, codified, and institutionalized is a significant factor in explaining technological resistance—and digital technology is a case in point.
A good non-digital example of this was the challenge posed by the South African Paralympic champion Oscar Pistorius, whose prosthetic lower limbs were seen as a challenge to the rules overseen by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF). Pistorius’ aspiration to compete alongside so-called able-bodied athletes was challenged by the IAAF for similar reasons—that his technological aids undermined the integrity of the competition. In technical terms, the argument hinged on whether or not the prosthetic limbs provided a kind of momentum that meant the way Pistorius ran was biomechanically different from how a person with biological limbs ran. If so, then the sense of the event was lost, and it was not deemed acceptable that one athlete had an unfair advantage over another in this way.
This example of resistance to technological change invites us to consider what it is about human performance that matters. Does the reduction of all aspects of sport to some scientific principle diminish the value of the performance, or can it promote the celebration of other values? There is reason to urge caution in the critical view of technology, not least because the value one attributes to present-day elite sports performances is at least partly predicated on the same scientific processes that critics question. In other words, if one acknowledges the value of athletes’ refining their practice and getting better at what they do through technological means, then it is difficult to oppose technology, as, over time, it becomes an even more crucial part of making such achievements possible. Indeed, following in the footsteps of Pistorius, the German long-jump Paralympian Markus Rehm has emerged as the next generation of prosthetically enabled athletes whose capacities may allow him to win medals in the Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Digital technology reveals aspects of an athlete’s insight that might otherwise be attributed to intuition or talent. By implication, although digital technologies may diminish the mythology that surrounds the performer, they also demystify what it requires to perform at the level of an elite athlete. Yet this is also why technology can be so controversial. After all, there is a sense in which technology can reduce magic to mere mechanics, and it isn’t clear whether or not such explanations enrich our lives. One crucial aspect of the debate concerns the value attributed to physical-world experiences. Thus, in contrast to how spectators experience the impact of digital technology, the direction of travel for athletes is found in its potential to make the conventional sports arena redundant as sports become enterprises that are practiced increasingly within virtual worlds rather than physical spaces. Consider the rise of the popular Les Mills Immersive Studio, which surrounds a spinning class with a 360º screen displaying computer-generated imagery of an imaginary cycling route.
In the future, highly sophisticated ergometers may replicate the competition environments entirely, and 360º, holographic, or 3D digital broadcasting may construct the arena for the viewer making the stadium redundant. Additionally, such technologies will create the conditions of an athlete’s experience as a performer, isolating the act of physical movement as the main criterion of what sports seek to measure when placing athletes alongside other athletes in competition. Thus, one might envisage cyclists competing within simulated worlds, sitting on real bicycles—not too different from exercise bicycles of today perhaps—but cycling within an entirely digitally constructed terrain, carefully designed to optimize the competition, offering the most precise comparisons between athletes from one tournament to the next. The input of the cyclists’ efforts would be digitized for the athlete and the viewer, communicating their performance in real time. As for present-day technology, the athlete’s performance data could be visualized alongside other data belonging to other athletes in the race. Examples of this are beginning to emerge, through such companies as “Activetainment,” which combines a cycling simulator and virtual-reality goggles to provide the athlete with a near-world experience of cycling in remarkable terrain.
Some people may recoil at the idea of moving sports out of physical arenas and into virtual worlds, or criticize this scenario as an excessively reductive view of what happens within the competitive sports environment. From this perspective, it is not just the conditions of the playing field that make sports meaningful experiences, but the entire range of interactions they elicit, which more broadly describe them as a cultural configuration and not simply a competition. This holistic view of what happens in a sports event encompasses the physical proportions of the space, an athlete’s temporal journey through it, the sounds and smells of the environment, and the sense of proximity to other people, or what may broadly be described as the “atmosphere” of a place (Chen, Lin, and Chiu 2013).
Reconciling these two perspectives on sport’s digital future relies on the ability of simulated worlds to deliver compelling realistic simulations, without involving any significant sense of loss in comparison with what we get from physical-world experience. Yet it also requires a sophisticated understanding of what such loss entails and whether it matters, and there is evidence to suggest that we do not quite have such an understanding with regard to our comprehension of life online. For instance, the concept of loss within social-media environments specifically and virtual worlds generally is contested. In some psychological studies, participants in virtual worlds were found to feel no sense of obligation if made aware of potential risks others might face. My claim is not that a similar kind of relationship to others ensues in virtual worlds, but that there is sufficient social communication to support the argument that people find virtual experiences enriching. Even if one concludes that interactions in the physical world are preferable to interactions in the virtual world (a view not supported by the literature), one’s inability to create physical worlds with such dynamic and physically present dimensions is suggestive of the additional value one may derive from life online. Were technology to achieve a state in which there is no sense of loss perceived about presence within physical space as opposed to offline worlds, the contrary view might apply—that the virtual worlds become even richer than the physical-world experiences because they can include additional sensory content that exceeds the possibilities of the physical world; such is the goal of augmented-reality technology.
A further rationale for rejecting digitally enriched future sports is that sport is already sufficiently exciting so as to not require augmentation. Yet there may be circumstances in which this view is jeopardized and where digital technology can provide additional ways of differentiating and heightening experiences. For example, consider sports in which distinguishing finalists is difficult because the athletes are all very similar in their capacities. In such sports, technology may provide new ways of discerning difference in a similar way to how photo finishes enabled such differentiation.1 There may already be a need to measure foot races in thousands of seconds, rather than hundreds. Although Baldwin (2012) argues that it wouldn’t be fair to distinguish first and second place on this basis,2 the challenge for sports is that first and final places may be indistinguishable in the future, raising questions about how else to adjust sports to allow a clear winner to be identified. In this scenario, digital technology may be the only means by which we enhance our perceptive skills to make sports interesting again, to show us who has won or to judge victory differently. Alternatively, presumptions about the sufficiently rich and immersive nature of present-day sports may be undermined as the spectator experience changes. In the past, a spectator may have simply sat in a seat in an arena and watched the sport. Today, many spectators hold mobile phones and cameras as they watch, and interact with content beyond what is happening on the playing field. These circumstances remind us that the nature of immersion can change dramatically and is technologically dependent.
There are various aspects of the elite athlete’s environment that demand closer inspection, and in subsequent sections within this chapter I aim to tease out these nuances. First, I will focus on how digital technology affects an athlete’s embodied experience of training and competition, considering how the skills required by athletes change as a result of these developments. Second, I will consider how officiating and surveillance of the sports field are affected by digital technology, notably in the way that equipment is used to enforce the rules and eliminate the human error that is implied by relying solely on an official. For each sport, the use of digital technology operates in varying capacities, though in all cases it promises to have a far greater influence on the interface through which an athlete competes. Finally, I will address the increased role of social media in an athlete’s career and how this presents new challenges for their professional conduct.
Digitally Trained Bodies
Digital technology finds its way into the performances of elite athletes most often through training methods and the capture of performance data. In the past thirty years, digital technology (for example, timing technology, heart-rate monitors, exercise ergometers, and virtual-reality simulators) has dramatically transformed how athletes have trained. Its impact continues to grow as greater methods of modeling sports fields are developed. Though visual data capture has been used in sport for many years in analog times (McGinnis 2000), one of the earliest examples of digitalization within sport is the recording of performances. Precise digital measurement has become more influential as athletes have become more competitive and as it has become more difficult to distinguish first from second place. During competition, the rules preclude certain kinds of digital interventions. For example, an elite athlete is not allowed to use an iPod while running the New York Marathon, because a musical rhythm may help to set a pace. This prohibition is specified in USATF Rule 144:
The following shall be considered assistance. … The visible possession or use by athletes of video, audio, or communications devices in the competition area. The Games Committee for an LDR event may allow the use of portable listening devices not capable of receiving communication; however, those competing in championships for awards, medals, or prize money may not use such device.
However, outside of competition, many athletes have pursued performance enhancement through developing sophisticated digital enhancements to training methods. Digital technology may even be used in pre-training situations to study the activity of potential elite athletes (Ives et al. 2002). For instance, FusionSport (2012) claims that “over 90% of the Universities in Australia involved in the Australian Institutes of Sport’s eTID program use Fusion Sport technology for their testing”—that is, they use it to identify new talent from large groups. FusionSport’s wireless-based timing technology provides a level of precision that is characteristic of the requirements of elite sports today, which reinforces the need for digital solutions to allow athletes the possibility of performance improvement.
Within the broad spectrum of athletic performance enhancers, digital technology falls into the category that the technological determinist Jacques Ellul (1964) described as “La Technique”: the collection of forms of knowledge that underpin any particular technological artifact. Ellul employed a definition of technology that went far beyond artifacts. This technological category also encompasses the knowledge gained through scientific endeavor, including databases of information that may be used to interpret performance achievements. For Ellul, technology also adhered to a rationalist logic that we may extend to interpreting the history of modern sport as a scientific project in its pursuit of more refined, more precise, and more extraordinary performances. In the early 21st century, modern sport began a journey which tied it to technology as the route through which progress would be achieved, and digital technologies have become intimately connected to these wider configurations. In this respect, digital technology should not be seen as isolated from other forms of technology. Rather, its utility is derived from other systems that produce meaningful digital data. For example, the “ski robot” created at the Jozef Stefan Institute in Slovenia may yield insights into robot design that will have applications outside of skiing. Indeed, the goals of such research may not be tied to elite sports at all, but may more broadly aim to “imitate human behavior and thus make a robot a useful assistant in everyday life” (Lahajnar, Kos, and Nemec 2009, p. 567). Yet transfers from such designs and research programs into the world of sport have happened in sports for decades.
Digital training is most often utilized as a form of feedback for athletes (Liebermann et al. 2002; Liebermann and Franks 2004). Some of its uses entail computer-aided analysis of player/team movements and body positions (Perl and Memmert 2011; Macutkiewicz and Sunderland 2011), computer-based models of movement interactions between athletes and equipment, or simply tracking performance activity during competition. For instance, ProZone allows the tracking of soccer players, which shows a positive correlation between ball possession and sprinting. Thus, the more a player sprints in the course of a game, the more likely he or she is to obtain possession of the ball, which can translate into greater success within the match (ProZone 2014). Each of these applications may utilize a range of delivery platforms, from mobile devices using GPS to virtual-reality simulators.
One prominent early example of an advanced digital training technology was used by the USA Olympic bobsled team in preparation for the 1994 Winter Games (Huffman and Hubbard 1996). A later virtual-reality simulator replicated the Nagano 1998 Olympic Winter Games sled run. Such simulations can be particularly valuable in situations where competitors have only a very limited number of opportunities to practice on the physical terrain before competing. Indeed, the value of using such simulations before teams arrive at the Olympics was made explicit at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games when a Georgian luge athlete, Nodar Kumaritashvili, crashed and died during a practice run. Though the inquiry into did not find fault with the design of the course, that unusual accident raises the question as to whether competitors are given adequate opportunity to learn a new route before competition. With bobsled and luge in particular, there is value in learning the twists and turns of a course, and the USA team’s simulator enabled athletes to do so. They could use the simulator to build their knowledge of the bobsled course before traveling to Japan and seeing the completed track. A more obvious solution would be to permit further practice runs before competition, but a time-critical schedule may preclude sufficient opportunities. A similar approach to helping athletes become familiar with a competition environment was explored by Sorrentino et al. (2005) with a group of Canadian Olympic speed skaters, and the results of their experience indicated that virtual environments promote athletes’ visualization in preparation for competition.
One exciting aspect of simulator technology today is that consumer products have become incredibly similar to those simulators used with elite athletes. For example, the VROX entertainment simulator allows users to experience a bobsled run just for fun. The overlap between these entertainment experiences and what might be useful as a form of training for professional athletes is getting stronger. The growth of simulators and goggle technology such as Oculus Rift is beginning to show a new range of ways to simulate sport experiences, and not just for spectators.
Coaches can also monitor athletes during competition by means of wearable technology such as SporTrack, Trak Performance, and inMotio, which enable real-time tracking of multiple performers that can provide sophisticated data about how athletes are performing individually or as a team (Barkett 2009). Film capture using external devices such as SportsCode, DartFish Team Pro, or SportVU provide further means of data-driven performance assessment. Monitoring athlete data often operates in tandem with the analysis of how athletes interact with the equipment they use. For instance, Akins (1994) discusses how the United States Golf Association utilized technology to assess the properties of new club designs to ensure that players were not given too much of a performance boost by the latest innovations. Indeed, in the past twenty years golf’s encounters with new club and ball technology have provoked considerable debate over whether the game is being transformed in a way that undermines its integrity. Moreover, Akins’ forecast that “tomorrow’s golfer will be able to buy a set of clubs that has been designed according to his or her needs and abilities” (p. 41) has been a reality for quite some time, thanks to the use of computer aided design. More recent innovations allow golfers to track their ball using GPS technology. For instance, GolfLogix provides players with insights into their performance by translating game play into visually detailed maps of the course, providing information about the player’s ball’s flight path, distance achieved, and progress from one round to the next.
The utilization of digital technology for training purposes coheres with its main premise, which is to prepare the athlete for competition by closely modeling those conditions. Thus, the more seamless the training experience, the more likely it is that the rehearsal will prepare the athlete for competition. Of course, the challenge for technology is to achieve a precise replication of the competition environment. As Liebermann and Franks (2004) noted, not all simulators do this equally well; some cause motion sickness that compromises the entire purpose. Sometimes, when attempting to simulate one reality, an entirely new reality is created instead.
iReferee: Could Artificial Intelligence Do a Better Job?
Another aspect of the athlete’s experiences in competitive sport has to do with how their performances are regulated by digital officiating systems. Often, debates about the need for such innovation in professional refereeing arises from high-profile controversial results, which attract considerable media attention and which are occasioned by the failure of human officials to correctly determine what is happening within the field of play. For example, in 2010, during a World Cup soccer match between England and Germany, a decision was made whereby a goal was not given to England. The replay clearly revealed that the ball was over the line by some margin, but the referee and linesmen failed to see that at the time. The incident reignited a long-standing debate within the world of soccer over the need for goal line technology (GLT), which uses high speed cameras and timing technology to record the ball’s location. The 2010 World Cup incident was one of a series of crucial errors spanning more than a decade, all of which could have been prevented had the use of goal line technology been employed. Perhaps because of England’s status as a powerful football nation coupled with it being a high stake game, on July 5, 2012 the International Football Association Board approved the use of GLT. At the 2014 World Cup Finals in Brazil, goal line technology led to the first result being decided on the basis of the GoalControl system (Chowdbury 2014).
In some sports, what happens on the playing field has changed dramatically in recent years, making it harder for officials to do their job without technological assistance. One of the best examples of this comes from men’s professional tennis, in which the average speed of play has increased so much that being able to determine whether a ball is played in or out is harder today than it was thirty years ago. In each of the Grand Slams, the first serve speed in the men’s game varies, but for the French Grand Slam it was approximately 160 kilometers per hour in 2000 and nearly 190 in 2008. The increase is comparable for other Grand Slams (Cross and Pollard 2009) and is one reason why tennis has pioneered digital officiating systems such as Hawk-Eye (Duncan, Thorpe, and Fitzpatrick 1996, p. 22). However, its introduction at major tennis tournaments (in 2006), cricket matches (in 2009), and British Premier League soccer (in 2013) was not without controversy, not least because of the large costs associated with installing the equipment.
In many sports, the wider objections to reliance on digital officials are twofold. First, there are concerns that appealing to a machine may automate a part of the competition environment that is best left to human judgment (Collins 2010). On this view, the referee is not just an enforcer of rules, but a crucial arbitrator of the ambiance of the match—perhaps more like the conductor of an orchestra than someone who applies the rule book. A human referee will know how severely to enforce a rule and, at times, may even choose to allow a match to continue without awarding a penalty, even if the rules require that a sanction is warranted. The second reason behind objections to the use of digital technology to assist officials has to do with whether their use will interrupt the flow of the game and prevent the demonstration of abilities that people feel are central to the sport’s value. This view takes into account that what happens within a sports match is a fine balance of circumstances that elicit an optimal range of opportunities to demonstrate skill and create a degree of tension that can be easily spoiled if small changes are made. For example, if camera technology were used to support every decision a referee made in soccer, the game would be brought to a standstill far too often.
The growth of the sports industries and the amount of money they generate create a great deal of pressure on sports federations to ensure that the right decision is made about any technological change. For that reason, it is hard to envisage a future in which resistance to digital officials finds much support, especially if its use is limited to crucial decisions within the game. While determining what constitutes a pivotal decision over the course of a match is contested, sports federations have already begun to implement the technology but also limit this use. For example, in tennis, the Hawk-Eye device is used only in cases when the line call has been challenged by a player; in soccer, it is used only in goal-line disputes.
Other digital systems are also affecting the regulatory conditions of sport, some of which may require advanced innovation. A good example is referee microphones, which allow the listening audience to hear what is being said to players by the referee, as it happens. In the past, spectators—whether live or remote—weren’t likely to know what players said to other players or to officials. Now everyone can hear, and this reduces the distance and isolation of the playing field to the spectators, subjecting the interactions which occur within it to the scrutiny of all onlookers. Allowing the voices of athletes and officials to be heard within the field of competition may be seen as a radical change in how people relate to their athletic heroes and may also enact a new form of disciplinary process toward players, insofar as their awareness of being broadcast shapes their behavior toward one another.
Many such technological changes to sports can also affect who are the winners and who are the losers, and this is one reason why any kind of innovation is significant for a sports federation. For instance, design changes to the javelin in the 1980s transformed the requirements of the sports so greatly that a new generation of throwers emerged. Sports are replete with examples of how technologies re-skill an activity. Yet the long term consequences of such change will not always be apparent, at the point of introduction. Edward Tenner describes this phenomenon in his 1996 book When Technology Bites Back, referring to J. Nadine Gelberg’s 1995 study of how the development of plastic helmets in American football decreased head injuries but led to a greater perception of safety among athletes and to greater risk taking; the consequences were an increase in other kinds of serious injuries sustained in the practice of the sport. In this case, a technology that was supposed to make a sport safer simply changed the kind of injuries athletes sustained. In this respect, digital sports technologies may be situated within a broader understanding of how technology is seen as a challenge to a sport’s ethos and values, without any obvious overall benefit.
Another example of such technological journeys is the design of the ball for World Cup soccer, which generates headlines ahead of each tournament, creating controversy over whether a new design modification will improve the game or make it worse. Over the years, new ball designs have been variously criticized for making goalkeeping more difficult, furthering the idea that a redesign is intended to increase the number of goals and make for a more exciting competition, presumably to make matches more entertaining. A press release by Adidas said this about a new ball design for the 2010 World Cup competition:
“JO’BULANI” also features the newly developed “Grip’n’Groove” profile which provides the best players in the world with a ball allowing an exceptionally stable flight and perfect grip under all conditions. Comprising only eight, completely new, thermally bonded 3-D panels, which for the first time are spherically moulded, the ball is perfectly round and even more accurate than ever before.
Coach Fabio Capello of England’s team was reported to have said that his players were unhappy that the ball was faster and lighter than previous balls. Yet why should that have been of any concern to spectators or to players? After all, as long as all teams are using the same ball, the competition remains fair. One of the reasons for concern is that, by changing the conditions of competition, governing bodies may compromise the tacit contract which stipulates that the competition would operate according to the rules agreed to by all parties—in this case the design properties of the ball.
To understand how grave it might be to change the design of a football ahead of a new tournament, suppose that FIFA had introduced a soccer ball that was the size of a tennis ball, or one with the shape of a rugby ball. What reactions would have been appropriate and reasonable then? Fans would have claimed, rightly, that such a transformation would change the conditions of the sport in such a way as to make it a completely different test of abilities. Athletes would have claimed that they have trained for a particular type of contest and that the new design created a different one, in which they had not agreed to play. Such concern about technology is less about fairness between competitors than about the legitimacy of a governing body changing the conditions of a practice without the agreement of its members. Yet what often makes these matters even more complicated is the widespread disagreement about the impact of the change. Of course, the principle underlying the redesign of a ball is that the new model should be more consistent and closer to the perfect technological artifact for the job than the old one. In the case of World Cup soccer, any new design that can demonstrate a closer approximation to what players imagine to be the perfect ball appeals to values that all players should share, and on that basis there is a strong case for its acceptance and for this priority to trump other concerns. Regardless of the ethical debate about technological change, the transformation of equipment reminds us that sports are not static. There is no single version of any sport that persists over time, without some kind of technological change.3
From this example, one learns that what matters about sports technologies is that they should always perform in as predictable manner as is possible. This is why we see balls changed at regular intervals in some sports, such as tennis, in which a ball’s continued use can diminish performance. Yet it is also interesting to note that we also witness athletes using this to their advantage—in tennis, for example, players may choose to serve with the same ball each time, for as long as they can. In such moments, the athlete is making a strategic judgment about which ball responds best to their skills. Even if absolute predictability cannot be ensured over the course of a competition, it is reasonable to pursue new designs to optimize predictability, in the hope that the sport eliminates the impact of irrelevant chance arising from technological design flaws. However, if a technology is introduced so late that players don’t have enough time to adjust to it, or if the new technology is too radical a change, the athlete’s preparation may be undermined, creating circumstances in which the technology cheats the athlete out of a previously agreed upon set of conditions.
These examples reveal how technological change creates new forms of inequalities in sport, but equality is not the sole concern of sports federations. Indeed, it is possible that new technological designs have nothing to do with fairness at all. More cynically, one may argue that publicity around sports innovations is strategically designed to generate more interest in events, and that headline stories about innovations are little more than marketing devices which serve a series of financial and political interests. Yet, aside from how new technology affects the media’s narratives about sports events, there are very real consequences to changing technologies in sports, which have a bearing on what we regard to be fair. However, the challenge in understanding the implications of these changes is that their full impact may remain unknown for some time to come. Evidently, different sports treat new technologies in different ways. In some sports, athletes are given the opportunity to choose their preferred apparatus, providing it adheres to a set of specified guidelines—for example, football players can choose their shoes. In other sports—for example, World Cup soccer—all players are expected to use the technology that their governing body approves.
In most cases, what unites new sports technologies is their common pursuit of reducing the uncertainty brought to the playing field by unforeseeable environmental changes or imperfect technological design. This is why when a soccer ball unexpectedly hits a tuft of grass in the field and bounces over the goalkeeper into the goal, spectators marvel at how unlikely the occurrence was but ultimately feel a sense of injustice at its having happened. The same is true of goals by deflection, which differ from when a player unexpectedly exhibits an unusual and unpredictable performance, such as a remarkable maneuver around players leading to an exceptionally beautiful goal. When a goal is scored by deflection, the unpredictability of sport is celebrated by the beneficiaries of the deflection and criticized by those whose fortune has been prejudiced as a result. Yet such chance occurrences are broadly seen as something not to be valued, even if one may feel that the occurrences is something extraordinary. Indeed, this is why a badminton player, having won a rally with a shot where the shuttle clipped the top of the net and tumbled over to the other side, apologizes to the opponent, knowing that the victory was due more to chance than to skill. In some sports, this is even acknowledged by replaying the point.
Perhaps the best thing about a surprising new sports technology is that it offers fans some explanation for their team’s failures which will permit them to enjoy a renewed sense of hope when the next matches occur. However, the choice for sports today is not to resist or embrace digital technologies, but to consider how many layers of digital surveillance may be necessary to ensure accuracy of results. On the third day of the 2012 London Games, one incident revealed just how far a technological approach to officiating may be taken. A South Korean fencer named Shin A-lam was engaged in her semi-final match, competing with the reigning champion, Britta Heidemann of Germany. With one second remaining on the clock and the match tied Heidemann needed to make one “clean touch” to secure victory; otherwise Shin would go advance to the final. Heidemann made two attempts to score the contact, without success. However, the clock indicated there still remained time for another attempt.
On her third attempt, Heidemann made a clean touch. However, more than a second had elapsed. After a 70-minute inquiry, the International Fencing Federation concluded that the decision in favor of Heidemann was fair. However, later evidence revealed that either the timing system or the referee had failed. This example goes to the heart of the debate about whether replacing—or even just supplementing—a referee’s decison with digital technology is likely to improve or make sports better. In this case, in contrast with most debates about the use of “third eye” technology, the failure appears to have been attributable to a digital system. Thus, this episode occurred in a context in which technology was already providing high accuracy.
The proposal that emerges from this example is that there should be a second layer of digital surveillance to watch the watchers. Instead of using one isolated timing system, aggregating the results of two or more timing systems may be the best way of achieving an accurate result. Yet there could be other solutions. In some cases, non-technological alternatives have been proposed—for instance, human goal-line referees in football (“fifth officials”) whose sole responsibility would be to monitor the goal line, rather like a line judge in tennis. This possibility also alerts us to two additional factors in deciding how best to regulate the playing field: the cost of the system and the possibility that the most effective technological solution would be to make more use of human intelligence.
In the lead up to the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, organizers are experimenting with the idea of using highly sensitive body sensor suits, which would convey contact in fencing to television audiences using a form of augmented reality. Multi-sensor platforms combining audio and visual elements may thus be the most effective solution to such problems. And so, in answer to the question about which is the more intelligent form of referee—a human or a computer—there seems merit in considering that a series of computers working in parallel with a referee would be the optimal solution.
The Socially Mediated Athlete
The final dimension of this chapter concerns the digital technologies that surround the communication environment in which athletes find themselves today. New channels of communication enable athletes to reach their public in different ways than were possible before and this creates new challenges. Before even considering the experiential aspect of the challenge of new and social media, it is useful to note that such changes have implications for how one makes sense of the economics of sport and the role of the larger infrastructure of sport. A good example of this is the emergence of the IOC’s new “Olympic Channel,” which I discuss in length later in the book.
In this section I want to examine how social media and other participatory media are changing the elite athlete’s experience. For instance, there are already indications that there is a growing expectation that an athlete must be present within social media, but this can have an affect on how an athlete undertakes his or her work. Indeed, around the London 2012 Olympic Games, CEO of the London Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (now president of the IAAF), Lord Sebastian Coe, raised concerns about athletes being distracted from their sport by social media. Yet the integration of social media into sports experiences is a growing trend. Intimations of such change are found in the emerging economics of professional e-sports, which are bypassing television and live-streaming matches to audiences directly, often through the athlete’s own Twitch channel.
In view of these changes to the media economy of elite sports, federations are under pressure to re-think what takes place around their sports, to ensure they remain relevant for a generation of mobile-only media viewers, but much remains uncertain about what audience expectations of sport will be like. For instance, at some point soon might audiences expect their athletic heroes sharing their feelings during competition, perhaps by means of Twitter? This seems rather unlikely, but the absurdity of the proposition really depends on its detail. Of course, a cyclist isn’t likely to pull out a mobile phone while in the middle of their race and share an update on Twitter. Indeed, the Tour de France forbids using a phone during the race by its riders.4 Yet there are two ways in which one might imagine this situation differently, which make it a more credible scenario. First, wearable technologies may provide a different kind of interface for athletes to use when attempting to communicate how they are feeling during a competition. Second, data can function as communication insights, and in the future ways of expressing how we feel may be more reliant on data correlations than on direct assertions. The importance of this second feature of Sport 2.0 should not be understated, since it helps explain digital technology’s potential to transform sport. The translation of sport into data leads to an expansion of the range of materials available to audiences. For instance, one tends to think of what goes on in the athlete’s body and mind as unavailable to spectators, but what if we could discover it in real time by converting body data into indications of, say, emotional states? It is in this manner that sport’s digital renaissance will become complete—when digital information finds ways of extending our sensory limits, providing insights into the world which we have not had before.
Again, in e-sports, this ethos of communicating while playing is built into the infrastructure of many games. Players have conversations within the platform as a competition is taking place. The appeal of this is also found in the endless pursuit of sponsors to monetize sports content further. If tweeting during competitions seems too absurd to imagine, then how about tweeting during time-outs, or during half-time breaks, which could become spaces for interaction between athletes and fans? Could sponsors contractually oblige their athletes to do a degree of in-competition interaction to heighten the experience for fans, in the same way that victors are herded to take part in certain high-priority interviews? Athletes already undertake such communications immediately before or after competition, and the pressure on them to nurture their celebrity may compel them further in this direction. Certainly, this may come at a loss in focus on the competition, but if the consequence is a more engaged audience and, by implication, a more lucrative business, then this may be a reasonable sacrifice to make. The central point here is not that sports may have to change to satisfy their need for economic growth, but that the mythical performance of athletes can be better understood through digital technology. This is appealing precisely because the heroic achievements undertaken by elite athletes are surprising and extraordinary. The entire system of sports media professionals works to allow spectators to come closer to understanding what such achievements entail and how they feel, and this trajectory leads inevitably in the direction I describe above. The first steps toward getting inside the athlete’s mind and body during competition can be found within present-day social media.
The impact of social media on athletes was most visible during preparations for the 2012 London Games, when a number of athletes found themselves in difficult circumstances because of something that had taken place on Twitter. Just before the Games, the Greek athlete Voula Papachristou was excluded from the London 2012 team before even arriving to the city because of a tweet that the Greek authorities deemed to be racist.
Once the 2012 London Games were underway, some athletes suffered because of abusive comments made by users of social media. For example, in an especially cruel tweet, the British diver Tom Daley was abused after failing to perform as well as his fans expected. (See figure 3.1.) Of particular interest in this case is that the abusive tweet probably wouldn’t have generated as much debate if Daley hadn’t re-tweeted it. This was the primary cause of a public debate about the abusive tweeter and a broader discussion about whether athletes should be using social media at all around competition time. Had Daley been advised to ignore the comment, there might not have been such a debate, the 17-year-old Twitter troll might not have been arrested, and the troll might not have gained 100,000 followers on Twitter—more followers than some of the most famous athletes in the world have. (The troll’s account was eventually suspended indefinitely.)
The Olympic Games—or any major tournament—are always likely to be a primary mechanism for promoting an athlete’s celebrity status, which may translate into sponsorship deals that can aid the athlete’s training. The example of Nick Symmonds may be the most eloquent articulation of a possible future in which athletes literally sell their body parts off to the highest bidder in order to compete professionally. In this respect, the impact of social media on an athlete’s profession derives crucially from the greater expectations of sports fan for real-time contact with their athletic heroes. Of course, this is one of the core values of social media as well; it has the capacity to change the structure of communication to permit more direct, intimate conversations, in comparison with older formats of communication. This shift also brings a burden of growing expectations: Some athletes may feel overwhelmed by demands from fans. Yet it is also a way for athletes to take more ownership of their celebrity status as increasing numbers of journalists rely on direct quotations from social-media platforms rather than sourcing their own unique words to report.
An elite athlete’s performance space is dramatically reconfigured as a result of digital technology. Athletes now prepare and compete within environments that are awash with data systems that serve to communicate insights and opportunities for them to augment either their performance or their persona. Sports may risk over reliance on these digital systems, if they neglect to consider supporting the importance of obtaining insights or interacting with people. Yet such technologies as GLT are here to stay, and athletes must adapt to the new conditions. For an athlete to ignore social media today would be like ignoring television thirty years ago or email in 1997. Equally, failing to capitalize on data-analysis software may mean losing an edge over a competitor, which might be the difference between excellence and mediocrity. In each case, the conditions of fairness in sports are affected as a result of digital innovation, and these trends reveal a growing contest among technologists within this area of research. However, the conditions of elite sport may have been this way for quite some time now; digital knowledge technologies are just the latest example of how science and technology are defining what it means to operate within an elite sports world.
