October 23, 2018 9:45 pm

Wednesday, Gary and Chuck Ask Your Questions to Sports Engineer David James

What does it take to make a world champion? As sports engineer and professor David James says, “Good athletes make world champions.” On this episode of Playing with Science, hosts Gary O’Reilly and Chuck Nice sit down with David, who’s also the Director of The Center for Sports Engineering Research at Sheffield Hallam University, to pick his brain on the influence of technology and engineering in the modern sporting world.

Having been involved in numerous projects from helping develop a controversial skin suit for Amy Williams, the British gold-medal-winning skeleton racer, to helping introduce goal-line technology for FIFA, David is an engineer’s engineer. Constantly looking at ways to better sport by using technology and engineering.

David takes us behind his process, which can either start before the design stage or after the design stage during the initial testing. We discuss the weight of certain sporting decisions and how some decisions must be right. Gary gives Chuck a quick lesson on the relegation process of the English football leagues. For those unfamiliar with the concept, if your team finishes the season in the bottom three of each league, they are then demoted to the league below. Meanwhile, the teams that finish in the top three, are promoted to the league above.

You’ll find out why technology could pull sporting worlds apart if everyone doesn’t get equal access to the same technology and learn how science can play a factor in making accurate predictions in “linear” sports. We also discuss the benefits and downsides of wearable technology.

Gary, Chuck and David also answer fan-submitted questions during the episode, including ones about the shape and curvature of snowboards, the comparisons of head injuries in football, rugby and American football, and making changes to the human design to make us more efficient when skating. All that, plus, David tells us his favorite sport from a physics standpoint, and we debate whether humans will ever reach a biological performance limit when competing.

Please join us tomorrow night for Ask a Sports Engineer, with David James right here on our website, as well as on our Playing with Science channels on Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, Stitcher, and TuneIn. If you’re an All-Access subscriber, you can watch or listen to this episode ad-free.

That’s it for now. Keep Looking Up!
–Ian Mullen