Sport Technology in Track & Field (with Lolo Jones)

Recently an awesome video came up on my Facebook feed about the use of sport technology to enhance athletic performance. The video was close to home on several fronts:

1. It features Lolo Jones who helped spearhead the championship teams when I was at LSU
2. The video takes place on the legendary LSU track that was my home for 4 years
3. It incorporates technology that I’m intimately familiar with….Vidon and optojump
4. Less than 100m away from where the video was shot was the biomechanics lab where I did much of my doctoral research using the Vicon system used in this video.

I’ve been a part of dozens of interventions like this over the past 10 years as a consultant or sport scientist for several national governing bodies and I will say that this was one of the more impressive setups I’ve ever seen. Collecting high speed motion analysis in real time outside of a lab setting is very new technology. The fact that it was done using an elite athlete hurdling is ground breaking. The next step is being able to do it without reflective markers with comparable accuracy. Let’s hope this technology makes it beyond marketing / case-study scenarios because I think we’ll garner lots of useful information.