History of Biomechanics

Part 4 - The Birth of the USOC Colorado Springs Training Center

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Title History of Biomechanics
Subtitle Part 4 - The Birth of the USOC Colorado Springs Training Center
Subject (keywords) APAS ; Biomechanics ; History ; Performance Analysis ;
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Created on 5/11/2009 12:00:00 AM
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Synopsis

The U.S. Olympic Training Center was initially established in Squaw Valley but was later moved to Colorado Spring due to altitude issues. The first Olympic Committee was also selected and the Koto Research Center was designated as an Olympic site. The chairman of biomechanics for the U.S. Olympic Committee was chosen and the computer of the United States Olympic Sport Medicine Committee was established.

Al Oder, a former gold medalist, and Dr. Gideon Ariel, the chairman of biomechanics, discussed the potential of computers in athletics. They predicted that sophisticated computing capabilities would revolutionize sports, with athletes being able to simulate perfect throws and receive immediate feedback on their performance.

However, they also warned about the potential dangers of over-reliance on technology, such as the possibility of implanting computers within athletes to override their natural limitations. They emphasized the importance of maintaining a balance between arts and science in sports and using technology to enhance, not replace, natural athletic abilities.

The U.S. Olympic Committee's budget for the 1984 games was more than $71 million, five times the amount spent on the 1976 games. They utilized the science of biomechanics, as refined by Dr. Gideon Ariel, to give the U.S. team a competitive edge. This involved analyzing the angle of each joint in an athlete's body and identifying errors that could not be detected by the human eye alone.

The biomechanics computer was also used to analyze the performance of competitors and learn from their techniques. The U.S. women's volleyball team, for instance, improved their performance by working with the analysis of the Japanese champions. The effectiveness of this "secret weapon" would be tested in the 1984 games.

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# Time Spoken text
0. 00:00 started the U.S. Olympic Training Center. The first one was in Squaw Valley.
1. 00:05 It didn't situate very well because of the high altitude and then we move it to Colorado Spring.
2. 00:12 We selected also the Olympic Committee, as you see here, that's the first Olympic Committee,
3. 00:18 and then you see them in my center in Koto Research Center, which was designated by itself
4. 00:24 as an Olympic site. Artets used to come to train there before Colorado Spring.
5. 00:29 Then I was chosen as the chairman of biomechanics for the U.S. Olympic Committee,
6. 00:34 as you see here in these certificates, and the first I start working what's called here the
7. 00:41 computer of the United States Olympic Sport Medicine Committee with my friend Al Other,
8. 00:47 the former gold medalist that I compete with in 1960 and 64, and continue to work with the
9. 00:53 Eman Colada Spring. These belong to perhaps the greatest Olympian in history.
10. 01:08 My name is Al Oder. I've been in computers for about 22 years now, and I think I've always
11. 01:13 realized that there would be the potential for the computer in athletics. We've gone through
12. 01:18 microcomputers and many computers, and now that we're developing computer chips with
13. 01:23 sophisticated computing capabilities, we're going to see a large introduction in the sport.
14. 01:28 They are setting the pace. Al Oder, 45-year-old discus genius who still is a threat to everybody
15. 01:34 in the world. And Dr. Gideon Ariel. I'm delighted to have you on the show obviously, but why is a
16. 01:39 guy 45 years old throwing a discus and why are you still beating most of the people in the world?
17. 01:44 I have yet to figure that out, but I enjoy it. I've always had a philosophy that you don't have
18. 01:51 to go out and win everything, as long as you enjoy it and you work hard, you know, the capability
19. 01:55 evolves, and that normally takes care of the winning kind of thing. I absolutely enjoy throwing.
20. 02:00 I'm going to be throwing to another 25 years. Gideon, 45 years of age, I've alluded to that,
21. 02:05 and yet a couple of years ago he had a combination three of the best throws. Are we beginning to
22. 02:10 shrink chronological and biological age, or are we beginning to expand the difference?
23. 02:15 Our body going by our genetic capability, and apparently at the age of 45 you don't have to say
24. 02:21 I'm old man. As far as I'm concerned, all right now it's probably 25, 26 years old, biologically.
25. 02:27 What kind of logically? That's for the birds. Did you know about Al before you started going?
26. 02:33 Al was my idol. In fact, in the kibbutin, I had his picture above my bed every morning. I would
27. 02:40 worship. I mean, thousands years ago, they would kill me, they would say that I worship idols,
28. 02:45 you know, but he was my idol for many, many years from 1955. All right, that was time for you.
29. 02:50 That's a long time ago. You're getting older, you're getting younger. Al, you have a scientific
30. 02:57 interest. Where'd that come from? Well, I've been in computers now for whole 20, 21 years,
31. 03:02 or something like that, and when I started back into competition, I had an eight-year
32. 03:06 layup from 1968 through 76, and when I started back, I thought I might as well learn as much
33. 03:12 as I can about the throw, and I hooked up with Gideon immediately to find out exactly what I
34. 03:17 was doing wrong. Why not take advantage of all of the innovations that occurred through that
35. 03:22 eight-year span? And I think the computer analysis of the technique in my event was actually the
36. 03:28 most important thing. I could determine for the first time what coaches were trying to tell me.
37. 03:32 I could see quantitatively where I was accelerating, decelerating, all these kinds of things,
38. 03:36 and then going through that analysis, I was able then to launch into my kind of newfound career,
39. 03:42 okay, with new enthusiasm and knowing what I was doing. Al, to understand the future,
40. 03:46 we have to understand the past. Unfortunately, or fortunately, you're the past and the present
41. 03:51 and the future. Now, where are we going to go with this game? I think the computer analysis will
42. 03:56 continue. I think we'll get into very shortly an area where athletes will be able to almost
43. 04:03 step inside themselves. We'll have computers simulating what the perfect throw will be,
44. 04:07 and throwers will be, in effect, able to enter their own image created by film, by computers,
45. 04:13 and as they execute the throw, if an arm goes out too far ahead tilt to something,
46. 04:17 there'll be an alarm go off and say, you're changing. So feedback systems and computers are
47. 04:22 going to be very important. You see that getting? Well, hologram is the thing of the future,
48. 04:26 and I tell you, I'm learning from Mal, more than he learned from me, but he's the head of the
49. 04:30 game all the time because he really talked about the future. We're talking about holography now,
50. 04:36 where you will have the ideal model that you actually will see. You cannot touch it because
51. 04:40 you see it, but you cannot touch it, but you can put your body right in it, and every time you
52. 04:45 depart from efficiency, either you will have some kind of feedback in alarm system, or I don't know,
53. 04:50 maybe he needs Germany to give you a 220. There are things that are a little frightening about
54. 04:56 the entire environment of computer introduction at the sport, because computers, 10 years ago,
55. 05:01 I couldn't lift computers that night now I hold in the palm of my hand very easily,
56. 05:06 and why not in the future be able to implant computers within an athlete,
57. 05:10 and through telemetry, exercise that athlete, because the thing that prevents a runner from
58. 05:14 going very fast, is his brain, and through telemetry, you can override that brain feedback that says,
59. 05:21 I think I'm going too fast, wrong fatigue, you can override that with computer implants that
60. 05:24 are stimulating various muscles, that's frightening, because then we're into robotics.
61. 05:29 Well, is that going to be legal? You see a lot of changes taking place in the Olympic rules,
62. 05:33 etc. Oh, the technology is here today. Certainly there's going to have to be a way of combating
63. 05:39 it, because then you'll have coaches up in the stands, okay, with telemetry stations activating
64. 05:44 their athletes, there obviously has to be a stop for that, how you do it is through some kind of
65. 05:48 body scan. All I 100% agree with you, because we are here dealing with a balance between
66. 05:53 arts and science, and when one taking over, you have a situation which is really a
67. 05:59 non-athletics anymore, and we should use science to amplify our mind in a way where you can perform
68. 06:07 the best, but it should be the non-invasive method, we should never implant chips in our
69. 06:12 body, we should never take drugs, we should do it as natural as possible to achieve our maximum.
70. 06:16 Sure, just enhance an athlete's capability to exercise more efficiently, to be more productive
71. 06:23 in his training environment, that's all we want. Vic, while we were setting up our
72. 06:28 comrades during our visit, he unloaded this source during training. Although the troll
73. 06:34 landed on a hill, we were able to calculate that the source would have travel approximately
74. 06:40 244 feet, that's farther than the world record, 244 feet. This guy is going to be
75. 06:48 47 years old in 1984, that's the year of the electric troll.
76. 06:53 Other athletes we won't quit, with all events, you'll see our fuel buck and
77. 06:58 make regions, the world I could hold them in the shot, and the viscous, which we
78. 07:02 will be able to help every four years, but to the athletes, that quadrennial event is a matter
79. 07:07 of just about perennial preparation, and these days, as Harold Down now reports from the US
80. 07:12 Olympic Committee National Training Center, the stopwatch and tape measure are supplemented by the computer.
81. 07:22 It's almost as if the United States Olympic Committee is preparing for war and not gains
82. 07:26 in 1984. The budget is more than $71 million, almost five times the amount spent on the 1976
83. 07:33 games, and they will make maximum use of what they call their secret weapon. The science of
84. 07:38 biomechanics is not new in itself, but as refined and perfected by Dr. Gideon Ariel,
85. 07:44 an Israeli-born computer science expert, it puts the US team years ahead of its competitors.
86. 07:49 I think we've got the secret weapon here, and we're going to be pleased German and the Russians.
87. 07:54 It is a painstaking process taking several hours to set up a sequence of motion pictures,
88. 07:59 transferring frame by frame the angle of each joint from the angle to the elbow,
89. 08:04 from the film to the computer, finding errors that cannot be seen by the camera or the human eye
90. 08:09 alone. Al order has won four Olympic gold medals during the discus. He has set six world records.
91. 08:15 This is also Al order after his technique was processed by the biomechanics computer,
92. 08:20 which not only showed him what he was doing wrong, but also told him exactly how to throw
93. 08:24 the discus further than anyone has ever thrown it before. He was able to draw on the computer
94. 08:29 250 feet. This is over 10, almost 18 feet, better than the world record. He has it in his body,
95. 08:37 the motor got it. Now we have to tune it. It's a matter of tuning. I think the results show that
96. 08:43 I am throwing better. I don't think I'm throwing up to my potential. I know the computer says I
97. 08:50 should be throwing around 250. Now whether it can throw 250, you know, there's something that's up
98. 08:55 here. But the analysis is telling me how to work more productively. Not only is the biomechanics
99. 09:03 computer being used to analyze the performance of American athletes, it's also a tool to determine
100. 09:09 if the competition has any secrets the team ought to know. One thing for sure, the East German
101. 09:14 and the Russians and the best analysts in the world will not be able to keep what hypothetically
102. 09:18 calls secrets from our sports medicine program because we will analyze them and we'll know what
103. 09:24 they're doing. And if they're doing better, we'll learn how to do it even better than them.
104. 09:28 The US women's volleyball team has already benefited working with the analysis of the Japanese
105. 09:33 champions. A few years ago, this team wasn't even considered competitive. Now it's one of the top
106. 09:38 rated in the world. Olympic athletes will be coming here for intensive work with the biomechanics
107. 09:43 laboratory between now and the 1984 games. That's when they'll find out for sure if the secret weapon
108. 09:49 really works. Harold Dow, CBS News, Colorado Springs. That's our report for this Monday.
109. 09:56 Until tomorrow, Dan Rather, CBS News, reporting from Washington.

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Video Segments

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started the U.S. Olympic Training Center. The first one was in Squaw Valley.

It didn't situate very well because of the high altitude and then we move it to Colorado Spring.

We selected also the Olympic Committee, as you see here, that's the first Olympic Committee,

and then you see them in my center in Koto Research Center, which was designated by itself

as an Olympic site. Artets used to come to train there before Colorado Spring.

Then I was chosen as the chairman of biomechanics for the U.S. Olympic Committee,

as you see here in these certificates, and the first I start working what's called here the

computer of the United States Olympic Sport Medicine Committee with my friend Al Other,

the former gold medalist that I compete with in 1960 and 64, and continue to work with the

Eman Colada Spring. These belong to perhaps the greatest Olympian in history.

My name is Al Oder. I've been in computers for about 22 years now, and I think I've always

realized that there would be the potential for the computer in athletics. We've gone through

microcomputers and many computers, and now that we're developing computer chips with

sophisticated computing capabilities, we're going to see a large introduction in the sport.

They are setting the pace. Al Oder, 45-year-old discus genius who still is a threat to everybody

in the world. And Dr. Gideon Ariel. I'm delighted to have you on the show obviously, but why is a

guy 45 years old throwing a discus and why are you still beating most of the people in the world?

I have yet to figure that out, but I enjoy it. I've always had a philosophy that you don't have

to go out and win everything, as long as you enjoy it and you work hard, you know, the capability

evolves, and that normally takes care of the winning kind of thing. I absolutely enjoy throwing.

I'm going to be throwing to another 25 years. Gideon, 45 years of age, I've alluded to that,

and yet a couple of years ago he had a combination three of the best throws. Are we beginning to

shrink chronological and biological age, or are we beginning to expand the difference?

Our body going by our genetic capability, and apparently at the age of 45 you don't have to say

I'm old man. As far as I'm concerned, all right now it's probably 25, 26 years old, biologically.

What kind of logically? That's for the birds. Did you know about Al before you started going?

Al was my idol. In fact, in the kibbutin, I had his picture above my bed every morning. I would

worship. I mean, thousands years ago, they would kill me, they would say that I worship idols,

you know, but he was my idol for many, many years from 1955. All right, that was time for you.

That's a long time ago. You're getting older, you're getting younger. Al, you have a scientific

interest. Where'd that come from? Well, I've been in computers now for whole 20, 21 years,

or something like that, and when I started back into competition, I had an eight-year

layup from 1968 through 76, and when I started back, I thought I might as well learn as much

as I can about the throw, and I hooked up with Gideon immediately to find out exactly what I

was doing wrong. Why not take advantage of all of the innovations that occurred through that

eight-year span? And I think the computer analysis of the technique in my event was actually the

most important thing. I could determine for the first time what coaches were trying to tell me.

I could see quantitatively where I was accelerating, decelerating, all these kinds of things,

and then going through that analysis, I was able then to launch into my kind of newfound career,

okay, with new enthusiasm and knowing what I was doing. Al, to understand the future,

we have to understand the past. Unfortunately, or fortunately, you're the past and the present

and the future. Now, where are we going to go with this game? I think the computer analysis will

continue. I think we'll get into very shortly an area where athletes will be able to almost

step inside themselves. We'll have computers simulating what the perfect throw will be,

and throwers will be, in effect, able to enter their own image created by film, by computers,

and as they execute the throw, if an arm goes out too far ahead tilt to something,

there'll be an alarm go off and say, you're changing. So feedback systems and computers are

going to be very important. You see that getting? Well, hologram is the thing of the future,

and I tell you, I'm learning from Mal, more than he learned from me, but he's the head of the

game all the time because he really talked about the future. We're talking about holography now,

where you will have the ideal model that you actually will see. You cannot touch it because

you see it, but you cannot touch it, but you can put your body right in it, and every time you

depart from efficiency, either you will have some kind of feedback in alarm system, or I don't know,

maybe he needs Germany to give you a 220. There are things that are a little frightening about

the entire environment of computer introduction at the sport, because computers, 10 years ago,

I couldn't lift computers that night now I hold in the palm of my hand very easily,

and why not in the future be able to implant computers within an athlete,

and through telemetry, exercise that athlete, because the thing that prevents a runner from

going very fast, is his brain, and through telemetry, you can override that brain feedback that says,

I think I'm going too fast, wrong fatigue, you can override that with computer implants that

are stimulating various muscles, that's frightening, because then we're into robotics.

Well, is that going to be legal? You see a lot of changes taking place in the Olympic rules,

etc. Oh, the technology is here today. Certainly there's going to have to be a way of combating

it, because then you'll have coaches up in the stands, okay, with telemetry stations activating

their athletes, there obviously has to be a stop for that, how you do it is through some kind of

body scan. All I 100% agree with you, because we are here dealing with a balance between

arts and science, and when one taking over, you have a situation which is really a

non-athletics anymore, and we should use science to amplify our mind in a way where you can perform

the best, but it should be the non-invasive method, we should never implant chips in our

body, we should never take drugs, we should do it as natural as possible to achieve our maximum.

Sure, just enhance an athlete's capability to exercise more efficiently, to be more productive

in his training environment, that's all we want. Vic, while we were setting up our

comrades during our visit, he unloaded this source during training. Although the troll

landed on a hill, we were able to calculate that the source would have travel approximately

244 feet, that's farther than the world record, 244 feet. This guy is going to be

47 years old in 1984, that's the year of the electric troll.

Other athletes we won't quit, with all events, you'll see our fuel buck and

make regions, the world I could hold them in the shot, and the viscous, which we

will be able to help every four years, but to the athletes, that quadrennial event is a matter

of just about perennial preparation, and these days, as Harold Down now reports from the US

Olympic Committee National Training Center, the stopwatch and tape measure are supplemented by the computer.

It's almost as if the United States Olympic Committee is preparing for war and not gains

in 1984. The budget is more than $71 million, almost five times the amount spent on the 1976

games, and they will make maximum use of what they call their secret weapon. The science of

biomechanics is not new in itself, but as refined and perfected by Dr. Gideon Ariel,

an Israeli-born computer science expert, it puts the US team years ahead of its competitors.

I think we've got the secret weapon here, and we're going to be pleased German and the Russians.

It is a painstaking process taking several hours to set up a sequence of motion pictures,

transferring frame by frame the angle of each joint from the angle to the elbow,

from the film to the computer, finding errors that cannot be seen by the camera or the human eye

alone. Al order has won four Olympic gold medals during the discus. He has set six world records.

This is also Al order after his technique was processed by the biomechanics computer,

which not only showed him what he was doing wrong, but also told him exactly how to throw

the discus further than anyone has ever thrown it before. He was able to draw on the computer

250 feet. This is over 10, almost 18 feet, better than the world record. He has it in his body,

the motor got it. Now we have to tune it. It's a matter of tuning. I think the results show that

I am throwing better. I don't think I'm throwing up to my potential. I know the computer says I

should be throwing around 250. Now whether it can throw 250, you know, there's something that's up

here. But the analysis is telling me how to work more productively. Not only is the biomechanics

computer being used to analyze the performance of American athletes, it's also a tool to determine

if the competition has any secrets the team ought to know. One thing for sure, the East German

and the Russians and the best analysts in the world will not be able to keep what hypothetically

calls secrets from our sports medicine program because we will analyze them and we'll know what

they're doing. And if they're doing better, we'll learn how to do it even better than them.

The US women's volleyball team has already benefited working with the analysis of the Japanese

champions. A few years ago, this team wasn't even considered competitive. Now it's one of the top

rated in the world. Olympic athletes will be coming here for intensive work with the biomechanics

laboratory between now and the 1984 games. That's when they'll find out for sure if the secret weapon

really works. Harold Dow, CBS News, Colorado Springs. That's our report for this Monday.

Until tomorrow, Dan Rather, CBS News, reporting from Washington.

Download summary in PDF format

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