The United States Olympic Committee is announcing today that it's going to use a computer

contributed by a company called Data General to improve the performances of every American

Olympic contender.

With us this morning is Colonel Don Miller, he's Executive Director of the Olympic Committee,

and Dr. Gideon Ariel, he's a sports scientist, a former Israeli Olympic athlete who has developed

a system that we're about to show you.

Let's begin with you, Colonel Miller.

How much can a computer do for an athlete?

Pretty much, Tom, I think it's a tremendous benefit to assist our athletes in perfecting

their skills technique.

Athletes in other parts of the world are already using the system to analyze what they're doing

right and what they're doing wrong, I gather.

Yes, such as the East Germans are using the system, however, they do not have the sophistication

in their computer systems that we have in ours.

They cannot manipulate the maximum data that we can, therefore we are very confident that

we will be much further ahead than the East Germans, some of the other countries using

the computer system in the very near future, if we are not already ahead of them.

Alright, Dr. Gideon Ariel is the man who developed the system, he's going to tell us

about it this morning.

First of all, you want to change the analysis from eyeball to hard scientific judgment I

gather.

That's why you went ahead and did this.

Well the human eye actually cannot see performance because what performance is all about is manipulation

of forces in the body and you cannot see forces, you can see movement.

The computer can give us the data to see forces and to be able to optimize performance.

Ariel believes that what the computer sees can help Americans win gold medals.

It measures things a coach could never measure, precise velocities and angles of movement

and stress points that affect an athlete's performance.

Discus Thrower Mack Wilkins won a gold medal in the 76 Olympics after Ariel's computer

showed he could channel more energy into his throw.

We don't try to create bionic outlets, what we try to do is optimize the human body and

we apply actually techniques that was devised in the 17th century by Newton.

Isaac Newton of course never coached volleyball or track but his principles of gravity and

motion are the foundations of Gideon Ariel's work.

Ariel is here in Colorado Springs to analyze the U.S. women's volleyball team.

A big backswing he and his computer conclude makes an inefficient spike.

Ariel is a member of the U.S. Olympic sports medicine committee.

It is all aimed at developing a system for U.S. Olympic athletes.

A system that Gideon Ariel believes can go a step beyond stop watchers and rulers into

new measurements of the science we have made of game.

Dr. Ariel, what is biomechanics?

Well, literally basically it's what the world say.

Biomeans life, mechanics mean the science of motions, the science of stresses.

So what we try to do is actually we combining life with the physical laws that affect in

life and that's where the world come biomechanics, the science of motions as related to biological

system.

Whatever happened in athletics, how far the shot go, how far the discus go, how far the

high jumper go, it all depends on how much forces were produced to be able the object

to move and the object could be the human body or could be a shot, could be a javelin,

could be a discus, could be a hammer, could be a frisbee.

We cannot see the forces but we can calculate the forces.

When we're talking about biomechanics, we're talking about calculations of kinetic parameters

or the forces that are acting upon the body.

We utilizing a high-speed film using photography.

Now after we develop the film, we can utilize an instrument which is called a digitizer.

You actually see the picture projected on the digitizer.

What we are doing, we're using a sonic pen to trace the joint center of the outlet and

this joint center location is going right to the computer.

Now at the past people did it by hand, it took months and months to do one analysis.

For the computer does, it takes the X and Y coordinates from the digitizers and put

it into a memory.

After we did the digitizing process which takes sometime hour, hour and a half to trace about

hundred frames each frame separately, we can reconstruct the pictures on the screen or

the megatec graphic system.

The data is processed by the computer and it gives us the following thing, the displacement,

how much the joint center moves, from that we can derive the velocities or how fast or

the speed of the segment, from that we can derive the acceleration and acceleration is

very important because the second Newton law said that force equaled to mass times acceleration.

If we know the mass of the different body parts and if we know the acceleration from

this technique, we can calculate the forces and what make an outlet move is actually rely

on forces.

The pattern of the movement or the acceleration pattern in each sequence is critically understanding

of the proper movement.

So we interpret the results of the outlet, we might make some changes and then two weeks

later we re-test them again and see if you correct this technique.

This is the non-direct measurement.

The uniqueness in this technique is that it's non-invasive, we don't touch the outlet

while we're taking the film, that's why the outlet can perform in the Olympic games or

in our court of sport research center and he even doesn't know when we're taking the

film and then we analyze it.

The direct method consists of a force measurement device that records the forces directly, it

gives us the three orthogonal forces, this is a direct measurement, it's very important

for example for runner, how much shock it transferring to his body, for example comparison

between shoes can reveal to us immediately the data if there is any difference in force

transmission to the body, also how can we construct better shoes, or how can we design

shoes for particular outlet so you can perform in the Olympic games better.

Dr. Ariel, how factual are the results of your calculations?

Well it's as factual as gravitational laws, it's like when somebody said that I left

the shot put and it fell down, very seldom am I here, somebody said I left the shot put

and fell up, it's a physical loss, it cannot fall up unless you are in the moon, so if

we're finding out that there is some kind of linkage here that translates momentum from

one segment to the other, it couldn't be, it will be any different, also I used to tell

the shot put the shot put the shot put the shot, what about the psychology, I said well

I don't know yet the shot put or the through the shot, the shot just left the hand and

then it concentrate and sunny zoom it went five feet farther, I never saw it, if it ever

happened it always happened, when it was still in contact with the fingers and when the forces

were transmitted through the dynamic link into the shot from the hand, all this concentration

all this shouting and all this jumping after the shot left the hand, this is just in person

on the audience, the shot is going to land where it's supposed to land.

Tennis pros have been consulting Ariel too to find out what really happens when a tennis

ball hits a racket, after testing every kind of tennis ball Ariel worked up a special ball

and now using special high-speed film taken at over ten thousand frames per second, he's

testing rackets to see how they can be improved, there too Sir Isaac Newton turns out to be

an ace, his forehand and backhand may not have been much, but his overhead smash is famous.

Sometimes we don't recognize a good idea until it hits us in the head, now sports equipment

manufacturers are hiring Ariel's firm to find out if there are better ways to design and

make things for athletes to wear and use, shoes for instance.

Using a force platform Ariel generates hundreds of thousands of bits of data, which the computer

records and remembers and can work with.

You take a big truck and a little Volkswagen car and you have different tires on the cars,

well why?

Because the different forces, the shock absorption characteristics are different for a big truck

versus a small car, but you take a three hundred pound outlet, size 11 shoes and 150 pounds

outlet, size 11 shoes and they wear the same shoes, that doesn't make sense.

The reason is that nobody bothered to calculate what's going on in the shoe, the really the

shoe was not designed for the man.

Ariel is also developing exercise equipment, training devices for use by athletes or for

rehabilitation, physical therapy, computers will program the workload and store the information

for coaches and doctors.

You can make a ball or a bat or a racket or a shoe out of different materials, but the

materials you can't change are ones like bone and muscle.

At some point, under some amount of strain, bone will fracture, muscle will tear and because

those are known quantities, Ariel's computers have been able to project what the limits

are of human achievement, how fast a human being will ever be able to run, to jump, to

throw, all forms of athletic endeavor have limits, and Ariel says he now knows what

they are.

In some cases, as in Bob Beaman's broad jump in the 1968 Olympics, the limit has already

been reached or something very close to it.

In others, man and woman have a long way to go.

The shot put record is now just over 70 feet.

Ariel projects that man is capable of throwing a 16 pound ball close to a hundred feet.

If you can tell the future, surely computerized biomechanical analysis should be able to settle

some of the long-standing bar bets of all time.

Would Jesse Owens still be a champion in today's competition?

Ariel says he would, using today's shoes and on today's tracks.

Would Secretary at Beat Man of War?

Ariel says he can tell.

The theoretical possibilities are fascinating.