Sports Engineering

You may have only just heard of sports engineering but it is not a new topic by any means. Over three hundred years ago, a mechanical line call device was introduced to Real Tennis, whilst in 1672 Newton discussed the way spinning tennis balls deviated in flight. More recently, in 1910, Sir J.J Thompson gave an explanation of the dynamics of golf ball flight in Nature, using the analogy of electron beam trajectories. In the last decade or so, sports engineering has become very popular across the world, particularly in the UK. So what is fuelling this interest and is sport ‘big business’ as many people say? There is a lot of hype surrounding sport, often in the claims of equipment manufacturers. So does sports engineering work and, if it does, isn’t the application of engineering to sport simply cheating?