In marathon running, the myth is that it is all about the athlete. The truth is more interesting. The four great stages of this popular test of endurance – London, Berlin, Chicago and New York – each present participants with their specific challenge through surface, gradient and rhythm, and modern technology in footwear and apparel is increasingly designed to meet those specifics. Performance, in other words, is a negotiation between physiology and the environment. 

Berlin remains the most-world record friendly because everything there is engineered for continuity. The course is flat, the camber is gentle, the asphalt is consistent, and the turns are forgiving. That stability is gold for today’s racing shoes, whose plates and foams deliver their best returns when ground interaction doesn’t change underfoot. Berlin hands athletes the luxury of running in a straight line, biomechanically and psychologically. For the marathon data-fixated, the sport’s fastest points cluster there. 

Chicago is also rapid, but with more surface texture. Its presents just enough variety to demand micro-adjustments in loading, and the city’s grid exposes athletes to subtle shifts in wind and shade. Those in the know recommend to “go early” on the course, but what separates a good day from a great one is often comfort management; aerodynamic fabrics, the thermoregulation, and the ability to keep mechanically tidy when the asphalt refuses to be entirely uniform. 

London sits somewhere in the middle. Its early miles are quick and clean while later ones are shaped by long straights and gentle rises that quietly tax the legs. The course is fast but not frictionless. This is where tech-led apparel earns real value: shoes that retain stability deep into fatigue, fabrics that reduce heat stress, uppers that hold the foot without over-correcting stride. London rewards those who can stay organized when form wants to unravel. 

And then there is New York, the least predictable of the four. It’s bridges, inclines and harsher surfaces offer their own challenges, but the crunch is a layout that refuses to let athletes fall into rhythm. It tests resilience more than pace. Technology still helps, but the emphasis shifts from bounce to control: footwear that keeps athletes centred, fabrics that adapt to changing microclimates, and apparel systems that prevent athletes from haemorrhaging energy long before Central Park. 

What the Big Four demonstrate is that endurance running has entered a genuinely technical era. Surfaces, gradients and materials shape outcomes just as much as tactics. If the course is the song, but increasingly the tools athletes bring with them…shoes, fabrics, and data…determine how it’s sung.  

The next Winter Games is only weeks away, and word has it there is a touch of anxiety at IOC HQ. Not panic, just the quiet realization that the world has changed faster than The Games have kept pace. Somewhere in the building, a Fit for the Future strategy paper is doing the rounds. It looks at how the Winter Games might appeal to new audiences, lift visibility and steady the model for the decades ahead. 

Good. It is needed. Anyone remembering organizers trying to make snow quicker than the sun can melt it will agree the sustainability question cannot be kicked any further down the piste. Sochi’s vanishing white carpets and Nagano’s gently rusting infrastructure are reminders that even the most storied sporting festivals need a post-competition plan. 

But the other parts of the strategy – the bits about visibility and ‘reaching new audiences’, including mooting making judo a winter sport – that is simpler to solve. Winter sport has a habit of forgetting one essential rule of modern attention: stars and their stats sell. Stars create anticipation, turn events into occasions and pull in casual fans. Yet the Games behave as though their job is to mint champions, not to build the stage long before the opening ceremony. 

It is the opposite of what every successful sport does. In football, tennis, golf, Formula One – even darts – the marketing engine never sleeps. Using the very best social media and marketing tech available, it creates household names months in advance and invites audiences to follow the characters as much as the competition. By comparison, the Winter Games still operates on a sort of ‘if we build it they will come’ philosophy.  

Except they do not always come. Ask the average person to name an athlete expected to compete in February. If you hear ’Mikaela Shiffrin’ or ‘Chloe Kim’, you have found a connoisseur. Despite millions skiing every year, that vast pool of participation does not convert into viewers at Games time. 

And that is the puzzle worth solving. Winter sport has the drama, the jeopardy, the gravity defying brilliance – and a pretty backdrop – to captivate almost anyone. What it has not done is shine a bright enough light on the athletes early enough. Make more stars before the Games and you turn the event from a two week showcase into a season long story. 

Do that, and the slide stops. Judo stays put in the summer, and the Games rediscover the momentum they deserve. 

Like an unsupervised artistic genie, AI can conjure almost anything a lazy creative might request: a snuff film script, a punk love song, even a murder mystery in the style of Dua Lipa. It is exactly the kind of mischief that sparks writers strikes and keeps musician lobby groups busy. We are also in an era where cultural icons must correct nonsense generated by people with too much time and too much technology. Who could have imagined Paul McCartney needing to confirm he did not, in fact, visit Phil Collins’ hospital bed with a guitar over his shoulder. 

Yet amid all this manufactured noise, sport feels oddly insulated. It is now the last mass market source of unrepeatable, ungenerated, unedited human drama — and that gives it a rare commercial edge. Sport has always traded in emotional extremes and, however wealthy it becomes, its true currency is passion. Music is the closest comparison, but AI has already seeped into that world. ABBA Voyage is both wonderful and impressive, but it prompts an obvious question: what happens when technology starts shaping the moments we treat as authentic. 

This matters culturally and commercially. Sport is marching toward a $600bn valuation, driven by a generation that prizes authenticity above almost anything else. They want something unfiltered and uninvented, and sport obliges every week. That accessibility, at scale, is something no other cultural arena can offer. Brands, broadcasters and rights holders understand this instinctively: they are not buying reach alone; they are buying the one thing AI cannot convincingly fake. 

The long-term question is whether AI remains a modeller of big moments or becomes a creator of them. If synthetic sport – generated contests, avatar leagues, algorithmic outcomes – ever feels as compelling as the real thing, authenticity stops being a resource only sport controls. 

The opportunity is clear: double down on the qualities that make sport irreplaceable while experimenting with the technologies that challenge it. The risk is assuming immunity in a world that is changing fast. Sport’s authenticity is its greatest advantage. That advantage is only secure if the industry treats it as something to be protected, not presumed. 

Some things you write stay box fresh for years; others have a shelf life. 

Immediately after the pandemic, our Sports Technology Annual Review included a chapter on sports apparel noting that kit had slipped behind the wider sports tech curve. Designers were trying to collaborate through a disrupted supply chain, the right materials were available, but the uncomfortable truth was that fashion was driving sales and few brands were thinking seriously about a tech led arms race. 

How times change. 

Last summer Nike and adidas went toe to toe in a contest defined almost entirely by technology. The smart kit genie is not just out of the bottle; it is already sprinting for the podium. 

Why? Because sportswear without tech is just fashion, and fashion alone no longer shifts stock. 

Track and field may be wrestling with formats and visibility, but elite athletes command serious money. Glimpse a contract and you will see how exacting a sponsor’s performance expectations are. When kit becomes a variable in the result, looking good is marketing; winning is the business model. 

Which is why the race for credible technology in footwear and apparel is so open. In house labs, scientists and designers can only push so far. Proposed EU sustainability legislation will be another significant hurdle. If sports brands are going to shape the performance frontier rather than simply dress it, they will need deeper collaborations, stronger external intelligence and a great deal of fresh thinking. 

For anyone who witnessed the bout between Jeamie TKV and Frazer Clarke, a split decision after twelve rounds where every round looked like the twelfth, you might have been struck by just how bouncy the ropes were. Seeing two big lads land on them looked most WWE than the BBBofC.  

It was a sharp reminder of something the sport rarely talks about: the ring is not just a stage, it is part of the performance. The legal size can range from 16 to 24 feet, and that range genuinely changes the rhythm of a fight. Give a technical mover more room and the theory is that footwork is cleaner, there are more reset points, and essentially, more chess. Bring the dimensions in and you up the ante on pressure, pace, and heavier exchanges. Rope tension adds another variable, and a surprisingly creative one; looser ropes encourage evasive work and counterpunching, while firmer ones promote centre-ring control. These differences do not distort boxing. They reveal fresh versions of it. 

This is good, exciting stuff – and something the sport has yet to unlock fully. Basic instrumentation, such as rope tension gauges, corner stiffness profiles, simple accelerometers tracking rebound, could give promoters, commissions and broadcasters an even clearer understanding of how a ring will shape a bout. Doubtless those well-versed in the sport have the experience to judge it but for the rest of us, it could add a fascinating dimension to the sport, including the sense of why a fight unfolds the way it does. None of this requires intrusive technology. It simply applies the same curiosity other sports use to understand their playing environments. 

The rash of contests looming between creators and pro fighters already show that the curiosity is there and If someone care to weaponize the intelligence rather than overlooking it, the spectacle itself will claim more fans, not least of all the bookies.  

Nike’s Mind shoes claim to soothe your neurons, tune your alpha waves and lift you into a state of focused brilliance. Trainers, in other words, that want to upgrade your head from the feet up. 

It is no surprise that tech minded creators have leapt on the story. Neuroscience. EEG data. Twenty-two foam nodes promising a pocket-sized reset for your instep. The ambition is impressive. Anything that tries to blend cognitive science with sports engineering is, at the very least, moving the conversation forward. 

But when footwear promises to reshape mindset, it is worth asking sensible questions. Hope has always been part of sport’s psychology. Max Factor famously sold hope, not cosmetics. In elite performance, whisper marginal gains and everyone listens. That is why we created The Smarter Sports Awards, formerly The Sports Technology Awards: to celebrate real advances and bring clarity to the ideas that can genuinely help people invest wisely. 

Nike’s Mind Science Department talks confidently about sensory pistons, altered brain rhythms and a future where cognitive tuning is as normal as cushioning. If the evidence follows, this could be a fascinating chapter in how athletes prepare. 

Right now, we simply have not seen the independent data that shows whether these neural ripples become better decisions or steadier competitive minds. The placebo effect is still sport’s most underrated technology. If someone believes the shoe sharpens focus, it will probably help, but that is psychology rather than engineering. 

So, are Mind shoes a glimpse of performance’s next frontier? Possibly. Are they marketing dressed as science? Also, possibly.  

The encouraging part is this: technology in sport is no longer something you simply download, recharge or plug in. Innovation is clearly accelerating but the bar for evidence also needs to rise. That combination is good news for everyone who wants sport to get smarter. 

On the TV mega-series, ‘This Is Us’, a couple made decisions by ‘worse-casing this’.  They’d imagine the most disastrous outcome possible, usually their daughter becoming a drug addled pregnant stripper, and work backwards from there.

So, let’s worse case the headline: England rugby team facing Fiji in front of 15,000 empty seats. The culprit, apparently? Women’s rugby.

After a summer in which the Women’s Rugby World Cup sold out, delivered thrilling matches, and created genuine new audiences, we’re now told it might have been too successful. Fans, the argument goes, are rugby fatigued. The women’s game has supposedly cannibalized interest in the men’s fixtures.

Really? Let’s worse case that.

If that narrative sticks, women’s sport becomes an easy scapegoat for a system struggling with its own economics. Rights holders start to whisper about whether women’s competitions can ‘afford’ prime calendar slots. Broadcasters retreat and sponsors decide their progressive experiment felt good but has run its course. Meanwhile men’s game pricing and formats go forward with blind faith that fans will keep coming.

Here’s the irony: women’s sport has been doing everything right; built new communities, new digital consumption habits, and a more modern relationship with fans. It has worked damn hard to earn attention, to make content social-first, and to show up where there was demand. It was forced to think differently and it did. Brilliantly.

FYI – see also the ICC Women’s Cricket World Cup.

Assuming that fans will always come and pay whatever price is set is dangerous, fragile and misguided. Yes, there are cost of living pressures, over-commercialization, and fixture congestion, but the audience hasn’t disappeared, it has just got more discerning. Fans want value, variety and something real. Tradition and heritage alone is insufficient.

Blaming women’s rugby for the men’s attendance drop is missing the point by a very long margin. Women’s sport hasn’t drained demand; it’s shown what sport looks like when you innovate to compete. 

Women’s sport isn’t a threat to be managed but a playbook worth stealing. The future isn’t about dividing the pie by gender; it’s about cooking up something big and compelling enough to feed a wider fan base. 

The worst case isn’t 15,000 empty seats. It’s learning nothing from why they’re empty.

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