Steve Hake

speaker

58 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 11 Jul

Steve Hake’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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FT News Briefing · Rewiring sport: How technology is helping athletes break barriers · 11 Jul 2026 podcast

Why are athletes today performing better than athletes in the past?

I'm Steve Hake.

I'm from Sheffield Hallam University.

I'm professor of sports engineering and also I like tech and I like sports tech.

You get back to 1896, the first Olympic Games.

And if you look at performance since then, you see a rapid improvement in performance, really huge improvements of performance in the first kind of 50, 60 years.

And then you see this plateauing off that starts to occur in about the 60s.

The first thing, the most important thing, is the size of your athlete population.

So the more really good athletes you have, the more likely you are to have a really good performance and more records.

So that's what's driven most of the performance.

You have globalization, so you have more people having access to facilities, maybe going on scholarships to America or Britain or whatever.

so then you have people with more access to say sport science right at the end of that is the tech so once you've got large populations with all these things available you then have the tech which is the icing on the icing on the cake like the new super shoes developed by adidas to break the marathon world record tech offers athletes the smallest advantage

Performance has leveled off in many, many sports, most sports, in fact.

And what you'll see is they're kind of in equilibrium.

And if something comes along to disturb that equilibrium, you get a change.

And those new super shoes are just something that's disturbed that equilibrium.

We've got a little bit of a performance improvement, but enough to get you over that two-hour mark.

And he just won three gold medals at the Pan Am Games in Canada.

He's only 20.

He was just hitting stardom.

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