The Olympics of Engineering

Vancouver, British Columbia Winning gold at the Winter Olympics takes endless practice and rigorous training. It also might help to have some piezoelectric fibers in your skis.

Here in Vancouver, tiny ridges on a U.K. skeleton racer's helmet supposedly made her go faster. Likewise the translucent fabric along the hips of the suits worn by some speed skaters. A Canadian bobsledder won a silver medal in a new sled that cost as much as a Porsche 911 Carrera S. And the U.S. women's hockey team skated into the gold-medal game wearing heart monitors beneath their jerseys.

More so than the Summer Olympics, the Winter Games pit engineers against one another nearly as much as the athletes. With hundredths of a second deciding who wins many events, a tiny tweak to a sled runner or a racing suit can mean the difference between gold and silver, or no medal at all.

Gearing Up for Gold

A field guide to technological innovations at the Winter Games.

Ridge Too Far

European Pressphoto Agency/Zuma Press

Amy Williams of Great Britain won a gold medal in women's skeleton wearing a controversial helmet with ridges across the back.

Conehead Attack

Associated Press

Elisabeth Demleitner of West Germany wore a new streamlined crash helmet in the 1976 luge competition.

Skating on Eggshells

Getty Images

Jung-Su Lee of South Korea, shown here competing in the men's 1500-meter men's short track in Vancouver, wears a new speed skating suit with extra-sleek eggshell-textured fabric.

A Porsche on Skis

Reuters

Helen Upperton of Canada's women's bobsled team won a silver medal in a new high-tech $100,000 sled.

Stiff Upper Tips

Associated Press

Lindsey Vonn of the United States has a computer chip in her skis that works with piezoelectric fibers to stiffen them in turns—improving overall speed.

Speed is everything at most winter events, so aerodynamics—how the passage of air over an object influences its velocity—can be decisive. The sleeker your sled, the faster you go. But even in the slower sports, athletes seek an equipment edge. This year, Canada's curling team used research on how their brooms heat the ice to adjust their sweeping techniques.

Because the gear tends to be high-tech, money plays a big role. Governments and private sponsors in Germany, Norway and the U.S. plow many millions of dollars into research and design of sleds, skates, skis and other winter equipment.

Canada's Helen Upperton used to find herself finishing fourth or fifth in bobsled races behind rivals with newer, sleeker sleds. Then a Canadian business group called B2ten bought her a new sled for nearly $100,000. She began winning medals in World Cup races. On Wednesday, she won a silver medal in the two-woman race.

"Equipment matters," she said in an interview earlier this year. "And it's depressing to lose out to somebody whose equipment is superior to yours."

To keep equipment from becoming more important than the athletes, the international bodies that regulate each Olympic sport pile on rules. The International Luge Federation, for instance, restricts the types of helmets racers can wear.

Naturally, athletes try to push the limits. Take the controversial helmet worn by U.K. skeleton racer Amy Williams, who hurtled to gold last week. The helmet, wrapped in the colors of the Union Jack, was developed with money from Britain's national sports-funding agency and tested at a wind tunnel at the University at Southampton used by Formula 1 racing teams.

Rival coaches called foul after noticing a thin line of ridges across the back of Ms. Williams's helmet. Skeleton rules prohibit the addition of "aerodynamic elements'' or protruding "spoilers'' on the normally round, smooth helmets, says Gregory Sand, the assistant U.S. skeleton coach, who filed one of two official protests.

The little ridges could help reduce turbulence that gathers at the back of racers' necks, slowing them as they plunge head-first down the track, Mr. Sand says. "Why not just show up with a Darth Vader helmet and slide down the hill?"

The sports federation that regulates skeleton dismissed the protests, saying the ridges were integral to the helmet. Britain's Olympic committee said its skeleton team hadn't broken any rules.

Controversy has often accompanied innovations in equipment. In 1968, the East German women's luge team got kicked out of the Games for heating the runners on their sleds, a well-known and outlawed trick. Four years later, when other countries showed up at the 1972 Games with wooden luge sleds, the East Germans brought plastic models, along with aerodynamic outfits. They swept the medals.

Not to be outdone, the German lugers (West and East) wore egg-shaped helmets to the 1976 Olympics, where they dominated the medals podium. Afterward, their so-called conehead helmets were outlawed.

One prominent innovation in Vancouver is the Canadian speed skaters' suit, with its trademark layer of translucent material at hip level. The feature is designed to help compress the area, making it more aerodynamic, says Annick d'Auteuil, a sports researcher who helped develop the outfits.

Ms. d'Auteuil and colleagues worked for four years, testing more than 60 suits in a wind tunnel. The team tried out different materials on various parts of the suits, experimenting with fit and placement of seams. She says it's the best suit Canada's skaters have ever worn. The suits have adorned four medalists so far.

Other teams have their own super suits. For the U.S., China, Norway and South Korea, that's the Nike-designed Swift Suit, featuring a slightly rough, eggshell-textured fabric for the fastest moving body parts, like arms and legs.

This year, U.S. alpine skiers Bode Miller and Lindsey Vonn began skiing with a computerized system in the tails of their skis designed to give them more stability and speed: the "Kinetic Energy Recovery System" designed by Head USA.

The technology essentially stiffens the ski on turns, enabling the skier to push harder downhill. The split-second stiffening occurs as piezoelectric fibers work with a computer chip embedded in the ski. Mr. Miller and Ms. Vonn, who are paid by Head, have won five medals between them in Vancouver.

Mr. Miller also switched from a rigid buckle on his ski boots to a "spine-flex" buckle that has a wire running through it, making it more flexible. The flexibility allows the buckle to conform to the hard shell of the ski boot, giving the foot a more locked-in feel, says Jon Rucker, Head's director of sales and marketing.

USA Hockey placed heart-rate monitors under the uniforms of its women players to monitor exertion during practices and games, including Thursday's final, in which the Americans lost the gold medal to Canada. The monitors told conditioning coach Teena Murray how often and for how long players' hearts reached anaerobic levels, when their energy begins to sap quickly.

All of the technorivalry spurs some oddball sniping. A few days before the games started, Canadian skeleton racer Jeff Pain told reporters he knew "for a fact" that the German team had a "magnetic component" in their sleds, perhaps for emitting a shock-absorbing magnetic field. The Germans denied it, and the complaint evaporated.

Write to Phred Dvorak at phred.dvorak@wsj.com, Kevin Helliker at kevin.helliker@wsj.com and Matthew Futterman at matthew.futterman@wsj.com

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page 28
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