[Written By External Partner]
Sports are constantly evolving, like all spheres of human life. Science and technology go hand in hand here. More modern materials and models of sports equipment appear, food and training are becoming more sophisticated and thoughtful. This topic is often discussed at professional conferences for famous athletes and the best scientists of our time. Based on their opinion, Meta.reviews have compiled a description of the professional sports of the future.
Spectacularity will become one of the main components of sport
Throughout the entire period of sport, the competitions of teams and individual athletes were very dependent on the attention of the audience. In our time, the era of mobile gadgets, this parameter is moving to another level. In the future, Google Glass (or a similar device) will dictate not only the game strategy but the game itself. Those kinds of sports that will allow the viewer to feel like an active participant in a competition or match will become popular. Already now virtual reality is not so far from becoming a familiar part of people’s lives.
It won’t be long before stadiums filled with roaring fans will go online completely. This will radically change the traditional structure of sports that has existed since the days of ancient Greece. Entire sports-related industries will be a thing of the past. The need for huge stadiums will disappear, which means that there will be no need for service personnel. This process has already begun and is irreversible.
Artificial body parts will be used everywhere
Oscar Pistorius, a sprint runner from South Africa with both feet amputated and a six-time Summer Paralympic Games champion, was not just a successful athlete who showed that willpower and perseverance are much more important than a person’s physical condition. Already sports committees are discussing the possibility of holding general competitions with equal participation of professional athletes and people with mechanical limbs and organs. Most likely, the day is not so far off when replacing the “parts” of a person participating in a sporting event will become commonplace.
Robots will compete
This item is in a sense a continuation of the previous one. It is quite possible to completely replace the bodies of the competitors with controlled mechanisms. This is due to the growing self-awareness of people. Many are already asking the question, are the injuries received by athletes in competitions worth the pleasure experienced by the audience? Of course not. For the sake of one moment of glory, it makes no sense to remain crippled for life.
Of course, such large-scale changes in sports will not occur in the next five years. Perhaps in 10 or 15.
If the strength of the athlete’s spirit and the athlete’s willpower is often more important than physical parameters, why spoil the body itself? Scientists, eminent athletes and journalists agree that sooner or later we will be watching tournaments and matches of controlled robots.
Coaches’ role will change
Coach’s place is off the pitch. This statement will cease to be relevant very soon. Does it make sense to come up with complex game schemes, build a strategy for the match, if all tactical tricks turn out to be useless due to unforeseen circumstances in real life? It is much easier and more reliable to give instructions to the players at the moment.
In this regard, the coach, over time, will cease to be mainly the inspiration and mentor of athletes and will turn into a real strategist who controls what is happening on the field using a visual interface.
All the necessary equipment already exists for this: several monitors, built-in cameras in the players’ helmets, an audio system… It is much easier for a person who sees the game from the side to make the right decisions.
Athletes will begin to be selected based on genetics
Genetic selection of athletes. This sounds like a forbidden theory of eugenics. This is already being practiced. Officially sponsored by the Danish Football League, an inconspicuous laboratory in South Africa selects athletes based on their genome.
Such an approach is quite expected because people invest a lot of money in competitions and their participants, and therefore they want to know if these investments will be justified. At the same time, based on physical characteristics, it is almost impossible to predict the behavior of an active athlete. A completely different matter is selection teams, each player of which has a carefully calibrated set of indicators.