This room is Beijing. It may be situated at Portsmouth University but with a temperature of 31 degrees and humidity at 70 percent, this thermal chamber is giving athletes a taste of what they'll face in a few months.
Well it's certainly hot and sweaty in here. Among all the talk about Beijing it's been about the pollution problem, for many of the athletes it's actually the humidity that's causing them the greatest concern. And that's what the British are hoping to have a competitive advantage.
Around 20 different teams have been tested in here. Triathletes,athletes,even the shooting team,all trying to get an edge no matter how tiny an advantage it might give them.
Coz' you're dealing with such small margins of success,if I tell you that at the last Olympics we won four Olympic golds in the 4X100 meters relay of men's. We won the 800 meters,with female track event, the 1000 meters cycling and the coxless fours rowing and winning margin when added together of all those events was less than 0.2 of a second,you can see that something like not being prepared to perform in the heat could easily make a deterioration in performers that could make a difference not just between a gold and a silver medal but between a gold medal and absolutely nothing whatsoever.
So here they are testing cycling helmets,trying to work out which designs are better for cooling down the cyclist's head.
OK,well,for example, we guess we are here,this is,this is the kit which we would use to measure how much sweat is being..
The British team is convinced that it's not only training and diet which their athletes need to pay attention to,but how the heat affects performance.So these help the scientists see deep body temperature. They are thermometers that are swallowed by the athletes, sending heat information back to computers to be monitored.
In the past,these were a bit bigger,they weren't disposable,and so you have to go and retrieve them.So,the nice thing about the advancement in technology is that it's become smaller and because it's become smaller it's become cheaper and we can get rid of it afterwards without having to go and find it.
Big business in science hope they can help Britain increase their medal hope. But other countries are watching closely.Many of the innovations going into Beijing are being kept secret. Technology is the legal and possibly crucial advantage that could push an athlete over the finishing line first.
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