Changing Trends in Sports - playing surface, wearable gears and sports equipment, technological advancements

Sport today looks very different from sport a few decades ago. The rules of most games are broadly the same, but almost everything around the game has been transformed by advances in materials, design and science. The ground athletes play on, the clothing and gear they wear, and the technology that trains and judges them have all changed - and together these changes have made sport safer, fairer, faster and higher-performing.

This section introduces three connected areas of change, each taught in full in the sub-sections that follow:

• Changes in the playing surface (1.3.1) - the move from natural grass, clay and cinder to engineered synthetic surfaces for outdoor and indoor sport.
• Wearable gears and sports equipment (1.3.2) - better clothing, footwear, protective gear and implements, plus wearable monitoring devices, all built from advanced materials.
• Technological advancements (1.3.3) - technologies for fair officiating and for scientific training, analysis and spectating. …