# Tech Disrupts Sports: Records, Recruitment, and Revenue

**Podcast:** FT Tech Tonic
**Published:** 2026-07-01

## Transcript

Technology is changing how we compete in sports.
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For years, two hours was the number that haunted marathon runners.
Not a record, but a wall.
Runners trained their entire careers to crack it.
And every time, it held.
Until one day this year, when it didn't.
So, it's May 2026, the day of the London Marathon.
Roads are shut, crowds run 10 deep.
Nearly 750,000 people line 26 miles of tarmac in the city, waving signs, screaming at strangers clad in lycra.
And among them are two Germans looking at their phones.
We were watching as more or less spectators alongside the track.
Mainly, though, they were watching the numbers come in.
Always with one eye on the phone in terms of where do we look like from a timing perspective.
All huddled around one mobile phone.
We were about kilometre 40, I think, something like that.
This is Mark Murkowski, head of innovation, and Patrick Nava, head of running at Adidas.
They'd spent the last few years developing what's called a super shoe.
And they'd flown to London to find out if their shoes could make history.
Using specially designed featherlight foam and carbon fibre.
They have an astounding ability to return energy to the runner with every single stride.
It gives you that feel of literally at every step you have got that springy effect that kind of like is delivered from the shoe into your kind of movement and into your stride.
Mark and Patrick were watching a small group of runners who were wearing their latest super shoe.
They'd been locked in a head-to-head race with Nike over who could beat the two-hour barrier first.
It had been tantalisingly close for years.
Break it, and the runner becomes immortal.
And the shoes on their feet?
That brand gets written into the record books forever.
Kenyan runner Sebastian Sawe was wearing the Adidas super shoes and leading the pack.
Sebastian's predictions from roundabout half marathon still on the slightly under 201.
He'd started strong.
Can he find a little bit extra just to squeeze that last little bit out?
And then they accelerated.
Run outside, folks.
Grab anybody you can and say there's a bit of history maybe in the offing here.
We could well be going for this world record.
We know we're like in world record time, but the world record before was two hours and 35 seconds.
Still, 35 seconds to claw back.
In the final stretch, Mark and Patrick check their runners' timings again.
Now, can he break the world record?
Can he get close to two hours?
Really solidified.
I would say almost in the last kilometre.
Come on, Sebastian!
You can get this!
History in the making.
Under two hours.
Nobody has ever done this.
They said it couldn't be done.
Sebastian Solway crossed the line.
One hour, 59 minutes, 30 seconds.
The barrier was gone.
And right behind him, Yomif Kajelcha, another Adidas athlete wearing the super shoe.
Also sub-two hours.
Not one runner, but two.
Absolutely incredible.
I've never seen anything like that.
What a finish.
And then just we erupted in joy and like people started looking at us.
And then to be honest, we headed for the first pop and got whatever spark in mind they had there and like popped a few balls.
There are many factors that contribute to moments of sporting greatness.
Raw athletic talent, years of training and dedication and great coaching.
But in the fine margins of elite sport, When the difference between success and failure can be measured in a few millimeters or a few seconds, the latest technology can be the thing that makes the difference.
Feats once thought impossible can suddenly become achievable.
For Patrick and Mark, Sebastian Solway's marathon record was the culmination of years of work.
But they say this is just the beginning.
I can tell you that we're already working on the next iterations, and I'm making it plural, intentionally.
because we're just not stopping.
Breaking the two hours is a watershed moment.
There's the industry before and now there's the industry after.
This is Tectonic from the Financial Times.
I'm FT Sports Editor Josh Noble.
In this season, I'm exploring how technology is rewiring sports.
I'll find out how it's changing the way athletes train and compete.
And I'll be asking if these technological advances are making sports better or worse for both players and fans.
In this...
The first of our three episodes, I want to find out what tech is doing for the athletes, both for their careers and for how they compete.
Episode one, the athlete.
First up, let's start with a simple but important question.
Why are athletes today performing better than athletes in the past?
I'm Steve Haig.
I'm from Sheffield Hallam University.
I'm a professor of sports engineering.
I like tech and I like sports tech.
Steve says if you step back, and look at the first official Olympic records we have and how they've been broken over time, you can actually see something quite interesting.
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 in performance in the first kind of 50, 60 years.
And then you see this plateauing off that starts to occur in about the 60s.
Look at the marathon record.
In 1896, the top marathon time was 2 hours 58 minutes.
By 1960, the best runners got it down to 2 hours 15 minutes.
It's taken another 60 years to get to the two-hour mark you heard about at the top of the show.
15 minutes in more than 60 years.
Some of the early 20th century gains came down to better nutrition and quality of life.
But after that, it could just be a matter of the growing number of people on the planet.
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 performers.
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, sports 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 cake.
Like the new super shoes developed by Adidas to break the marathon world record, tech offers athletes the smallest advantage.
Just the icing on the icing on the cake.
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.
Although each new technology might only give athletes a tiny advantage, taken together, they can add up to a huge improvement in performance.
About a decade ago, our sports engineer Steve actually tested the impact of technology on competition.
specifically for the 100m sprint.
What difference would it make if you took a modern athlete and made them use the running shoes and equipment of yesteryear?
Jesse Owens in the 100m.
The world's most superb runner makes the others look as if they're walking as he wins the final and equals the world's record time.
Steve wanted to recreate the conditions from the 1936 Olympics when American sprinter Jesse Owens won the 100m gold.
So...
He enlisted a sprinter named Andre de Grasse to run the test.
And he just won three gold medals at the Pan Am Games in Canada.
He's only 20.
He was just hitting stardom.
On the Friday, he was competing in the stadium with everyone shouting his name.
And then the Saturday morning, he was at Pickering High School on an old kind of cinder track.
And so we gave him some old-fashioned shoes that were made by a professional shoemaker.
that replicated what Jesse Owens had with spikes on them, made out of leather, quite soft.
And then we put some kind of baggy shorts on him, cotton t-shirt.
So nothing like modern running shoes or aerodynamic running gear.
And then back in 1936, what you were running on was kind of a natural track made out of cinders.
It could be quite hard.
It could be quite soft if it was really, really wet.
And there were no starting blocks.
And you've got images, if you look online, you can see images of Jesse Owens with a gardening trowel, literally a gardening trowel.
And he's down at his starter's end and he's digging a hole to create his very own foot placements, basically his own starting blocks.
Digging your own starting mounds went on until 1948, when the first standardised starting blocks were introduced at the Olympics.
And it wasn't until the 1960s that running tracks started to be made out of new synthetic materials that had a good, even bounce.
You would have the starter's gun, ready, on your marks, get set, bang.
And on the bang, there would be a bit of smoke.
And down the opposite end of the track, you'd have someone with a timing watch, which I've got one here, and it's accurate to about a fifth of a second, which it was about in those days.
So we replicated this, and I had to be the time I was...
petrified.
So I had to be the timer.
Andre de Grasse ran down as fast as he could and there was just like bits of gravel just spurting everywhere.
And he got down and I pressed stop and it was like 11 seconds.
Oh my God, 11 seconds.
That's terrible.
Like the day before he'd done 10 seconds.
Who knows what it was that slowed him down?
Was it the crude leather shoes or the uneven cinder block track?
Or was it the old-fashioned stopwatch that made it impossible to record a decent time?
Whatever the case, de Grasse, with his modern-day gear, would go on to win seven Olympic gold medals, including two at the last summer games in Paris.
But it's not just on the day of a big race.
Technology can have an impact much earlier in someone's career.
Take, for example, the hyper-competitive world of American football, where hundreds of thousands of high school kids dream of making it to the NFL.
What you've just heard is a highlight reel of big hits, touchdown plays and improbable passes all put to pumping music.
But these aren't professional athletes.
These are high school kids hoping to get spotted.
Uploading clips to social media is now part of the ritual as promising players look to get recruited by college football teams, the key pathway to elite sport in America.
There's entire social media crews that are following the athlete to every practice, journaling their entire story from training to games.
This is Larissa Horton.
I'm the CEO here at Sumer Sports.
Sumer tries to help young athletes make it in professional football.
And over the past few years, getting spotted has only become more competitive.
All across the country.
Highlight videos are uploaded and sent to colleges in the hopes of catching a recruiter's eye.
Typically what a kid submits is 30 seconds of film that a recruiter will watch of you to decide if they're going to now invest the next two to five minutes to watch more film to then decide if they're going to invite you to a practice.
Larissa says that technology has already transformed the recruitment process in football.
But there are two problems.
High school football is hyper-competitive.
And getting noticed can be incredibly expensive.
That includes both the highlight reels, which require costly videographers, and the summer camps, where teenagers go to get timed, measured, and spotted by teens.
When you go to these camps, there will be a subset of scouts or recruiters that will show up, and then you can go and get measured.
These measurements then get posted to a public website.
The challenge is the price of these camps are becoming more and more...
of a, I would say, a difficulty for everyone to get measured, to get seen.
How much, when you mentioned the sort of cost of going to a camp, I mean, how much are we talking about here?
We've heard from many families, average camp cost being about $5,000 US.
So it's definitely, our biggest concern is the pay to play that is happening in the market.
If you want to have the best pro sport, you want to make sure you're finding the best athletes.
But what if you're filtering them out too early just because you can't see them?
since the places you're looking are now becoming pay-to-play.
Larissa has come up with a workaround, an app that can help athletes measure themselves and their potential for a much, much lower price.
We actually start by ingesting raw data like film, and we turn that film into insights for the player, the coach, everyone in the sports ecosystem.
SUMA trains an AI model on video data and pairs it with tech-enabled measuring tools.
Kids can actually download this app.
They can measure themselves for wingspan, hand size, height, and even their 40 time.
The key measurement in the world of American football is the 40-yard dash.
Using SUMA, athletes can gather data and get recommendations on how to gain an edge in training.
all through the use of their smartphone.
Looking at your measurables and then also looking at what are areas that I can improve.
For example, if you can put on some weight, but keep your time, your 40 time, does that boost your chances of going from looking like a D2 athlete to a D1 athlete?
A quick bit of jargon here.
A D2 athlete would be someone at a Division 2 school, which is less prestigious than a D1 or a Division 1 school.
Suma's recruiting tool has been made possible by advanced camera technology.
better video analysis and the use of AI.
And that's all been helpful for people like Kari Darlington.
I spent 16 years in the NFL as a scout, traveling the country.
And most recently, I was working as a general manager with UCLA Bruins.
Kari's professional career has focused on recruiting athletes.
He's done that by traveling around the United States, sometimes staying in hotel rooms for as many as 200 nights a year, because this is historically...
how football recruitment happens.
He goes to camps, he meets players, and he gets a sense of a young athlete's potential.
When you first started, it was that gut reaction.
You would sit around the table and you would argue your point and have convictions based off of things that your eyes have actually physically seen.
And a lot of, I guess you would call football purists, we just didn't believe numbers by themselves could show you who somebody is.
Kari says that the trend towards tech-enabled scouting that Suma and others have brought about is rapidly changing the way future athletes are being discovered.
I think tech has changed the entire approach.
I'd say probably over the past two to three years, it is an everyday part of recruiting.
And one used technology as a tool to either streamline your process some.
Start to sort the type of players that you need that would fit your program or your style of offense, your style of defense.
But also just starting to track where certain players in certain positions that have success come from.
Thanks to the move towards technology in the world of recruiting, Kari has a lot more data and a lot more chance of finding undiscovered players that have that slight edge.
But from an athlete's perspective, all this tech and data can be a double-edged sword.
Apps like Sumer can replace going to a camp or sending a fancy video, yet it can also heap pressure on young athletes without the expert advice that comes from experienced coaches.
These kids are overtraining.
You're starting to see an increase of injuries coming in, burnout's a real thing now.
Just the pressure from it has that impact too.
I think the information, if not used properly, can hurt you.
If that information is put in the right hands, you're going to have coaches, strength and conditioning staff kind of teach you how to best optimize the information and data they've gathered.
I think it's a beautiful thing.
But if it's in the hands of somebody who doesn't understand the recovery piece of it, it could be a hindrance.
At the start of an athlete's career, access to small tech-enabled gains can be massively consequential.
But for older athletes, it can also help them stay in the game for longer.
We'll find out how after the break.
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Learn more at gist.ai In suburban Las Vegas, far away from the casinos and the nightlife, inside a big air-conditioned building, there's a robot.
that likes to fight.
This is a jujitsu robot.
Basically, it lights up if you choke or you do a joint submission.
It moves very much like a human.
It's not just a rag doll.
This is Duncan French, Senior Vice President of Performance at the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the UFC.
It's a sport league for mixed martial arts, and Duncan is on the ground demonstrating his moves on a robot.
You can start to put him in armbars and then you're going to get in certain postures where it'll light up and set off an alarm.
It's just more of a technique drilling toy.
This is an example of how technology is finding its way into the UFC, one of the biggest combat sports leagues in the world.
Duncan helps run the UFC Performance Institute in Las Vegas.
The league has facilities like it in Mexico City and Shanghai, all free for the UFC's more than 700 fighters.
They provide coaches and high-tech equipment in the hopes that they can give their athletes a competitive edge.
We have anti-gravity treadmills.
They wear some kind of shorts that look like a wetsuit.
We zip them in and this blows up like a bubble.
So you're like walking on the moon.
And we can then get the mechanical, the biomechanics functioning again without the same impact on the joint that's just healed.
We've also got some really cool VR capabilities for managing brain health.
If someone has a brain injury or concussion, then we can look at using that type of technology for eye tracking.
Tracking eye movement is one way to diagnose traumatic brain injuries and concussions.
There's also a new machine that uses sound waves for muscle recovery.
So yeah, it's like a subwoofer in a car and if you put your hand on it you can feel it vibrating.
Yeah, cool piece of technology.
The question is, is it possible to take the oldest sport in the world, two guys punching each other in the head, and give it a tech makeover?
We are essentially working with fighters.
It's hard.
Our sport is very, very granular.
It's very basic and fundamentally simple to understand.
It's a fight.
If you think about most boxing gyms or MMA gyms in the world, they're pretty spit and sawdust.
So athletes want that information, but where do they go and source it?
Well, they can come to the PI and we can do all that and we can take care of it.
Now, interestingly, the thinking behind the Performance Institute is less about throwing bigger punches.
and more about regulating size and weight in a healthy, sustainable way.
We're a weight classification sport, so our athletes have to actually make a particular weight class before they can compete.
And usually that means them modulating or changing their body weight a little bit prior to fights.
Duncan says that UFC's move into more sophisticated training came out of a weight-cut incident that happened 12 years ago.
A Brazilian named Henan Barão was preparing for a big UFC fight.
Burrell, who will get his rematch this Saturday night as the two walk into Team Alpha Male territory in Sacramento.
One of the fighters in the main event, unfortunately, had a bad weight cut and he had to drop out of the fight because he missed weight and he had to be transported to hospital.
Burrell had been sitting in a bathtub in a Sacramento hotel room trying to sweat out weight.
But when he stood up, he fainted, hit his head and was rushed to hospital.
Rapidly losing weight can have all sorts of side effects on the body.
That was actually only one of several incidents that year where fighters were drastically cutting their body weight and ended up requiring medical attention.
Oh my God.
Oh gosh.
What happened?
He fainted.
So the UFC developed these high-tech gyms specifically to counteract this exact problem with machines that can help cut weight.
We've got things like, you know, this metabolic cart, which people lie flat and we put this hood over their head like a spaceman's helmet.
Ultimately, what that does is measure your basal metabolic rate, how fast you burn calories, basically.
We can then start to understand how long you need to reduce weight or change your diet for over a number of weeks prior to the fight.
So it's a math equation, basically.
But without these high-level technologies, we don't get that ability to really understand what's going on inside the body physiologically.
And it's worked.
And we've reduced the rates of missed weights significantly, about 68% reduction in missed weights over the last nine years.
Duncan is pretty explicit about why this new technology also benefits the UFC's business model.
It's an events and promotions company.
It sells tickets to a traveling circus.
Yes, we have a global roster of athletes, which we do see as our assets.
You know, without the fighters, there is no UFC.
There is no fight.
We don't own the rights to those fighters like Liverpool FC or the Raiders here in Las Vegas.
These are all independent contractors.
Now, I use him because everybody knows him.
But if Conor McGregor was unable to fight, we can't book him to fight, then that fan base is going to go away.
So we need to have our superstars healthy and being able to compete.
And when they do compete, we want them to perform optimally.
There are plenty of examples where sports tech has kept fighters performing optimally, even as they get older.
Fighters like Andre Feely.
They call me Touchy Feely.
I mean, I know I wanted to be in the UFC by like eighth grade.
So this has just been my focus for a long time now.
He actually moved from California to Nevada full time a few years ago because of this facility.
He's had some ups and downs in his career.
He's won a lot of fights.
He's also been choked out and had to pull out of fights because of injuries.
I like to put on exciting fights.
I've never been in a boring fight.
I'll never be in a boring fight.
And I think that's part of what contributes to my longevity, you know?
At 35 years old, Andre's actually not that much older than the average UFC fighter.
In general, experience counts for a lot in mixed martial arts.
But he's been around long enough to see the changes over time.
It's like...
going from the Stone Age, you know, like to modern times, the way we used to train, the way we used to do strength conditioning.
Everything in the sport has evolved.
Mixed martial arts is still a young sport, and Andre says that technology is helping it professionalize and ultimately reach a bigger audience.
Whether people realize it or not, fighting is everyone's favorite sport.
If you're at a basketball game, you're watching the best basketball players in the world play basketball and a fight breaks out in the stands.
You'll stop watching the best basketball players in the world to watch two slobs fist fight.
It's in our DNA.
Fighting is everybody's favorite sport.
So as the sport grows, it's cool to watch it become a kind of a mainstream thing.
And I think it's going to head that direction.
Not every sport is about raw physical combat like the UFC, but across the world, from Cristiano Ronaldo to LeBron James.
we're seeing athletes able to compete at the highest level for longer, thanks to a more modern approach.
Technology is helping find undiscovered talent.
It's breaking world records, and it's also extending athletes' careers.
But when sport opens the door to technology, it doesn't always go as planned.
And sometimes, well, the door gets pushed shut again.
Here's academic Steve Haake.
So there's this balance between tradition and technology.
And some sports like cricket just go, no, it's a wooden bat.
That's all you're going to get.
You're never going to get a carbon fiber bat.
Tennis goes, okay, we'll allow carbon fiber, but they can only be this long.
They can only be this wide.
They can only do certain things.
So having a good set of rules is the way to control what is allowed.
So the rules of physics says we can do all of this.
We could put wheels on the bottom of someone's running shoes if we really wanted to, a rocket pack.
All these things are all possible.
So the rules of the sport define how much technology is used.
And once you've made that definition, you go for it.
In the coming decades, Steve reckons sports rules will have to keep changing in response to new tech.
The use of super shoes like the kind designed by Adidas, AI-driven recruiting tools and recovery technology used by the UFC are all evidence of the subtle ways in which sports are progressing, for better and for worse.
But beyond athletic performance, there are also changes to the way that fans and spectators interact with sport, the way that sports are broadcast and consumed.
And that's led to some tension.
That's next time on Tectonic.
This episode of Tectonic was hosted by me, Josh Noble.
The producer was Josh Gabbard-Doyan.
Edwin Lane is our senior producer and Topher Forges is executive producer.
Sound design by Breen Turner and Sam Giavinko.
Original music by Metaphor Music.
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Juli.