Winter Olympics Technology

For the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics, the National Research Council of Canada developed a special Olympic torch for that year’s relay (a tradition since 1936). It resembled Calgary’s most recognizable landmark, the Calgary Tower, and bore the Olympic motto “Faster, Higher, Stronger.” Designed to be especially lightweight, the torch was powered by a special fuel in order to ensure that the flame would stay lit in all weather conditions during the 88-day, 18,000-kilometer trip across Canada.

At the 1948 Winter Games in St. Moritz, Swiss watchmaker Omega first used its cellular photoelectric eye to measure timing in Olympic events such as skiing; it was water-resistant and used infrared technology that was immune to the effect of the sun’s reflection. In 1980 at Lake Placid, Omega’s Game-O-Matic technology revolutionized the timing of alpine skiing by immediately calculating and displaying a skier’s current ranking as soon as he crossed the finish line. At the 1992 Albertville Winter Games in France, Omega introduced their Scan-O-Vision photo-finish system, which digitally measured time to the nearest one-thousandth of a second.

In the Winter Olympic sport of biathlon, a combination of cross-country skiing and rifle shooting, athletes count on the calculation of “split times”—how long it takes them to complete a short section of the race course—to find out where they stand in the race and help coaches strategize. Coaches used to take these calculations manually by stopwatch. But in the Salt Lake City Games in 2002, the biathlon went wireless: Splits were beamed from a transponder strapped to an athlete’s ankle (similar to those used by marathon runners in the Summer Olympics) to a coach’s computer, where software instantly determined the split time.

The 1956 Winter Games in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, saw the Olympic debut of starting gates in alpine skiing events. Before that time, timekeeping had been a relatively simple affair involving two synchronized stopwatches, one at the start and one at the finish. The new starting gates used a buzzer and an optical signal similar to a traffic light that changed from red to orange to green to automatically trigger the official start time. Skiers were required to set off between a half-second before and one second after the acoustic signal.

In 1950, American engineer Howard Head introduced an aluminum-alloy ski that made turning much easier for recreational skiers. Emile Allais, a former world champion skier from France, used his knowledge of Head’s advances to design a riveted aluminum ski for Rossignol. At the 1960 Winter Olympics in what is now Olympic Valley, California, Frenchman Jean Vuarnet won the downhill gold medal on Allais’ ski, and the metal ski gained instant credibility among world-class racers, coaches and dealers. Head kept working on his ski in order to reduce vibrations in the metal and earned international respect when the Swiss national team began using Head skis in 1963.

Fed up with traditional leather ski boots, Bob Lange of Dubuque, Iowa, wanted to create a boot that would make things easier for amateur skiers like himself. In 1963, he introduced Lange ski boots, the first fiberglass boots with lace closures. Incorporating advice from the Canadian National Ski Team, Lange improved his boot and made it good enough for racers. At the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble, France, five gold medals were won in Lange boots, and the company went on to dominate the ski equipment industry.

The 1960 Winter Games in California were the first Olympics to use computers to tabulate event results and the first to be televised in United States. CBS paid $50,000 for the U.S. broadcasting rights, and that investment soon made them a television pioneer in more ways than one. During the men’s slalom skiing event, officials were uncertain whether one of the skiers had missed a gate. They turned to members of the CBS television team and asked if they could review a videotape of the race to confirm what had happened, inspiring CBS to invent the now-widespread “instant replay.”

Decades later, instant replay technology made its debut in Olympic figure skating at the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City. That year’s scandal involving judging misconduct in the pairs skating competition led to the replacement of the traditional 6.0-scale with the less subjective International Judging System. Under the new system, a “technical specialist” uses instant replay to identify and evaluate each skating element—for example, the exact foot position in takeoff and landing of a jump. If necessary, judges then review the video to confirm the technical analysis and come up with a final score.

The 1960 Winter Games saw the first Olympic use of the ice resurfacing machines invented and produced by Frank Zamboni. After creating the ice resurfacer for his family-owned rink in 1949, Zamboni gained great exposure in the early ’50s when Olympic champion skater Sonja Henie bought a machine to travel with her. Zamboni’s invention—still the modern standard for ice resurfacing machines—was able to shave a surface of ice, remove the ice shavings and wash the ice to create a perfect slick surface for Olympic skaters and hockey stars to strut their stuff.

As Innsbruck, Austria, prepared to host the 1964 Winter Games, unusually warm weather threatened to ruin the competition. In an Olympic first, organizers resorted to using artificial ice to construct two tracks for the bobsled and luge events. The ice was harvested from nearby alpine peaks by Austrian soldiers, who also carried 40,000 cubic meters of snow to coat the Olympic ski slopes.

The artificial ice changed the sport of bobsled forever. Initially a leisure activity for the rich, bobsled began its transition into an elite sport in the 1950s when a key rule change limited the total weight of crew and sled. The transition from natural to artificial ice tracks, as well as the use of high-tech fiberglass and steel sleds, have made bobsled conditions more controllable and eliminated much of the danger that characterized early competitions.

Over the years, warm weather has threatened more than one well-planned Winter Olympics. The 1980 Games in Lake Placid, New York, saw the first Olympic use of machines to make artificial snow, in order to guarantee favorable conditions for all events. Artificial snow proved more resilient than natural snow and held up better in rainy or warm weather.

Since then, state-of-the-art equipment has churned out man-made snow for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, 2014 Sochi Olympics in Russia, 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics in South Korea and 2022 Beijing Olympics, where venues in one city used nearly 100 percent artificial snow. Fake fluffy stuff is also expected at the Milano-Cortina Games in 2026.

The 1968 Olympics in Grenoble, France, were the first Winter Games to be widely broadcast in color. (Select events from the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics appeared in color, but only for local viewers.) From Grenoble, ABC television network provided the most extensive satellite coverage of any Olympics yet, including some live daytime coverage and the rest same-day coverage.

When the difference between winning and losing an Olympic medal comes down to hundredths of a second, it’s all about aerodynamics. Canadian speed skaters like Catriona LeMay Doan (a 2002 gold medalist in Salt Lake City) used a 2-by-3-meter wind tunnel developed by Canada’s National Research Council to test the aerodynamic capability of their racing suits.

That wasn’t the first time Canadian athletes relied on wind tunnel. When Canada’s alpine racing team, dubbed “the Crazy Canucks,” dominated the sport in the late 1970s, skier Steve Podborski used a wind tunnel to test his equipment. He won the 1980 bronze medal at Lake Placid.

Luge competitor Georg Hackl of Germany won a silver medal in his Olympic debut in Calgary then went on to win gold in 1992, 1994 and 1998. In Nagano, Japan, at the 1998 Games, Hackl turned heads with new aerodynamic yellow booties that drew protests from the Canadian and American luge teams. Before the 2002 Salt Lake City Games, where he attempted to become the first Winter Olympian to win four consecutive gold medals, Hackl teamed with chassis and aerodynamics specialists from German automaker Porsche to design a better, faster sled to aid him in his quest. This special sled proved not to be quite enough, however; Hackl finished second to Italy’s Armin Zoeggeler.

At Nagano in 1998, 18 speed skaters beat the Olympic record for the men’s 1,000-meter event that U.S. skater Dan Jansen had set four years earlier. Their secret? Clap skates, a revamped version of an old skate with a hinge that connected blade to boot and allowed for more speed. Dutch skaters, who drove the clap-skate resurgence and won gold and silver in the 1,000-meter race that year, also attached adhesive rubberized strips to their racing suits to cut down on wind resistance. The International Skating Union had only approved that bit of new technology the week before the Nagano Games started.

Ahead of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, Canada’s snowboarders got new boards, developed by Apex Composites through Own The Podium, a program that was meant to help Canada become the top medal-winning nation. Carbon-fiber composite plates set between the new board and its bindings reportedly allowed athletes to be more “in touch” with the snow and make cleaner turns, among other benefits. With faster-than-ever times leading up to the Games—including World Cup victories in all three men’s races, with six medals overall—Canada’s snowboard alpine team collected two gold medals and one silver. Those three pieces of hardware contributed to Canada’s 26 overall medals in 2010, but that wasn’t enough to beat America’s 37 or Germany’s 30.