Can technology make sports more equal, or does it only widen the gap between competitors?
This post was written by a student. It has not been fact checked or edited.
Technology is putting a massive difference on sports and changing the way we see sports completely. Could this make barriers between teams change the game forever?
Technology puts a good and bad effect on sports. A perfect example is video assistant referee [VAR] a tech that improved accuracy in football from 82 percent to 96 percent in a course of five years. VAR helps calculate if a goal counts or not, if it is offside, if the player should get a yellow or a red card and if the right player gets the card. VAR has been in football since 2018. When VAR wasn’t around goals like that from the Argentinian icon used his hand, but the referee couldn’t tell if the goal was a hand ball so it counted when it shouldn’t have. VAR has changed football forever.
Hawk-eye in tennis is another example of good technology as it pin-points the exact location of the ball and helps the referee to see if the ball went in or out of the court they play in. Hawk-eye was introduced in 2005 and it helps the referee to make fewer mistakes and errors. Some big tournaments have adopted hawk-eye as it makes the game fairer. Hawk-eye is a big part of tennis and players are mostly happy with it as it is more dependable than the human eye as it has cameras that catch everything.
In some sports technology is used to help athletes be safe. The Halo in F1 racing is a little mandatory, wishbone-shaped titanium structure that was introduced in 2018 to protect players from having life-threatening injuries. This little structure is used to stop debris from hitting the driver's head while they are driving. The Halo has saved multiple lives in F1 racing.
Technology can also be used to cheat, making unfair gaps between teams. This can be shown as in 2025 a ski jumping team added an extra thread to their ski suit ultimately cheating and getting banned.
I believe that technology is always good to use unless you are ultimately using it to cheat in a sport. However, there do need to be rules about how tech is used so that it is fair for teams and gives everyone the same chance.
Comments (0)