The Winter Olympic Games at Salt Lake City generated a surprising I degree of interest among Britain's radio-listening and TV-viewing public The more technically minded even started to pay attention to how the design and the materials of construction of the sports equipment might have influenced the outcome of the competitions. A sportsperson from Bath University explained how research on the materials properties of his bobsleigh would increase his speed of descent and might even win him a medal. The gold-medal-winning British ladies curling team used, in training, an instrumented and computerised broom constructed for them by staff at Edinburgh University's Centre for Material Science and Engineering. There is an upsetting postscript - our only-ever winner of an Olympic medal on snow Alain Baxter, has been threatened with having his bronze medal taken away from him for allegedly taking a performance-enhancing drug. It is puzzling that it is illegal to gain advantage from the (even accidental) use of a drug but legitimate to derive benefit from improvements, possibly achieved clandestinely in the properties of the materials used in the construction of one's equipment.
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