Innovation in Athletics: From Carbon Fiber to Health Tech

I’m writing Tech Corner today from the co-working space at our rowing boathouse in London, on the bank of the Thames. Some of you may know that all three of us on the founding team, Brandon, Marcus, and myself, rowed for our undergraduate universities and have been life-long athletes across a variety of sports. While you’re likely used to people talking about how athletes are driven, resilient, good at handling adversity, etc. (all the stuff that sounds great in job interviews), there are two other aspects I want to talk about today: athlete longevity and sports as a ripe ground for innovation. A peak behind the curtain - our earliest ideation for InStep was around post-career athlete health management because we all have chronic aches and pains from our years in sport. Post-career athletes are healthier than the general population average, but also report chronic pain, musculoskeletal dysfunction, and osteoarthritis. A third of former Olympians, globally, report current, ongoing pain and functional limitations. Brandon and I spoke with representatives at both the International Olympic Committee and the World Olympians Association back in 2023, and came away understanding that long-term athlete health is a priority they still don’t know how to handle well.

The first all-carbon bicycle - for the engineers out there, this was also the first bicycle to be modeled using Finite Element Analysis (FEA) prior to production!

The first full carbon composite monocoque for the McLaren MP4/1

Now let’s talk about innovation in sport! Professional athletic teams have two things that are key to innovation: the drive to find an edge wherever possible, and money to support that drive (see also: the military). High performance carbon fiber was first developed in 1958 and cost $10 million per pound to manufacture. Once the manufacturing process had been refined, some of the first applications for carbon fiber outside of aerospace were in Formula1 racing (1981) and cycling (1986), both sports that had the funding to manufacture and test cutting-edge innovation. Today, around 80% of Winter Olympic sports and 50% of Summer Olympic sports have carbon fiber-based equipment. Sports have a deep history of testing out new tech, from fiberglass (which shatters on impact, yikes) to shark skin-patterned fabrics for swimsuits. And this, of course, extends to healthcare technology. Athletic teams are great proving grounds for advances in health tech - besides the drive for an edge against the competition, and funding, they also have fewer insurance pathways to navigate. Athletes are a great sample population too; they are also a population that is pushing their bodies to the extreme and so, as mentioned above, they see a higher rate of injury and accelerated wear and tear. Between all of us on the founding team, we’re pushing advancement in the health baselining space not just because Large Movement Models are cool, but also because we want a better way to monitor ourselves, geriatric millennials and former athletes that we are  🧠

A note from Brandon: aside from human movement did you know that Alex is also passionate about materials? She was a co-author on one of the seminal papers on graphene when at Columbia, hence the passion for carbon tech!