How Technology Changed Sports

By Debbie Mickle

Published July 15, 2019 at 10:20 AM EDT

Rayvon Fouché, Purdue University Professor talked about some of the history of technological advances that have impacted the games we love to watch and play. Engineers, scientists, and corporations have teamed up for decades to manufacture victory for elite athletes. Fouché spoke about some of his research on this subject from his book; Game Changer: The Technoscientific Revolution in Sports.

Presented by Science Matters, a multimedia educational initiative of the VPM, Central Virginia's PBS & NPR stations.

Rayvon Fouché, Ph.D.’s scholarship on invention and innovation explores the multiple intersections and relationships between cultural representation, racial identification, and technoscientific design. He has authored or edited several books including Game Changer: The Technoscientific Revolution in Sports and Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation. Fouché is the Director of the American Studies Program as well as a Professor at Purdue University. He received a B.A. in Humanities from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a Ph.D. from Cornell University in the interdisciplinary field of Science & Technology Studies, and completed a two-year post-doctoral fellowship in African and African-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. A former elite cyclist, he was one of many hopefuls that competed in the 1992 Olympic trials.

Rayvon Fouché, Ph.D. and Karen Rader, Ph.D. (Photography: Joe Ring)

This program was held on April 8, 2019 in Richmond, Virginia as part of a series of eight science cafes in a partnership between Science Pub RVA and Virginia Commonwealth University’s Science, Technology and Society Program, a unit of the College of Humanities and Sciences, and is supported by a National Science Foundation grant (#1611953).