Dr. Kim Blair, the founding director of MIT Center for Sports Innovation, predicted that the two key words for the future of sports innovation are social and smart.

“Social is about being able to share your successes with friends. Smart means a continuation of personalization used to help athletes improve their performances or spectators to improve their experience.”

These are two very appropriate descriptions for the open water swimmers we have met around the world.

Social is a given in our sport. The camaraderie and cohesiveness of open water swimmers, especially when a group of individuals come together for a solo marathon swim, is something special to see.

Smart is also evident. To properly calculate the tides and currents – in both local swims and channel swims – requires knowledge and experience. Catch those tides incorrectly and there is a whole lot of swimming left to do – a very good motivation for getting things right. And utilization of technologies while the swimmers are far away from shore are continuing to expand. Instead of the carrier pigeons used in the early part of the previous century, open water swimmers and their teams are delivering information on the progress of swimmers in the open water by all kinds of technologies – mobile, GPS and radio.

The next ten years will be fascinating to see the continued development of technology.

Copyright © 2011 by Open Water Source