Forget Virtual Reality and 8K Ultra-HD TV at the Rio Olympics — These Are the Technologies Actually Changing Sports

From how we watch to the sports themselves, technologies you can see and technologies you can't have seeped into everything.

To boost ratings for the Rio Olympics, NBC, NHK and the other big broadcasters all rolled out their newest television technology.

NBC brought in sponsor Samsung and prepared 85 hours of panoramic Olympic video, covering the opening and closing ceremonies, men's basketball, gymnastics, track and field, and more. The BBC would produce 100 hours of 360-degree panoramic video during the Games.

And 8K ultra-HD video (7680x4320) — footage you have to crouch a meter from the screen to tell apart with the naked eye — was used for an Olympic broadcast for the first time, by NHK.

The habit of watching the Olympics on a television screen began with the Berlin Games, which opened on August 1, 1936.

But none of that effort saved Rio's ratings. In China, the United States and Australia, the broadcasters carrying the Games all saw ratings drop by double-digit percentages from four years earlier.

Live television, the Olympics' companion all along, had stopped working.

The new technology that changed the Olympics most — live television — began in Berlin in 1936.

Germany's postal service broadcast more than 70 hours of live television during the Berlin Games.

Back then Nazi Germany was sending troops into Spain and staging the grandest Olympics since the modern Games began. The torch relay, the lavish opening ceremony, the use of gold-medal counts to prove a political system's superiority — whether you like these Olympic staples or not, they all started at that Games.

After that, live broadcasting became the Olympics' most important technology, and by 1964 the Tokyo Games were carried around the world by satellite.

Today broadcast technology is chasing ever-higher resolution. But shooting and watching 8K video both cost a great deal.

8K televisions on the market are expensive, so Olympic Broadcasting Services promised this year that only 130 hours of competition would be shown with the technology — 1.8% of total broadcast time — and that it would be sent only to Japan.

In fact even 4K, a notch below 8K, has yet to be used for live broadcasts — though one company is now getting ready to make a business of it. Videotron, Canada's third-largest television operator, plans to broadcast the NHL (National Hockey League) live in 4K this year.

The sheer density of programming keeps growing too. According to NBC, the Games' U.S. broadcaster, if all of the Rio Olympics ran on a single channel, it would play 24 hours a day for 250 days straight.

So three years ago NBC built a set-top box system called X1 to help viewers sift through the programming. Viewers can simply tell X1 the name of the event, the country or the athlete they want to watch, and X1 plays the matching coverage. The process works like a search engine.

But with television's influence battered by video sites and smartphones, none of these technologies saved Rio's ratings.

The technologies really changing the viewing experience, and the sports themselves, are these:

The price of your newest television technology: the stadium billboards got smart too

Just as Apple began allowing ad-blocking plugins on the iPhone, the billboards in stadiums were upgraded.

More than a decade ago, the ads we saw around a pitch were mechanical devices that scrolled and flipped through pages. Changeable LED screens later replaced them, making it easy to switch between different ads and attracting more advertisers.

But LED screens have their limits as advertising. The audience for a big event's broadcast comes from every country in the world, with wildly different languages and cultural backgrounds, and yet all of them can only see the same ad at the same time.

In 2015 a British LED-panel company worked with a media technology firm to turn pitch-side advertising into an augmented reality (AR) system, so the same stadium could show different ads to different audiences around the world.

You can see specific cases on the home page of the product, called digiBOARD; they have already used the technology in 2015 La Liga matches. In one game, viewers in China saw Chinese-language ads in the broadcast feed while viewers in the United States, at the same moment, saw English — or a different brand entirely.

Until now only website ads could do this — ad slots that show different content according to IP address and browsing history, reaching a more precisely chosen audience.

For clubs and ad agencies it means more clients and better results: within the 90 minutes of a match they can carry ads from several brands at once, aimed precisely at fans in different regions.

digiBOARD in fact works much like the 3D effects used in television studios, so in theory any corner of the broadcast picture could carry ads this way. A Norwegian supplier, Vizrt, has already done it on NBA courts.

In several games of the 2015 NBA playoffs, CCTV used Vizrt's technology to push the boundary of the ad boards out across the whole court surface; the players ran on ads that changed under their feet. The NBA has said it hopes to fit eight different court advertisers into one game in the future.

You may be used to ignoring the banner ads on websites, but there is no dodging these moving ads on the court.

And now that television's revenue growth has slowed, the viewing experience has to give way to ad money.

TDG forecasts that the number of U.S. cable subscribers will fall from a peak of 100.9 million households in 2011 to 94.6 million in 2017. In step with that, television ad sales have grown less than 6% since 2012. The traditional television business has pinned its hopes of a turnaround on the Olympics: NBC this year spent $7.8 billion to extend its Olympic broadcast contract through 2032.

To satisfy the data obsessives among sports fans, radar once used to track missiles has been moved into the stadium

Sprawled on the couch, viewers are still endlessly keen to pass judgment on teams and players. Luckily, new technology has given data lovers more to enjoy.

At a 2014 MLB game, the moment the batter's swing met the ball, the ball's speed and flight time flew onto the television screen.

Then, as a defensive player set off running the bases, the picture showed a waveform of his running speed. You could see that after his first burst of acceleration he hesitated for an instant and slowed down.

This conjuring trick of a visual effect is a system called StatCast, from MLBAM (MLB Advanced Media), the media company under MLB.

It combines data with visual effects. Unlike the virtual world-record line that floats across the picture during a swimming broadcast, StatCast generates these images at close to real time, during the show.

To do that, the venue needs radar to track the baseball and an array of high-speed cameras to track the players.

The two systems capture huge amounts of data, send it to the cloud, and run it through software algorithms to draw real-time images a viewer can understand. One baseball game can produce 7TB of data; a 2,430-game season comes to 17PB.

MLBAM releases this analytical data during games, and third-party sites such as BrooksBaseball gather and display it. You can look up any player's historical record and follow how his performance changes.

Similar data tracking is used in other sports — for instance the SportVU system from the company STATS, used officially by the NBA, which mounts six cameras above the court and shoots images 25 times a second.

Fans obsessed with data get better grounds for their arguments: SportVU will tell them which player is fastest, who dribbles the most, whose shooting percentage is highest.

The fun of arguing over bad calls is shrinking too

Football history holds plenty of unsettled disputes. The most famous may be the "Wembley mystery" of the 1966 World Cup final.

England and West Germany were deadlocked through 90 minutes. After extra time began, England put a shot onto the goal line and the ball bounced away again; nobody saw clearly whether it had gone in. The referee ruled the goal good on the spot, but the replays and calculations the two sides worked through afterwards produced the opposite answer.

It created a case that is still unresolved today. A museum in England still plays the footage of that moment and lets visitors vote on whether the goal should have counted.

Goals like it kept coming. Even after FIFA added goal-line officials, wrong calls could not be eliminated.

Technology has now solved the problem. After several years of hesitation and testing, FIFA finally required official matches to use electronically assisted "goal-line technology."

The system divides roughly into two sub-systems, GoalRef and Hawk-Eye. The first came from Adidas working with the Danish company Cairos Technologies; they lay thin cables along the goal line and put a sensor inside the ball. An electric current creates a magnetic field, and when the ball moves into the goal area the sensor picks up the magnetic signal and sends the information to a central computer, which can judge fairly accurately whether the ball crossed the line.

Hawk-Eye is already widely used in cricket, tennis and other sports. It consists of ten high-speed cameras that capture a mass of image data, from which it simulates the ball's path.

The "Hawk-Eye challenge" rule came into use in tennis in 2006. It is a player's right to question the umpire: when a player objects to a call, they can ask to see the Hawk-Eye record.

The system is held mainly by a company called Hawk-Eye Innovations, but the system FIFA requires follows the standard of another company, Roke Manor Research, which sets up six cameras around the field.

Even so, goal-line technology is only an aid to the decision, not a replacement for the referee. Whether the ball went in is still the referee's call.

Other sports are likewise trying more precise instruments to help score fairly. Taekwondo at this year's Rio Olympics, for instance, will use "third-generation electronic body protectors," a set of sensors covering the athlete's whole body that senses valid strikes and scores them automatically.

Testing began in 2007, and in 2012 the World Taekwondo Federation issued a document making electronic body protectors a standard scoring tool in taekwondo from the London Olympics onward.

The company that made a business of electronic body protectors is the Swiss watchmaker OMEGA, the official sponsor of this year's Olympic timing and scoring equipment. Besides the taekwondo protectors it also supplied the finish-line cameras and timers for track and field, and the electronic targets for archery.

This year's Olympic archery will use "electronic targets" in place of the referee's eye for the first time. The target carries two scanning devices that can tell apart differences too small for a human to see, accurate to within 0.2mm. It is also faster: the decision appears within a second.

Seen from another angle, though, waiting for a result and arguing about it is part of the pleasure of sport, and technical progress has taken that pleasure away. If the Wembley mystery of half a century ago happened today, it might have made for a lot of happy argument.

How players train and compete no longer rests entirely on a coach's experience

The athletes on the field, and the coaches directing them, have more supporting equipment too.

Tablets, for instance, have turned up on the field, though their greatest use may have nothing to do with technology.

At a 2015 NFL game, the player Johnny Manziel sat on the sideline holding a Surface Pro 3 in a sky-blue case. He may have been looking at data or replays; in any case, video from the game shows him suddenly lift the machine and smash it against his own head five times.

That way of venting is far safer than hitting a wall or another person.

That sturdy Surface Pro came out of a $400 million deal between Microsoft and the NFL, under which Microsoft supplies tablets in custom cases as game-recording data devices, along with a storage and charging cabinet built for the sideline.

Microsoft's idea is a good one: images from every stage of the game reach these Surface Pro screens in real time, and coaches can zoom in, mark them up quickly and file them away.

Apple struck a similar deal this year with Major League Baseball (MLB), bringing the iPad Pro onto the field. Whether it is tough enough is another matter.

Beyond equipment makers paying leagues to use tablets, some new technologies really are changing how athletes train and compete.

American track and field athletes, for example, wear a pair of headphones in training, but not to listen to music: the headphones give off pulses that build muscle strength. The U.S. military used similar headphones earlier, reportedly with good results.

South Korean archers can now use a brainwave testing system to judge when they have reached a steady mental state.

The healing bracelet the U.S. gymnastics team uses has 50 infrared lights; put it on an injured spot and it speeds up cell repair.

A Dutch swim team uses a finding from Germany's Bielefeld University that lets swimmers hear changes in water pressure in the pool, so they can correct their strokes.

Nike and Adidas both make custom kit for the Olympics — running shoes with metal plates in the sole, clothing that keeps the body warm — all sold on the promise of better times. Nike also once designed custom swimsuits for British swimmers, said to hold the body in a streamlined shape and cut water resistance to a minimum.

New technology draws objections too, especially anything that improves results in competition; some call it another form of doping.

In 2009 the swimsuit known as "sharkskin" helped several athletes break world records, among them the American swimmer Michael Phelps. The suit was eventually judged to damage the order of competition, and from 2010 the Olympic organizing committee banned the high-tech product from the field.

But of all the technology that intervenes in modern sport, doping and anti-doping have the longest history

The Russian track and field team's collective doping case; the Australian swimmer Mack Horton mocking the Chinese swimmer Sun Yang. Doping became a focus of this Olympics, as usual.

By today's general understanding, an athlete using drugs is a disgrace. But in sport, and at the Olympics above all, doping has been abused for 100 years.

As recently as 50 years ago doping was still half in the open. Athletes only began losing results over banned substances after 1988.

At the start, the drugs athletes used were generally opium or alcohol. Opium in fact stands for the defining trait of early doping: the "central nervous system stimulant."

In the early 20th century, using drugs in competition was no scandal; it stood for "the most advanced productive force." At the third Olympics, in St. Louis in 1904, the American Thomas Hicks won the marathon.

But Hicks did not win on his own strength alone: his coach ran behind him, injected him with strychnine several times during the race and poured hard liquor down his throat. The highly toxic strychnine gave him fresh energy to keep running, but the poison made him collapse the moment he crossed the line. The damage to his body was such that he never competed in an official event again.

During the Cold War, the U.S.-Soviet contest reached into every field, and sport was no exception. The great powers put state-level scientific resources into developing many performance-enhancing drugs, such as amphetamine, a stimulant of the pseudoephedrine class. This "drug," first given to soldiers so they could go without sleep, worked remarkably well and was especially popular with endurance athletes.

On July 15, 1967, the cyclist Tom Simpson fell from his bike on an Alpine climb during the Tour de France and died after being taken to hospital, with amphetamine he had not finished still in his pocket. His cause of death was drug and alcohol abuse, and in life he made no secret of using performance-enhancing drugs.

As biotechnology and medicine advanced, the nerve stimulants were gradually phased out, and hormone-substitute drugs became cheats' new "weapon" because they could change the body's condition at its root and last longer.

In the 1950s, Soviet coaches began giving athletes "methandrostenolone," better known as "Dianabol." This analog of a male hormone the body produces itself let male and female athletes add muscle and strength in large amounts, and events built on raw strength, such as weightlifting, became the worst-hit areas.

But because taking hormones from outside works against the body's own hormone production, male athletes lost hair, suffered metabolic disorders and lost some or all of their fertility; the effects on female athletes were more frightening still, and less reversible.

Thomas Hicks was not the first athlete to win with drugs and lose his health. That is one reason doping is banned in the modern era: it distorts fair competition and harms the athlete's body. Both stimulants and synthetic steroids, however, leave large residues in the body, and that is what makes testing possible.

The 1968 Mexico City Olympics formally began testing athletes for drugs, but it was not until the 1988 Seoul Olympics that Benjamin Sinclair Johnson, who won the 100 meters in world-record time, became the first athlete stripped of an Olympic gold medal for doping.

In the 1990s a new kind of banned substance appeared: erythropoietin (EPO). Originally used for anemia patients, the drug does not push the body to build muscle; it raises the number of red blood cells in the user's blood so the muscles can take in more oxygen, which produces better results in endurance events.

The famous cyclist Lance Armstrong, seven-time winner of the Tour de France, used it. EPO is in fact hard to detect, and it was not confirmed by testing until the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.

Armstrong's 15 years of secret drug use came to light in 2012 only because his coaching team informed on him; all his Tour de France titles and Olympic medals were stripped.

Today there are more kinds of doping drugs, and they are better hidden. International anti-doping bodies test athletes ever more strictly. Not only are drugs that act directly on the body forbidden; prescription drugs that alter bodily function slowly have been banned as well.

Testing methods are improving along with the list of drugs. An athlete today gives blood and urine samples before competing and must also submit to random "flying" tests during ordinary training, which they may not refuse.

The blood and urine samples are kept as evidence for decades, too. If a substance that cannot be detected today is found in them later, the results are still taken away.

But the doping scandal that broke around Russia's track and field team in 2016 shows that the use and policing of banned substances in sport will only grow fiercer as technology advances.

In 2016 The New York Times, acting on a tip from an insider, reported that during the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics Russia had used its state intelligence service, in collusion with the country's own anti-doping agency, to open and swap large numbers of athletes' urine sample bottles.

The bottles were designed so that once closed they could not be opened normally again, only broken, to keep the sample clean. But against the KGB's successor, the FSB, the technology was not good enough.

Had someone involved not had a change of heart and reported it, the scandal around Russia's track and field team might have stayed buried.

In another 10 days the Rio Olympics will be over. But the new technologies that appeared at these Games will go on evolving, alongside every league and world championship you watch from here on.