When soccer superstar David Beckham laces up, he wears an Adidas shoe designed in a lab tucked away at the University of Calgary.

These days, visitors to the cramped human performance laboratory (HPL) must walk gingerly around a taped-off area where cameras and sensors capture the movement of runners. There are computers scattered around the place and dust in the air. But it’s good dust, because soon the HPL will double in size and move into whole new areas of research.

Because of the high-profile Beckham connection, engineer Gerald Cole is the lab’s latest media darling. But when asked why the U of C is a world leader in running-shoe design, Cole has a two-word answer: “Benno Nigg.”

Nigg is founder and co-director of the HPL, and brought the Adidas connection with him when he arrived from Switzerland more than three decades ago. One measure of the lab’s exalted status in the world of running shoe design is that it also has contracts with Nike, a major competitor of Adidas. “They both trust us to keep their secrets safe,” laughs Cole, who did a stint at Nike world headquarters in Beaverton, Ore.

Ken Bendiktsen photo, University of Calgary
U of C engineer Gerald Cole laces up a shoe of the type used by superstar David Beckham.

What’s so special about the new Predator Pulse shoe designed by Cole and his colleagues? It borrows an idea from high-tech golf clubs and tennis rackets, and redistributes the weight and mass to where it will do the most good – in this case, near the front of the foot. According to Adidas, this helps to “generate maximum power transfer as the foot contacts the ball.”

They also decided that the total weight of the shoe needed to remain the same, which provided some gnarly engineering challenges. “We did extensive computer simulations on it based on a model derived from an average male soccer player,” Cole says. “It should allow someone to kick faster, which hopefully will translate into more goals. Beckham is very well known for his ability with free kicks, so this was definitely tuned to his kind of game.”

‘Becks’ himself is lavish if a bit ungrammatical in his testimonial for the shoe posted on the Adidas website. “This really is a boot that when you step onto the pitch you feel special in. I wear a new pair nearly every game and as far as I am concerned the Predator is the most comfortable boot around.”

Informed that the shoe didn’t produce any magic in Beckham’s first game with it, Cole smiles and says, “That’s soccer, and there’s a lot of other guys out on the field. Our hope is that over time this will give him a little bit of an edge so the performance will increase.”

Weekend warriors willing to pay around $250 for this experience can find the Predator Pulse in local sporting goods stores.

While Cole won’t comment on the next phase of the research, he hints that it may focus more on kicking accuracy instead of just speed. “Benno Nigg is working on concepts involving muscle vibration,” he says, “and how all the muscles and joints work together as a unit.”

Will we ever see bionic soccer shoes? “It has certainly come up in brainstorming,” Cole laughs.

While shoes are the HPL’s flagship product, the place is really a bubbling cauldron of ideas. Graduate students hook each other up to machines that measure their oxygen use, straining until they nearly pass out on the treadmills. Prostheses for child amputees are tested and refined.

Robots simulate knee joint movements.

“We’re doing a lot of work on athletic surfaces to make them safer and more comfortable,” says Nigg. The lab has contracts with companies such as Mondo, whose sports surfaces will be used at the 2004 Olympics in Athens.

HPL researchers are also working in orthotics, ankle braces and prosthetics. “We’re really interested in how you train people for optimal performance and we’re looking into the biochemistry and physiology of sports performance,” says Nigg, Contracts bring about $1 million a year into the human performance lab. In fact, the university only pays about 20 per cent of the total cost of the facility, which has been running since 1981. The rest comes from research grants and contract work.

Looking to the future, Nigg sees huge potential in linking genetics and human performance.

While we hear a lot about their work for superstars such as David Beckham, the underlying philosophy of the HPL is to keep all of us healthy, active and moving, even into old age.

One example is a series of biomechanical studies done by Nigg while serving on the International Olympic Committee’s subcommission on biomechanics and sport physiology. He found that even after hip replacement surgery, people could safely resume most types of skiing. “Cross-country skiing and long-radius turns on a flat slope put little stress on the hip joint, somewhere between walking and running,” he wrote. “What hip replacement patients do need to avoid are short-radius turns on steep slopes and moguls.”

In a sense, that’s how Nigg has built the HPL – steering around the inevitable bumps and icy patches that come from linking industry and academia, and focusing on the long-term goal of win/win collaboration.

Now if only Mr. Beckham would pull up his socks and do his part.

Web Watch:
www.kin.ucalgary.ca/hpl
www.adidas.com
www.nike.com
www.mondoworldwide.com

(Tom Keenan is a professor at the University of Calgary and an expert on technology and its social implications. He can be reached at keenan@businessedge.ca)