Game Changer

A distinctive and important contribution to the histories of sports, bodies, and technology. Game Changer is a timely book by a proven scholar. -- Carroll Pursell, author of From Playgrounds to PlayStation: The Interaction of Technology and Play Informative, engaging, and well-written, Game Changer deftly reveals that the impact of technoscience on sports has never been greater. -- Eric A. Hall, author of Arthur Ashe: Tennis and Justice in the Civil Rights Era Sport is increasingly impacted by sophisticated science, technology and medicine. Drawing upon a wealth of examples, Rayvon Fouche takes us through the good, the bad, and the ugly of how technoscience has changed sport. With its attention to the detail of juiced balls, drugged riders, and sports shoes that can send you leaping higher than Michael Jordan, this is a book sports fans and people interested in the history and sociology of technology will find hard to put down. -- Trevor Pinch, author of Entanglements: Conversations on the Human Origins of Science, Technology and Sound, Cornell University A well-researched and well-written book on the impact of technoscience on sporting communities and sporting cultures. Fouche convincingly challenges long-held narratives about the relationship between technoscience and sport. He offers a first-rate start to an urgently needed debate about the limits of technoscience in sport. -- Hans-Joachim Braun, Helmut Schmidt University Hamburg, and co-editor of Playing with Technology: Sports and Leisure A smart and compelling analysis of the tensions produced by the increasingly significant role technoscience performs in organized sports. Fouche artfully reveals such tensions about the impact of fastsuits and other advancement in equipment or in gender verification testing are in fact products of long-standing questions, whether it is the body or the machine, and the efforts of different sporting public (fans, governing bodies, athletes) to advance their own claims about the meaning of performance. -- Adrian Burgos, author of Cuban Star: How One Negro League Owner Changed the Face of Baseball, University of Illinois The marvels of high tech gear, performance-enhancing drugs, drag-reducing fabrics, computerized biometrics -- all these devices and more are rapidly transforming the world of sports. For players, coaches and fans, the quest to fathom what such exotic innovations offer and what they mean on the field of play is now a daunting challenge. As boundaries between the natural and artificial, fairness and cheating, health and injury, even between female and male are blurred, questions about who won, who lost, and why often have highly uncertain answers. Rayvon Fouche brings to his inquiry the intellectual skills of a historian, discerning eye of a cultural critic and sensibilities of an accomplished sportsman (which he is). His book offers new ways to understand and enjoy the games we love. -- Langdon Winner, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, author of The Whale and the Reactor

Game Changer will change the way you look at sports-and the outsized impact technoscience has on them.We like to think of sports as elemental: strong bodies trained to overcome height, weight, distance; the thrill of earned victory or the agony of defeat in a contest decided on a level playing field. But in Game Changer, Rayvon Fouche argues that sports have been radically shaped by an explosion of scientific and technological advances in materials, training, nutrition, and medicine dedicated to making athletes stronger and faster. Technoscience, as Fouche dubs it, increasingly gives the edge (however slight) to the athlete with the latest gear, the most advanced training equipment, or the performance-enhancing drugs that are hardest to detect. In this revealing book, Fouche examines a variety of sports paraphernalia and enhancements, from fast suits, athletic shoes, and racing bicycles to basketballs and prosthetic limbs. He also takes a hard look at gender verification testing, direct drug testing, and the athlete biological passport in an attempt to understand the evolving place of technoscience across sport. In this book, Fouche: * Examines the relationship among sport, science, and technology* Considers what is at stake in defining sporting culture by its scientific knowledge and technology* Provides readers and students with an informative and engagingly written study Focusing on well-known athletes, including Michael Phelps, Oscar Pistorius, Caster Semenya, Usain Bolt, and Lance Armstrong, Fouche argues that technoscience calls into question the integrity of games, records, and our bodies themselves. He also touches on attempts by sporting communities to regulate the use of technology, from elite soccer's initial reluctance to utilize goal-line technology to automobile racing's endless tweaking of regulatory formulas in an attempt to blur engineering potency and reclaim driver skill and ability. Game Changer will change the way you look at sports-and the outsized impact technoscience has on them.