About three weeks ago, photos of Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes playing in a sub-zero outdoor game during the wild card round of the NFL playoffs went viral, and not necessarily for the best reasons. Photos showed Mahomes standing with his teammates near the huddle, his helmet shattered with a hole on the front left side (an incident that the NFL is reportedly investigating with its helmet suppliers).
In order, my initial thoughts upon seeing this image were:
- That’s crazy.
- I can’t believe that he was allowed to play multiple downs with his broken helmet before it was caught by the refs, especially with all the concussion and safety spotting that happens in the NFL nowadays.
- If Mahomes did actually take a hard blow to the head, maybe it’s actually good that his helmet bent and shattered like it did, since it would dissipate much of the impact, similar to the way a car’s crumple zone works (and how some NFL helmets are being designed intentionally now)
- They need to design helmets with padding materials and shell polymers that provide ideal mechanical properties at different temperatures, even if it means that NFL players have multiple helmets for different temperature ranges.
A couple days later, I was thinking about this event again, and started to convince myself that beyond just football helmets we’ll start to see an emergence of more temperature-specific equipment and accessories in elite athletics for both safety and performance. Beyond the super basics of temperature-specific equipment like long-sleeve shirts or thermal clothing, you already see this type of approach in a wide variety of sports. In professional racing (especially Formula 1) teams use different tires, fuel injection strategies, and aerodynamic packages in cooler environments. In nordic and alpine skiing, athletes use specific ski waxes for narrow temperature ranges and snow conditions. In professional cycling, tire pressure is specifically tuned to the environment and duration of a race.
However, the fact that I couldn’t provide a quick example of a more traditional team sport or a larger set of endurance sports that had salient temperature-specific equipment might show my own ignorance, but also speaks to the lack of clear examples in the space. Which to me is incredibly surprising given how thoughtful teams and athletes are about squeezing out every single marginal gain from their performance and safety measures. Once you start thinking about the topic of temperature-specific sports equipment and gear, you can pretty quickly generate a veritable laundry list of products that could warrant such treatment. I have tried to limit my own list in this article and provide a few examples immediately jump to my mind:
- Football helmets: Composed predominantly of plastics and compressed foam for impact control, it’s pretty clear to me now that football helmets should be made of slightly different materials when used in different ambient temperatures.
- Baseball bats: Should teams use different bat shapes or types of wood in different temperature games? Should they keep their bats warmer during the game itself to increase elastic response? Probably yes to both (if it’s legal within the rules at least)!
- Golf balls: Similar to baseball bats, it wouldn’t surprise me if Titleist or Callaway released golf balls that played better in specific temperature ranges, or begin to suggest players should temperature control their clubs and balls while out on the course.
- Trail running shoes: In general, running shoes are going through a materials and form factor revolution, and I expect this to get specific enough that the material in high-performance shoes are tailored for specific temperature ranges, especially for ultramarathons.
- Tennis rackets: Finally (for this list at least), the strings and frames of tennis rackets should certainly be considered for modification in different temperatures either through material choice or tension. It would also be super interesting to see if the “sweet spot” actually changes location in different temperatures for both rackets and bats.
You may notice some similarities in the short list of examples above. First, the sports themselves are played in a wide variety of environments, with some ranging from freezing temperatures up to the 90’s or 100’s Fahrenheit. There aren’t any indoor sports that I think temperature-specific product design applies to, as long as their gear is already optimized for their constant operating temperature, like basketball shoes or hockey helmets. Second, the equipment or gear in focus can be optimized for one or two very specific parameters like energy return for trail shoes, impact reduction for helmets, or elastic response for tennis rackets. Third, those key performance attributes change in different temperatures, predominantly due to the materials that compose the products. Petroleum-derived materials like plastics, rubbers, and waxes tend to have much greater differences in mechanical properties across the outdoor temperature range than metal,- or carbon fiber-based materials. In summary, 1) the sport takes place in varying temperatures, 2) the gear or equipment is designed to be optimized for a limited set of performance variables, and 3) those variables meaningfully change due to temperature changes.
These three qualifications driving the need to adapt a product for different temperatures highlights that not all sports gear, and not even all equipment within temperature-variable sports, requires individual models for different temperatures. However, it’s still clear that in the current marginal-gains elite athletics environment, equipment and gear in more sports will develop temperature-specific variants over time. For me, this trend would also be a natural continuation of a trend of elite athletes will generally re-thinking their approach to temperature and its impact on performance (which I’ve previously written about), but it will be very interesting to see how an evolution of temperature-specific gear trickles out from elite circles to the general public. Will it be like “super shoes” that have become ubiquitous among the general public’s enthusiasts or remain a more niche and unobtainable product like elite time trial bikes?
Only time will tell!
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