World IP Day: IP in sports innovation

To mark World IP Day’s sports theme, we explore how intellectual property quietly shapes the world of winter sport, from performance and safety to sponsorship and visibility.

Drawing on stories from the Olympics and beyond, we unpack how patents, trade secrets, and open standards influence everything from the equipment athletes use to the way competitions are run and experienced by fans.

In this episode, we cover:

• How parabolic skis transformed technique and speed
• The patented spring loaded slalom gate and its unexpected impact on safety
• Airbags in downhill skiing and the balance between protection and risk
• Athlete branding and Olympic sponsorship as drivers of visibility and income
• Four year innovation cycles and why trade secrets can outperform patents in elite sport
• Clapskates as a case study in know how and competitive advantage
• The UK roots of skeleton and links between sport, the military, and university research
• Innovation in ski mountaineering gear, from skins to pin bindings
• Avalanche transceivers, open standards, and why interoperability matters
• A preview of standard essential patents for a future deep dive

If you enjoyed the latest episode, please leave us a review or share it with your friends and colleagues to help grow the audience.

Transcript

Airbags And Speed On Skis

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Yeah, more recently they've brought in airbag systems for this and made them compulsory in the rules and regulations for the ski races to wear those, so that if they crash, that they that the airbag expands and and protects them from summer injury at least. I mean, at the some of the the speeds that the some of the downhill ski races go at, they do get quite badly injured. And we probably all saw in the Olympics Lindsay Vaughn getting airlift off the mountain.

SPEAKER_00 0:27

Lee Davis and Willem Roberts are the two IPs in a pod, and you will listen to a podcast on intellectual property brought to you by the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys.

SPEAKER_03 0:46

Well, this is a little bit weird for me because ordinarily I would have had a little pre-conversation with my good friend Grillam, and we'd be starting to think about the sort of banter we would have before a podcast. But for the first time, and I can't actually think how many years I'm sat on my own without a podcasting companion. So um, so the pressure's on me really to deliver. I'm not I'm not even delivering with the pre-bents or anything like that now. So uh I don't know, I don't know if I'm doing a great job. So isn't it good that I've got a really, really great guest on uh with something fantastic, fantastic to talk about. So, Emily, welcome to the podcast. How are you?

World IP Day Sports Theme

SPEAKER_01 1:21

Hi, I'm very well, Lee. Thanks, thanks for having me. Very an absolute honour to be here on this podcast.

SPEAKER_03 1:27

Yeah, so so excited to be doing this because um you approached us with an idea for a podcast that would work for World IP Day. So we're doing we're we're recording this shortly, uh the week before World IP Day, in the hope that we can get it out. The um the theme around World IP Day this year is all things sports and intellectual property. And you are the perfect crossover, aren't you? I I believe.

SPEAKER_01 1:46

I think so. I'm I'm such a keen sports fanatic um in many, many ways. If you ever go to Pub Quiz and you need somebody to do the sports round, I'm I'm the girl for your team.

SPEAKER_03 1:57

Um maybe enough, but I will follow up.

Fandom And Access In Sport

SPEAKER_01 2:00

Because even though I mean there's there's there's sports I play that I'm very keen on, and winter sports in particular, and I've just come back from the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics a couple of months ago. But yeah, there's many, many sports I'm interested in and I play. And uh, but I'm also like, as I'm going about doing whatever I'm getting up to in my flat, I have Radio 5 live on all the time, and it's always going along in the background. So there's a lot of sports that I even know quite a lot about that I don't do myself. Things like golf and boxing that I've, you know, not been to see personally, not watch, but I still know a lot about it because the radio is always babbling away in the background. But I have been to see many, many sports live as well. There's probably about close to 30 different sports I've seen, um, professional level or elite level sports I've seen live. And I I just love going to and watching sport because it's it's never scripted and you never quite know what's going to happen. And that's what makes it really exciting. But I love playing sport as well, and there's a real pleasure in taking part in sport and moving around and hitting a ball and chasing a ball and or skiing down a slope or whatever it is. So I I love everything about sport, and it's it is a big passion of mine.

SPEAKER_03 3:09

So quick question before we get into like the serious your professional your professional background, because it'd be quite nice to ground this in you as a patent attorney. Before I do that, so I'm gonna give you a gift, okay? You can go and watch or compete in any sport tomorrow you want. What is your number one go-to?

SPEAKER_01 3:25

To go and watch a compete.

SPEAKER_03 3:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:27

Well, you know, it it changes. Oh gosh, you've really put me on the spot now because it's really hard to have a favourite. But no, this is gonna sound really sad, but the the the sport that takes up a lot of my time and a lot of my passion is is following Burton Albion Football Club. And I know it's it's really sad. Um, but I I love I love football as well, and actually something that's been a great addition to my life recently was when I was a little kitty growing up, I really wanted to play football, and I watched the 1990 Football World Cup, and of course, England did very well, and it's very exciting. But as a little girl, then it wasn't really possible to play football, and I always really wanted to, and I used to have kick-arounds with my brother and his friends, and it was always kind of jumpers for goalposts sort of things, and it was never possible for me to play the sport in a formal way. So in recent years, female football is well, female sport in general has become more prominent, but to to have an opportunity to play football in the last few years, which I have has has been a huge gift to me. So that's that's been the kind of dream that's been realized more recently, I say. But there's many other sports where it is female participation has been possible in the past. So so I I guess you could say that that football has has has become a thing for me more recently, with with female participation being a thing.

SPEAKER_03 4:43

That's interesting. Football, I mean, football at one point was moderately important to me in my life, but uh over the years it's become less and less so. I sort of take and leave football these days. I'm I'm a squash fanatic.

SPEAKER_01 4:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 4:54

Watch watch watching playing, uh I live for squash is what I do.

SPEAKER_01 4:58

Yeah, I mean it is a great sport. I mean, I play a lot of tennis, and and at my club there's also a squash section. Um, we've had the uh what's what's it called? The squash Premier League has had a they've had a team there recently. So I've got gone to watch some of the squash there as well. And at the Commonwealth Games, which was in Glasgow sort of 10 years ago, I uh 12 years ago, I think it was, I went to watch the squash then as well. So yeah, I I get it. It's a really exciting sport as well. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 5:24

I'm the honorary secretary managed on the management committee of a combined squash tennis uh gym social club, quite quite a recently high-level one. So I know a bit about the running of the sport from um inside as well. And we're just we're we're really excited that it's going to be in the Olympics this time around because we're hope we're hoping that will because squash is it's not a dying sport, but there are fewer younger people playing squash.

SPEAKER_01 5:47

Um yeah, and I I was really pleased to see it get on the Olympic programme recently as well, because there seems to be more of a movement towards Olympic sports of picking for new sports making their Olympic debut. There seems to be more an emphasis recently on sports attracting a younger audience. So it's things like in the summer Olympics, things like skateboarding and surfing and people doing like cool things where they're jumping around doing flips and trips. And for some of the more traditional sports like squash, it's been harder to get on the programme, I think. So I was really excited to see squash being being given its opportunity. And and when I was at the Winter Olympics just now, I I went to watch the ski mountaineering, which made its Olympic debut. And that's that's something that's probably one of the oldest winter sports that are going, but it's only just made its Olympic debut. So but yeah, I was very pleased to see Squash on on the Olympic programme.

SPEAKER_03 6:41

We need to get into your story, but just to finish the squash uh in the Olympics, I I find it quite interesting that they're playing around with the scoring for the Olympics. So if I understand if I understand it properly, so traditionally I would have always played up until a few years ago English scoring, which is um for first to nine, and you only score on your on your own serve. So it's um uh and then over the last few years we've transitioned to we we call it American scoring, it's not, it's kind of like a more of a global scoring. So you play first to eleven or first to five for 15, but you get uh a point per rally. Um yeah, and they're they're dropping it to first to five, so out of nine points in the Olympics, to just to get through the games more quickly because professional squash players play very, very long rallies, and I I think the concern was that it just wouldn't be a television experience for people.

SPEAKER_01 7:31

This was this was exactly the thing for the ski mountaineering at the recent Olympics that I went to watch. Is it an incredible? It's in such a different format to the version of it that most of us do. Um, it took place over a three-minute kind of loop, and there were several transitions, and it was all about being good at the transitions between the uphill and the downhill and taking bits of equipment in on and off. And that's where the the races were won and lost. And it was done inside a three-minute window to make it really exciting for TV. But actually, this weekend just gone. The biggest ski race in the world is the Patrol de Glacier, which happens in Switzerland and it involves like 4,000 metres of ascent and it's 57 kilometres long, and it's you know, these are like races that go on for hours and through the night and things. So it's a very, very different format that they've put on in the Olympics to make it not that I do the racing at all, I do it in a very recreational sport when I do ski mountaineering, but the version of the racing that they've put in the Olympics has been really like shaved down to be really compatible for a TV audience. But I don't think that's a bad thing in a way, because I think it it does bring people in and it does draw attention in the same way that T20 cricket has has brought an audience in, and then maybe people who get interested in the shorter form of the game will become then interested in the longer, more sophisticated forms of the game, you might argue, by having an introduction to the kind of the easier to manage version of it that works well on TV.

Emily’s Patent Attorney Path

SPEAKER_03 9:03

We need to talk about you as a professional, but you're opening up so many avenues for me. So, yeah, average cricketer until my eyesight started to be not as good as it used to be in my 40s. Um, and I've never got on my contact lenses and didn't like wearing glasses when I was batting. So I gradually decided to stop um to stop batting, basically. Um but it's interesting because yeah, of course, 2020 came along and it's like, oh wow, this is new revolutionary stuff. Most of us have been playing 2020 cricket for most of our lives, but we never used to call it that because that's that's all you could fit into an evening or across the weekend or Saturday morning or something. Yeah, so in in many ways, the um the amateur sport became the professional sport, which is quite fascinating. Anyway, tell tell us about you. I know you're at IK IKIP.

SPEAKER_01 9:44

Um I am, yes.

SPEAKER_03 9:45

You are indeed. So Ilya Kasi, good friend of CEPA. A bit about your professional background.

SPEAKER_01 9:49

So yeah, I've I've been a I started as a trainee in 2008. So um, yeah, coming up to 20 years as a patent attorney. I'm a generalist, I suppose. I'm I've I've I did a life sciences degree, but that's probably the area of technology I've practiced in least in my career. Um as well as being a big sports fanatic, I'm also a key musician. And um, as well as my degree, I did quite a lot of courses in myself in sound engineering and music technology, and that kind of I guess set the path towards me becoming a generalist patent attorney because I joined quite a small practice when I started as a trainee, which was Rouse in Oxford, and it the the expectation was that everybody should be quite versatile and be prepared to dip into different technical fields and not just stay in their lane with what they did their degree in, and that suited me perfectly because I'm interested in lots and lots of different things, and so that sort of set the tone for my career. And I've I've worked in many, many different fields, and so I've worked in industry as well in in as well as private practice. So I worked for um BTG doing medical devices for a few years, and also at MasterCod doing computer implemented inventions and fintech, and and I've yeah, I've I've moved around and done a great variety of different things in my career, which which I've for me I find it really I find that interesting. I like like a lot of variety. Um, and at the moment, yeah, I'm working for IKIP. I've I've known Ilya for a few years, and yeah, I approached him to work at IKIP because I felt it was you know a really young and growing practice. And Ilya's somebody who's quite um irreverent and you know, he's my kind of person, he's a real character, and he's unashamedly trying to do things a little bit differently. And that kind of really that sort of ethos works with me as a person as well. So, yeah, so I'm now working for IKIP.

SPEAKER_03 11:49

Nice, and that still gives you time to enjoy your sports passions.

SPEAKER_01 11:53

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So there's yeah, there's a lot of fluidity in the way that I work and my working days. So uh when I was out at the Winter Olympics, I was um watching sport and posting content on LinkedIn about about IP and winter sports, but also, you know, doing my day job at times as well. So yeah, exactly. It's it's it's great to be able to do that.

Linking Winter Olympics With IP

SPEAKER_03 12:16

So you've just you say you've just come back from the Winter Olympics. Sounds like you had a fascinating time out there.

SPEAKER_01 12:22

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 12:23

Were were you always thinking about the crossover between sport and I? Is that sport and IP? Is that something that lives in your brain?

SPEAKER_01 12:28

Not as such, but I think winter sports has been like a big passion of mine kind of my whole life. And I just I like I said, I'm interested in lots and lots of different things, but the more I thought about it, the more I realised there was a lot of IP involved in winter sports, and and I hadn't seen anybody really talking about it in a big way. And I was like, well, you know, I I you know this is my profession, and I get excited about IP, but I also get excited about winter sports as well. And it was probably my first love was winter sports, actually. I I loved watching ski Sunday as a young child. I really got excited um watching ski races like Alberto Tomba, and it just made me really want to go skiing. Because when when I told people I started skiing at five years old, um people often think I have this very glamorous upbringing where I was brought up in a ski resort going on family skiing holidays actually every year. But actually, I just watched ski Sunday on the telly and I pestered my parents constantly until they took me skiing. And there was a dry ski slope in in a place called Swaddling Coat in Derbyshire, built on a slag heap, not at all glamorous, but you know, it was great, it was somewhere to start. And you know, luckily it was near near my my family home, and and I went there and I loved it, and I just got stuck in straight away. But it was so it was just one of these things where as a young age I really wanted to ski, and and my first memories of Olympic sport were the Winter Olympics as well, because if you remember, the winter and summer games historically used to happen in the same calendar year, and so in 1998, it was my first memory of the Winter Olympics, and Eddie Eagle was there very famously doing his thing. And I really remember being at school in the school assembly, and the teacher saying to me, like, I remember this assembly and the whole sentiment, like, oh, oh kiddies, you know, it's all about taking part in sport. And and even as a young child, I remember sitting there thinking, no, that's really stupid. It's about winning. Sport's about winning, surely. Um, and and and I kind of, yeah, I kind of now think, actually, I do really enjoy taking part in sport, but I I do enjoy winning as well. So I've kind of mellowed on that thinking a bit. But but yeah, winter sports has always been a big interest of mine. And and also, and yeah, so when when the Winter Olympics came along this year and I knew I was going to be out there for the whole Olympics fortnight, it seemed like a really great opportunity to bring these two different strands of my life together. So the winter sports and the skiing aspect, but also my my professional life as a patent attorney and and an opportunity to get excited and post lots of content on LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_03 15:07

I know that your content on LinkedIn was very much looking at that intersection between sports and IP, or in this case, the sort of winter sports and IP. What were your big takeaways? What were what were you writing about on LinkedIn?

Parabolic Skis And Slalom Gate Patents

SPEAKER_01 15:18

Um some of my earlier content was relating to the ski racing that was on because um the first the first event I went to was the men's downhill. So I was putting out my content um uh largely relating to the competition schedule and as things went along. And so my first article I put out was was looking at ski racing technique and the parabolic skis that came in the in the late 1990s. Because when I learned to ski race, which was about 10 years before then, when I first started ski racing, we learnt on like these very straight planks they were, and it was quite difficult to put in a carving turn. But that's that was one of the skills you learnt as a ski racer. And a carving turn is where you really dig the edges in and you lean over into the turn at an angle. A bit like when you see motorcycle racers, they really, as they go around the corner, they really lean into the turn, and that's kind of the fastest way to go down the mountain. And you don't want the skis to skid overly because that's effectively slowing you down. Um, so I my my first content was was basically my memory of those skis coming in in in the late 1990s and the huge change that that particular innovation brought about. I mean, the the the ski racers were able to ski so much more quickly because they were really able to lean into the turn in a big, big way. But it made it a lot easier for recreational skiers. So I really remember that happening and it changed skiing overnight. But also I was aware that kind of my ski racing legend, Alberto Tomba, who I idolised growing up, was was the first one also to adopt the idea of um skiing through the slalom gates, and that he he kind of uh pioneered a new ski racing technique which was very wash buckling and kind of a dynamic technique. Because before he came along and others like him, the ski racers would go around the slalom poles. But in the 70s and early 980s, they they developed um patented spring-loaded slalom gates, which were originally introduced for safety reasons, because especially in the faster events like downhill, people were skiing into the into the gates and injuring themselves. So they decided they wanted to make them spring-loaded. So they, if they got whacked over, they'd return to their original position, but also say stay secured in the snow. Now, the idea was that the original reason for doing this was safety reasons, but actually in the end, it just encouraged people to be take a more aggressive way of skiing because rather than skiing around them, they just ski into them and and kind of use the fact that they were spring-loaded to and only the skis would go around the outside, right? The ski racer would be leaning in and using some of the other protective equipment. So when I was learning to ski race, we'd have leg guards and handguards, and again, this was originally brought in for set for safety reasons if if you hit the gates, but people are actually using them to actively push the gates away, um, the spring-loaded gate. So it's really interesting that, and and you see this in many areas of science and technology, is it don't you, that an innovation's brought in for a certain reason, and then there's kind of all these unintended other consequences that happen. And I'm not sure how much it really improves safety because it just encouraged people to ski in a more aggressive and racy way. And I think I think it probably did overall improve safety because in the faster races like downhill, they they don't tend to ski into them as much because it does slow them down. Um, so it probably did improve safety in that area. But in in slalom in the GS races, people were just taking more risks effectively because they could go through the gate. So things like that I find very interesting. Um I first learnt to race in the in the early, you know, in the early 90s was was skiing through the gates rather than round.

SPEAKER_03 19:10

As you were talking there, I'm thinking about so I was an avid, I've never been into skiing. We discussed that before we started uh recording, but um, I was an avid watcher of ski Sunday, and I remember watching that change. I remember watching the gates change and yeah, and the spring kind of loaded um devices coming in and that, but never ever thought about it in that way. Never thought that it was, you know, for safety, but encourage risk taking. That's fascinating.

Brand Power And Athlete Sponsorship

SPEAKER_01 19:33

Yeah, and you see you see this in many ways, don't you? Sometimes like in yeah, innovations have these different consequences coming out of them. And um, but a lot of the innovations within ski racing have been for safety reasons. I mean, the parabolic skis that I mentioned earlier were to uh improve the kind of carving and ability to like take a nice uh sharp cutting turn into when you put because when you put pressure on them, it the bet the ski bends and it allows you to carve a nice sharp turn rather than skidding through the turn. But yeah, more recently they've brought in airbag systems for this and made them compulsory in the rules and regulations for the ski racers to wear those so that if they crash, that they that the airbag expands and and protects them from some injury at least. I mean, that some of the the speeds that the some of the downhill ski races go at, they do get quite badly injured. And we probably all saw in the Olympics Lindsey Vaughn getting airlift off the mountain. Um and I think the fact that some of the racers are wearing airbag systems now, uh does it encourage them to ski in a more risky way? I'm like, I'm not sure that it does because I think they were already doing it. Honestly, the guys who were the ski ski, the the downhill ski races are completely insane. And you know, I said Lindsay Vaughn got airloff lifted off the mountain. It was only a few weeks, you know, before you know, after the previous time she'd been airlifted off the mountain. And she, you know, she does it all the time and still gets up and goes again. And this, you know, they are a bit crazy by their very nature, the downhill ski races. And um, but but of course, any any safety systems and innovations that brought in for those purposes are very good things.

SPEAKER_03 21:12

So we've been talking, we've we've we've touched on certainly uh sort of harder IP patents, the way patents underpin so much in in sports technology. Um, I always I always remember I've always played with exactly the same makeup racket, which is a prints squash racket, uh, and and has this little device called a power ring. So you're the long strings rather than going through the frame uh go around this power ring. So they're effectively one continuous string, which keeps keeps keeps the tension much more uniform. Uh now obviously that that kind of came out of patented protection some time ago, and others have have started to introduce it. So that so that fascinates me, the way you get a competitive advantage from one particular innovation that that can't bleed across immediately because of it being protected. But also, I'd quite like to touch on other areas of IP. So I know one of the things That that you're interested in is branding, particularly personal branding, in in terms of the way big names themselves become personality rights. And also, I don't know if this is true for uh scheme because I don't know so much about it. But I'm also quite fascinated in the way clothing, which is developed for competitive edge, becomes fashionable. So there's so much kind of read across in in sport and IP.

Trade Secrets And Four-Year Cycles

SPEAKER_01 22:26

Yeah, absolutely. And it was interesting that when I was trying to get tickets for these Winter Olympic Games, the tickets are really hard to come by, were the ones for the women's ski racing events in Cortina. Basically, it was impossible to get the tickets for those events. So I went to the men's downhill and I went to the men's slalom, which happened in Bormio. And the reason for that is because at the at the moment, some of the biggest names in ski racing are the female names. I think, I think Michaela Schiffrin is just about the biggest name in ski racing at the moment. Lindsay Vaughn has obviously she came out of retirement for these Olympics and again is a really, really big name, but also in terms of the the kind of the Italians who were part of the host nation contingent. You had uh Sophia Godger, who lit the Olympic cauldron with with Alberto Tomba. She won the gold in 2018 and the silver in 2022 in downhill. So she's a really big star in Italy. And also Frederica Brignoni, who'd won a multitude of Olympic medals before. And so they were competing in in many of the female races. So it's really hard to get tickets for those events, but you could really see their faces all around the Olympic venues, on all the billboards, with all the sponsorship deals. Um, so there's a a number of brands that were very clearly associated with the Olympic Games. Like Coca-Cola has been like the Olympics games official partner for I think as long as as long as the Olympic Games has been going practically. And Coca-Cola was very prominent in the branding everywhere, not just in the competition venues, but in the villages that were hosting as well. They'd they clearly donated a lot of their, you know, there were things like Coca-Cola deck chairs and um ice coolers and and every everything you can think of were everywhere. But but Visa as well. Interesting, Visa was the the only payments provider. If you wanted to buy something in the Olympic venues, you could only use cash or you could use Visa, so no other credit cards were accepted. So that particular brand has got an exclusivity arrangement with with the Olympic Games and also Corona beer. So which was the only beer you could buy in there was Corona, which is let's say not my favourite beer, but you know, sometimes needs must, you know. Um so so it's really interesting to but to see a lot of the, yeah, a lot of the these great female athletes, their faces were all over the billboards. And um, so Michaela Schiffrinand and Sophia Godger had um commercial sponsorship agreements with Visa and um who were the official official payments provider and official sponsor of the game. And I think it's you know it's great for a lot of these winter, winter sports athletes because outside the Olympics, these these sort of sports don't necessarily have the biggest profile. And when the Olympics comes round, it's it's a chance for these sort of athletes to get you know a really good commercial opportunity because I think a lot of the time a lot of the winter winter athletes are not earning a lot of money, they're scraping by an existence. It's not like footballers or tennis players who who really earn the big books. So when the Olympics comes round, it's really their time to shine and and take an opportunity like that. But you know, what comes with that? What comes with that is a huge kind of there's a lot of pressure on people's shoulders at the same time, isn't there? And I think we remember Jess Ennis at our own 2012 Olympics, she was everywhere, but it was a huge pressure on her personally, um, but a great opportunity for these athletes at the same time.

SPEAKER_03 26:06

So what one of the things I wanted to touch on, because uh so I I was fascinated by the Winter Olympics where you got hooked on it. Probably the thing I got hooked on the most was the skeleton. Yes. Well, one, because we did really well in it. Um so so that that inspires you to watch it, doesn't it? It's but again, watching it from a technical perspective, the innovation that must go in to that, and also the fact that you know, and and I and I don't know how frequent skeleton competitions take place outside of the Olympics, but I'm also wondering whether is there like a is there a cycle when it comes to innovation in in winter sports because of the four-year kind of period?

SPEAKER_01 26:42

Yeah, exactly. I mean, in a lot of sports you see this where a lot of the innovation happens on a on a four-year cycle, where sometimes trade secret protection is is relied upon in these sort of situations where teams will keep their innovations very much in-house and to themselves. And it's possibly because for whatever reason they can't seek patent protection for particular innovation. Um, and sometimes trade secret protection might not be possible beyond the Winter Olympic Games because it's ha they have to make what they're doing visible in some way or another. So they'll keep it very much in-house and quiet, but then they'll kind of, I guess, release it to the world at the Olympic Games, by which time other teams have kind of um, you know, they're slow to react and it may take time. And a really good example, I mean, we're deviating away from skeleton a little bit here, but a really good example of this, which I mentioned in one of my articles, was was the clapskate, which was introduced by the Dutch speed skating team in the late 1990s. Now, this was like it was a single-hinged blade on the speed skate, which enabled more efficient power transmission. And this kind of concept had been known for a long time, but the the the Dutch team worked out with improvements in materials and and other innovations, they they made it possible finally, but they couldn't get a patent because it was already known. And trade seeker protection wasn't useful to them because you could see very visibly how it worked as soon as it was released in the wild, sort of thing. But what they did do was rely on a lot of the kind of the ancillary information around that. So they had particular training methods and biomechanics and and all the kind of know-how and knowledge about how to ski with that particular skate. That when it came to that four-year Olympic cycle, they were like streets ahead of everybody else. They had this skate, and even though other people could use the skate as well, they didn't know how to use it. And the Dutch had developed that, and they were smashing world records right, left, and centre. But then everybody else got hold of the skate. They started practicing with it and using it. And within another four years later, everybody else had caught up and that the playing field was leveled again. And so you often see this in in in sort of four-year cycles. And I think we've seen it as well in summer sports with most notably with like the British um track cycling team. They had a period of huge dominance, right? And and in that period of time, um, you know, the British team were way in ahead of other other nations, and often their innovations were released on these kind of four-year cycles, and other teams would play catch upon certain things. And but the British team for a while was always one step ahead. But but now again that the the playing field's leveled a bit, and a lot of these other nations are now um innovating heavily themselves within track cycling, and so um the British, the the kind of 10-year period when the British team had its dominance is is over now, and everybody's innovating like crazy in track cycling. But but yeah, to come back to skeleton, I was I was very lucky to be at the mixed team final when we won the gold medal. That was very exciting, yeah. So that's the that's the one gold medal that I saw for Team G while I was at GB while I was out there, and yeah, I think that it's quite an it's got quite an interesting background because a lot of people kind of look at skeleton and think, why did we become so good at this? Why are the British good at this? We don't have skeleton tracks, we don't have snow and ice in our country. Kind of how does this happen? But it's skeleton has a lot of history with the British Army and the Cresta run in Sam Maritz in in Switzerland, and the Cresta run is like the original kind of skeleton illusion bobsleigh track and the oldest one in the world. And the British Army had had a base out there in the kind of the late um 19th century, and they kind of codified the rules and developed the sport initially. And so Britain has a like a deep-rooted hit history and heritage in skeleton. And so when the sport got reintroduced into the Olympic Games, I think it was in 2002, we already had a lot of IP, I guess, in knowledge and know-how and expertise in the history of that sport to get kind of an advantage, even though we don't have you know deep root part, you know, grassroot participation in that particular sport, but we did have a lot of background knowledge. And the the the GB skeleton team was set up and they partnered quite heavily with the British Army to develop certain technologies because, as you all know through your own practice, right, a lot of technologies can cross over between different fields. So there's certain things with like kind of composites and material science and things about aerodynamics that the army themselves in their technology divisions are developing that were able to be used kind of in parallel by by the British skeleton team in in the sled design and thinking about the techniques and the aerodynamics. And so so it's kind of counterintuitive that the Brits are good at skeleton, but it's because we have this deep history with the the British Army and because of the sort of technologies that they're developing and the collaborations that exist to kind of um I guess benefit everybody in those situations.

SPEAKER_03 32:11

There is quite an overlap, isn't there, between sport, particularly elite sport services. So my son, one of my sons, is uh head of sport for Royal Navy.

SPEAKER_02 32:20

Okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 32:21

So I've been learning quite a lot about the Royal Navy's role in elite sports and um and the fact that you know some people will join the services not so much to be active personnel, but for the but for the sports development, which is which is absol absolutely fascinating.

SPEAKER_01 32:39

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and that's that's exactly it. But it it's it seems particular that there was this particular historic link with the the Cresta run in Samaritz and Switzerland. And that's that's where the British Army all started out. And um and yeah, so and it, but but the skeleton team also has strong links with the universities as well. And you've probably heard that a lot of the British skeleton races, as well as having sports careers, they're they also usually go to university at the University of Bath to progress their academic studies at the same time as training as athletes. And and at the University of Bath, they've got a skeleton push track there where they can train on the start, because the start's very important for skeleton. Um, so so they're they're they're often developing that particular side. But uh at Bath, there's also kind of there's a lot of specialists there thinking about particular training techniques and and all sorts of associated innovations. And so they've got to kind of tie up there, and people with PhDs working on things like sled design, and um, and as you know, like a lot of universities don't commercialise the IP themselves, they partner with outside industry and other kinds of companies working in a particular field. So, so this is what happens at the University of Bath. They've that's been set up as a specialist centre for British skeleton and also LovePra as well, which as you know has got strong associations with sport and developing.

Ski Mountaineering Tech And Safety

SPEAKER_03 34:09

Yeah, long, long history. Yeah, but my daughter's at Bath and studying interior design. So next time I'm over there, I'll try and look at the skeleton stuff.

SPEAKER_01 34:16

Yeah, see if you can have a go on the on the on the start track.

SPEAKER_03 34:19

Oh no, oh no, that's far too terrifying, far far too terrifying for me. Um I on time, Emily, because um we try and keep the podcast around sort of like 40 minutes or so on the we could just and we could talk forever, and I know we're getting kind of quite near to um to close. Yeah, so come on in. Tell tell tell us what other things that you uh that you watched where you were uh at the Olympics then and um what you brought back and yeah, so I went I went to loads and loads of events.

Open Standards And A SEP Tease

SPEAKER_01 34:47

I was really lucky, so I I saw the Jamaican bob sleigh team go down, which is quite iconic. I went I went to a few of I call them the kind of badass sports where it's it's people in baggy trousers going off ramps and doing amazing things with all the flips and the tricks, and so that was very cool. I as you as I mentioned, I went to the ski racing and the skeleton, I went to the ice hockey as well, and um uh and I went to the men's curling final, which they sadly lost. They got but it got the silver medal, which was amazing. But the thing that was really great about that, I was sat next to um Hamming McMillan's father, um, who was also a former Olympian himself and world champion in in curling, and he gave us like a stone-by-stone um uh explanation of what what the GB team were trying to do. So that was very exciting. But yeah, I also went to watch the ski mountaineering, which is a sport that I've been participating on in myself in the last 20 years, and um, so that was quite exciting to see that making its Olympic debut, even though I, as I said, it's in a completely different format to the sort of thing you'd normally expect to see in a ski mountaineering race. But I think I think ski mountaineering is very important, interesting from an innovation point of view, because it is it is very, very different to the sort of um the technology and the equipment is very different to the sort of thing you'd see in normal recreational skiing, even though it is it's it's basically the oldest version of skiing in that how it works ski mountaineering basically existed as a sport before ski lifts were around because the origins of the sport were people used um animal skins such as reindeer, skin, and seal skins, and attach them onto the bottom of the skis to have traction to go uphill. Because, as you know, with skins, you've got the kind of the fur or the grain going in a certain direction only. So you could have a smooth glide for pushing the ski uphill, but then you get grip from going downhill. And and the the modern skins now are synthetic, but they basically use those same principles. But there are kind of modern innovations around that because you attach them to the bottom of your ski with adhesive. Now that can be a bit messy. So now there's kind of new technologies that rely on molecular interactions to keep the ski attached to the bottom of the skin attached and bottom of the ski. The bindings are also very different to normal recreational skis because they need to enable going uphill as well as going downhill. And there's been a bit of a revolution in those in the last sort of 20 or 30 years. Because when I started 20 years ago, we all used the the Fritchy binding, which is a very kind of heavy, clunky binding. Um, and one of the keys for ski mountaineering is to keep everything really lightweight as possible because a lot of the time, most of the time you're going uphill, right? With gravity being what it is. So you want everything to be really, and often you're at altitude and it's it can be hard work. So a lot of the equipment has gone very lightweight. So now there's pin bindings are a thing where there's small pins that go through the the front of the um through front of specialist ski mountaineering boots. So that's what we all use now. Um, and but and then there's various bits of key safety equipment, which um the the kind of the most important bit of safety equipment we wear is the avalanche transceiver, which allows us to basically our ski companions, if somebody triggers an avalanche and gets buried, it allows us to find them and hopefully dig them out as quickly as possible. And we all wear those. And the interesting thing about those from an IP point of view is like the key frequency that allows them to keep to communicate with each other is is an open access standard. So the idea is that people using different makes and manufacture-provided avalanche transceivers, whatever you're wearing as an avalanche transceiver, it can it can interact and communicate with any other transceiver. Um what you don't want is a situation where, um, as you know, in kind of areas like telecommunications, you have things called standard essential patents, where certain standards um become really prominent because they're the best standard for a particular way of communicating. But there are patents associated with that, and there are certain things that exist within intellectual property law that we don't have time to go into now, but allow that these particular standard essential patents are able to be licensed between different mobile phone providers. But the idea with the Avalanche transceivers is that those sort of restrictions and need to negotiate shouldn't exist. And there's an open standard on a certain frequency where all transceivers are interoperable between each other. But that doesn't stop innovation entirely because all the different transceivers and manufacturers are able to innovate in in different ways. So they they they there's things like having improved search efficiency, having better ways of directing you into where somebody's been um buried, having certain antenna arrangements and that sort of thing. There's lots of patent patents around them that allow the different manufacturers to innovate and you know sell themselves above their competitors. But it's interesting that the key frequency to allow communication um is kept free and not patented. And you see this in other areas of technology as well, things like you know, aviation and communications and and emergency situations there. It's really important that certain communication channels are kept open.

SPEAKER_03 40:26

That's a lovely place to end, Emily, if that's okay. Because um not least, because uh a little invitation for you, and that's it. Gwillem and I have been talking about doing uh at least one, maybe two podcasts on standard essential patents. So maybe we just leave it as a little teaser and we get you back.

SPEAKER_01 40:41

Yeah, yeah, why not? Very up for that, yes, sure.

SPEAKER_03 40:44

So um, so yeah, so so let's leave that. Thank you so much for coming and and joining me. Really excited that we're gonna get this out for World IP Day.

SPEAKER_01 40:53

Um, yeah, it's been yeah, a great honour and really, really fun to talk to you today.

SPEAKER_03 40:58

Again, so so so sorry that Gillam couldn't be with us. I do have a little close I have to do, and that's what I have to say to people that if they've listened to the podcast and found it really interesting, and why wouldn't you? This has been so good. Um leave us a little review, uh, tell your friends about it, build the audience up because um, yeah, everyone everyone needs to hear stories like this. So thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 41:16

You're very welcome, and look forward to chatting next time.