Olympic Games: From drones to special shoes, here’s how tech has been used to get ahead

Before the Paris Olympic Games officially began, the Canadian women's football team were embroiled in a scandal involving a drone flown over an opponent’s practice. 

New Zealand reported to French police that their practice on July 22 was disturbed by a drone, with police tracking it back to analyst Joseph Lombardi with the Canadian team. 

Lombardi, head coach Bev Priestman and official Jasmine Mander were all issued one-year suspensions from any football-related activity by FIFA in response to the scandal.

Priestman also implied that drone flying is a common technique used by both men’s and women’s teams, according to the Associated Press. 

Canada then failed to overturn a six-point deduction in their group and was issued a 200,000 Swiss francs (€214,845) fine.

Canada is now out of medal contention after losing 1-0 in the quarter-finals to Germany in a penalty shootout on Saturday, but the so-called “Dronegate” scandal is not the first time individual athletes or coaches have been accused of using new technology to get ahead in the Olympics.

“There has a been a history of what we could call ‘technological doping’ in sport,” according to Louis Nolte, teaching fellow in sports policy and management at the Scottish Centre for Olympic Research and Education at the University of Edinburgh. 

“This situation is often complicated by the fact that different to traditional forms of doping (the use of banned substances), there is no global governing authority like the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), for technology”.

Boris Onishchenko was coming off a series of disappointments at the Olympic Games: a fifth-place pentathlon finish in 1968, then an individual silver medal and team gold for the Soviet Union at the Munich Games of 1972,