A Gold Medal Finish

About this technology

Overview

During the summer of 1999, Darryl Mitchell of Goddard Space Flight Center's Technology Commercialization Office (TCO) met with the U.S. Olympic Committee at the official training facility in Colorado Springs, Colorado, to offer assistance in transferring NASA technologies applicable to Olympic sports. Following the meeting with the Olympic committee, Mitchell was approached by U.S. Speedskating Long Track Program Director Finn Halvorsen, who eagerly voiced his interest in working with NASA to identify a means of improving performance for his team. The two generated a lengthy list of promising NASA developments that could benefit the sport. From this list, they selected a NASA mirror-polishing technique, developed by Jim Lyons, a 16-year optical engineering veteran of Goddard. Lyons and the Goddard TCO team quickly determined that the aluminum super polishing technique was not suitable for speedskate enhancement. This discovery, however, was hardly a setback, as Lyons came through with an alternative polishing process. On February 17, 2002, U.S. speedskater Chris Witty used Lyons' newly developed polishing tool, and skated her way to victory with a world-record time and a gold medal in the 1,000-meter race at the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Olympics.