Occasional fiascos apart, technology continues to make inroads into different sports to the point that it's not really possible to be competitive without using sensors, data analytics and other geeky bits of equipment.
Singapore has just staged the latest Formula One grand prix, where Microsoft was backing the Lotus team with its Dynamics customer relationship management (CRM) system.
Lotus' superfast black and gold cars make a much more compelling CRM story than, for instance, a chain of retail stores.
Lotus uses a huge amount of technology to design the cars and test their performance on the track.
That means sensors recording so much data that it's no longer possible for people to wade through it to glean useful information. Instead, Lotus uses machine learning to discover insights and patterns that'll improve the cars.
As the event was taking place, Singapore was blanketed by smog - known as The Haze - the burn-off of forest and peat in Indonesia, an annual environmental disaster that kills people with respiratory problems and generally makes life miserable in the hot and muggy city state and surrounding countries (tinyurl.com/nzh-haze).
For Lotus, the haze meant more testing of its engines and working out which tyres to use as the pollution affected the track grip, said Thomas Mayer, the team's chief operating officer.
Mayer also mentioned some interesting limitations to the team's use of technology. First, getting telemetry data from the cars as they zoom around the track at high speed is quite a challenge as there's only a short window of time to send the information wirelessly. In that situation, the data chunks from the cars have to be small and concise, so it can be squirted over as the F1 racers go past wireless transponders.
Second, the driver isn't "sensored up", which I expected would be the case. In extreme climates like Singapore's, the drivers are put under extreme stress as temperatures soar in the cockpit. Although Microsoft is making a great deal of noise about cloud computing, that's not something Lotus and Mayer can use. They travel with their own computers instead, which is expensive and clunky.
They do so for two reasons. First, the majority of race tracks do not have multiple redundant connections, but just a single network circuit which may or may not have sufficient capacity. Mayer would like at least two connections per track to use cloud computing securely.
The second issue is latency, or the delay as data is transmitted back and forth. Most data centres are physically a long way from race tracks, meaning the connections to them aren't anywhere near as responsive as having locally networked computer systems.
Sport going high-tech means those who can afford the gear and the experts to operate it will have a competitive advantage.
For a vastly expensive sport like Formula One, burning a bit more cash on sensors and data analytics is neither here nor there. But money to spend on technology can mean the difference between teams and countries reaching the top or not.
Does this mean that those who can afford large tech budgets will dominate the sports fields?
Not necessarily: Mayer pointed out that the difference between 2012 and 2015 for Lotus is that much of the technology the team uses today is off-the-shelf gear that's inexpensive and readily available - the Internet of Things has seen to that.
In the past, everything Lotus used had to be custom designed and made and was complex to set up and operate.
Countries such as New Zealand where clubs and codes don't have the mega budgets of those in bigger nations need to be agile and make sure they take advantage of the latest technical developments to stay competitive.
In other words, teams need to ask geeks to join the game if they want to win.
Juha Saarinen travelled to Singapore as a guest of Microsoft Asia Pacific.
