sports

Skiing and snowboarding have always been cutting-edge sports, thanks to renegade personalities and high-tech gear. But this ski season, designers are stepping it up to a whole new level. Here, take a look at some of the finest in snowsports tech—and enter to win some gear of your own.

Much of the debate on the place of advanced prostheses for the disabled in competitive sports often downplays arguably the most important perspective: that of the athletes who couldn't compete without them. In light of the recent MIT research project that found prosthetic limbs offering no advantage over natural legs, sprinter and double Cheetah leg user Aimee Mullins has some even more thought-provoking (and first-hand) analysis of the issue.

It's getting much harder to cheat at sports these days. Urine tests have been re-calibrated to look for the cream and the clear, blood tests check for the presence of excessive oxygen, and you spitballers? Yeah, they're on to you, too. But a new breakthrough in gene therapy may allow athletes to skip the steroids in favor of adding muscles from the DNA up.

In 2008, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) banned double amputee Oscar Pistorius from racing in the 2008 Summer Olympics. Later that same year, the ban was reversed. The back and forth centered on Pistorius' specially designed, spring-loaded, prosthetic legs. The IAAF argued that artificial legs designed especially for running gave Pistorius an unfair advantage against runners whose flesh-and-blood limbs didn't benefit from advanced engineering and space-age materials.

While an MIT study last year eventually led to the overturn of the original IAAF decision, no one had done a systematic study of amputee racers in general. Now, the MIT researchers that investigated Pistorius have released the results of a wider trial, and it turns out that specially designed prostheses don't actually help sprinters.

The 2010 snowmobile season, which begins this month, will see daredevils in places they couldn’t reach before: in deeper powder, on remote cliffs, squeezing between trees. That’s because the first full air-suspension sled swaps the usual heavy steel coils for air-filled shock absorbers, creating a smoother, 20-pounds-lighter machine. Riders can easily steer the FX Nytro MTX SE 162 with their weight, glide it nearly drag-free through powder, and unstick it from drifts.