Abstract
This article examines the effect of technological change (innovation) on sports. We argue that innovation affects a sport through two pathways: sports equipment and sports media. We propose a simple economic model with positive feedback, which predicts that technology-enhanced sports will dominate the sports ecology. There is also the opposite phenomenon of technological overshooting that causes the elite end of a sport to develop much faster than the beginner's end, damaging entry into the sport. We present this model through a case study on windsurfing, illustrating the role of sports media. A surprising result is that the case study suggests a welfare-maximising case for monopoly licensing of sports media in newly emerging sports, or sports with rapidly changing equipment technologies.
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