Massive research efforts will be, no doubt, devoted in future to the improvement of sports equipment and increased attention will focus on sports engineering in general. ndeed, the recent launching of the new journal "Sports Engineering" is proof of the ising need for condensed information on the subject. The optimal adaptation of the equipment to the need of the customer is currently one of the dominant factors in equipment design. Another major field of sport technology is the development of appropriate methods for testing objectively the quality criteria of sport equipment, and example of which has been presented in the previous section by the testing of tennis rackets. The biomechanics of sports offers a large variety of subtopics that are, and should be, investigated in numerous single studies. Too frequently, however, publications are encountered in which large volumes of data together with phenomenological descriptions of an observed event are presented without a clearly defined objective or any reference to the causes underlying the observed phenomenon. The mere measurement and description of the ground reaction forces during for release phase of the javelin throw, for instance, without interpreting their functional form in terms of the myoskeletal factors that determine the throwing distance, is meaningless and constitutes a futile exercise. We would be well advised to guard against this type of pseudo research. Present international trends in biomechanics reveal an increasing use of complex large-scale neuromusculoskeletal models for simulation, prediction, and optimization. It is to be expected that these trends will also influence the future research directions in sport biomechanics.
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