Being unable to see where you are going is usually an impediment to progress, but the success of the Great Britain rowing team at the Olympic Games may be largely down to wearing sets of virtual-reality goggles in training and so pretty much rowing in the dark.

When Sir Steve Redgrave recently described the Britain rowing team in Beijing as “the best we've ever had”, it may be partly to do with the depth of investment in the squad that leaves every other nation - apart from China - in their wake.

Over the past four years, the total investment in rowing by UK Sport, which allocates public funding, has been £26,042,000. Some of the best spent money on the rowers could well be on these goggles, which come in at just under £5,000 a pair, complete with bum bag carrying a receiver and battery pack.

Rather than a pair of Ray-Bans, the goggles look more like a builder's visor that flips up and down. When crews of Britain rowers have been wearing them on the water, they have not been watching peripherally to see how well the boat is moving, indeed they have not been able to see the water at all. They have instead been concentrating on information in front of their eyes on a computer-generated screen inside the visor.

The information is all about improving the quality of their rowing strokes. Each rower can see a screen showing their performance profile statistics, such as their individual stroke power, length, angle and pace.

Alternatively, the rower can watch live footage of his own stroke from the side. In this case, the coach is on a boat alongside, videoing the crew. That footage is sent from the coach's transmitter to each rower so that they can see how cleanly they are rowing.

Such information is almost unique in sport. In almost every sport, athletes will watch video analysis and afterwards try to execute improvements on what they see. The Britain rowers, however, can now see and feel a change in technique simultaneously.

Experts within British rowing say that they do not know whether anyone else in the world has been using such technology; however, if this is not a case of the British being out ahead on their own, the only crews alongside them will be Australia's because the idea for the goggles was pioneered at the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS), then unashamedly plagiarised before the Athens Games in 2004 when their biomechanist, Valery Kleshnev - a Russian - was head-hunted from the AIS to work in the UK.

In the build-up to Beijing, Britain rowers have thus become accustomed to rowing without being able to see the water. Initially, they experimented with a visor with a small inset screen, also allowing them a peripheral view of the water, but this was deemed a failure: too much simultaneous information became a distraction.

Now, though, they have become experts at working in the dark and looking as though they are training for cyberspace rather than Beijing. However, what exactly they have learnt, what improvements they have made, they insist, will remain trade secrets.

Such secrets have also been gleaned from another technical advancement: electrical instrumentation within the oarlock that delivers performance profile statistics by using force transducers to measure the performance of each oar.

Over the past five years, British rowing has spent nearly £60,000 on instrumented oarlocks, but, as Rosie Mayglothling, the team's technical co-ordinator, said: “That doesn't include the cost of someone to translate the information.”

Force transducers were first used by the East Germans and, among crews with a decent budget, have been commonplace ever since. But where the British believe they may have an edge is in the type of information they have gleaned and the way they have used it.

This is down to Steve Kerr, the team's biomechanist, and again, when asked how instrumentation has changed the crews' technique, he - understandably - becomes extremely tight-lipped. “There is no point in giving the opposition a leg-up,” he said. “I'm not in the business of sharing trade secrets. This kind of technology has been around a long time, the trick is to make it useful. It's like saying, ‘Here's a chisel and a lump of rock. Now make Michelangelo's David.' You have to know how to make it.”

Clearly, the intention is clearly that such investment in technology and know-how will pay dividends in the next three weeks. Team GB have genuine gold-medal chances in three boats in Beijing with the women's quad hoping to become the first British women's crew to win gold. After four years of rowing in the dark, the hope now is that brighter days are just round the corner.