Graphic: the sporting arms race for Gold in 2012

All they lack is John Cleese playing the part of Q, but for their next trick - the one they intend to pull off in 2012 - the brains trust behind Great Britain's Olympic success intend to bring the following futuristic advancements: radar-tracking technology for archery and the javelin; a judo robot; personalised spikes for sprinters; and a miniaturised, wireless body-sensor to help swimmers to save milliseconds on their tumble turns.

And that is just the start. According to Dr Scott Drawer, the head of research and development at UK Sport, they have only “scratched the surface”.

You may have noticed that one of the areas in which Team GB took a leap on the world at the Olympics was their progress in Beijing's techno-Games. If there were medals for men in lab coats, Britain would have been top of the podium: best bikes, best skinsuits, best canoe paddles, best meteorological equipment for the sailors. What Britain proved in Beijing was that technology can be a winner. But as Drawer said: “Because of Beijing, we now know the world is looking in. The cat is out of the bag; they have seen what we are doing.”

The questions, therefore, are twofold: have Britain played a trump card four years too early? And if Britain were winning the technology arms race in Beijing, can they remain ahead in London?

The answer, apparently, lies in the motto that Drawer's four-man team live by, a line from Arie de Geus, the luminary oilman: “The only competitive advantage that we can sustain is to learn faster than the opposition.”

Can they? This is Drawer's take on the techno-race: “There is so much knowledge out there that we haven't exploited, it's quite frightening what we can still achieve. A lot of the ideas we first looked at in 2004 we just didn't have time to exploit, so we've got so many things already in progress. Plus we started a lot of work for the next cycle back in 2007. So for a lot of ideas, we're already into the development cycle.

“In the previous Olympiad we had to start from scratch. This time we are already out of the blocks. We're already two years ahead of where we were before the last Games.”

But this is his killer line, delivered with confidence: “In 2012 I want to have the most aerodynamic or hydrodynamic teams across all sports, who have the best equipment with the least drag and the strongest, lightest components - who can look across the start-line and know that they are in a better position than anyone else.”

For example, the single greatest technical innovation going into the London Olympics could turn out to be a wireless sensor, marginally bigger than a fingernail, that has been devised at Imperial College, London by a computer scientist who is a specialist in developing robotic machines for surgery. The e-AR sensor sits behind the ear of the athlete and can give a coach an immediate reading on speed, stride frequency and stride length and may thus, for instance, prove invaluable in improving a sprinter's start.

“Most coaches do this stuff by eye,” Drawer said. “But by having this objective information, you can make a better call. If an athlete over 12 weeks' training gets a 2 per cent improvement in performance, we would hope that with better information you could double that.”

The e-AR sensor is in testing. The intention is that it should be applicable to other sports, such as gymnastics - to measure speed of approach to the vault, speed of rotation on the pommel horse or force required to maintain a specific body posture - and swimming, with the same principle but different technology, to improve the tumble turn.

But first, and most importantly, comes the Beijing debrief. In the technology race, the only currency is knowledge and every Britain team in every sport in Beijing will have been studying the opposition to the point that they were encouraged to photograph any equipment or behaviour that seemed unusual. In other walks of life, this might be called espionage, but Drawer said: “If you don't know what your competitors are doing, then you're not in a very good position. We're much more systematic now at looking at the opposition and making sure we're not missing any tricks. We'd be negligent if we weren't checking.”

Drawer has thus kept video footage of every minute of the BBC's coverage, so that he can rewind and study. He was particularly fascinated watching the German flatwater canoes because, a year before Beijing, one of his team spotted some news announcing a design partnership with Ansys, the engineering specialist in fluid dynamics.

He is also aware that money does not necessarily equal success. The Americans attempted to move ahead in the technology race, particularly with bikes and boats, before the 1996 Games in Atlanta, but their success was negligible. The Germans are viewed as strong competitors, although their perceived weakness is that they are too inward-looking.

A mark of the British approach is to maintain as outward a vision as possible, piggybacking on the knowledge base of industries such as medicine, defence and motor sport. “Whether you are developing the new wing for the Airbus 380 or a new track bike, it's the same principles with a different application,” Drawer said.

“Within the UK we have magnificent expertise. Eighty-five per cent of F1 engineers are British. After the US, the UK is the second-best scientific nation in the world. All the F1 companies and aerospace companies are pushing the limits of knowledge and when they find something significant, we'll try to exploit it as quickly as possible. We're like a rat up a drainpipe.”

Drawer has thus brought together a range of companies and research organisations into what he calls “a virtual team”. His annual budget within UK Sport is £1.5 million, but he taps into the university network, which is on the end of £2.8 billion of research funding. His partnership with BAE Systems, for instance, gives him “access to 17,000” brains.

This is what the “brains” are telling him: that the next advances are not in equipment but in the information and feedback applicable to training. “A lot of our historical knowledge around training has come from the old East Germany and Russia,” Drawer said. “We're trying to challenge that. If you can get through, say, a max of 30 hours' training a week, can we get more return from the effort we put in by being smarter?” That is perhaps why the e-AR device is the future - that and “Graeme Obree moments”.

Obree was the Scottish cyclist who decided that because handlebars caused aerodynamic drag, he would saw his off. He did so with world record-breaking results.

Drawer has thus initiated a campaign, Ideas for Innovations, in which members of the public are invited to share their own such flashes of genius, with the reward of a £25,000 research grant. That way, he does not have only the 17,000 BAE brains working for him, he has the entire nation. And that way, maybe, in 2012, the techno-race will deliver another British winner.

Britain and Australia battle for suprmacy

The technology arms race will have something of a head-to-head feel about it over the next year, with British and Australian sports scientists out of the blocks to see who can produce the first gizmo to perfect swimming's tumble turn. Why? Consider, for example, Joanne Jackson, from Yorkshire, in the women's 400 metres freestyle in Beijing, in which she finished third, behind Katie Hoff, the silver medal-winner from the United States, by 0.23sec.

No one, for a moment, is suggesting that Jackson's tumble turn is a weakness, but if she shaved four hundredths of a second off each of her seven turns, the silver would have been hers to go alongside Rebecca Adlington's gold. This is the kind of statistic that fascinates the right kind of minds in UK Sport. They want to be able to measure a swimmer's exact movement through a turn so a coach can identify where minimal gains can be made.

There is thus a project team at work on it at Loughborough University Sports Technology Institute, attempting to produce a wireless, miniaturised body-sensor to deliver a stream of performance data. Where the sensor will be worn is one of the challenges - the small of the back is a strong possibility - as is transmitting information through water. As Drawer said: “Transmitting through water is exceptionally difficult. We know that from submarines.”

The Loughborough team have been working on the project for 18 months and hope to deliver early next year. This means they have given the Australians a big head start, but Drawer is confident. “We know the Aussies have worked on something similar for five or six years,” he said. “We're hoping to short-cut that process very quickly.”

The swimming sensory device is typical of the direction that technological advancements will take sport. The emphasis is on how to train better, smarter and more efficiently - and technology can help by providing coaches with unprecedented performance data.

This, for instance, is where the idea of a “judo robot” comes in. On a fact-finding mission in eastern Germany recently, British coaches saw a device used in wrestling called the “gut wrench”. The gut wrench is a wrestling move, but this one was like a large sausage - an instrumental device on which you perform the move, allowing it to measure torque (how much force you can apply with rotating-type movements).

A coach using the gut wrench tool can therefore be presented with statistical data pinpointing how to adapt technique to maximise power. Performance improvement over a number of weeks' training can now be minutely measured, too. UK Sport is considering devising a similar “robot” in judo that would measure speed and power in a throw.

Even before Beijing, Britain's archers and shooters were employing technology to help them to train by using a super-sensory mat on which they would stand. In both events, body balance and the moment of arrow-release or trigger-pull are critical. This mat can measure posture, balance and body movement and thus give immediate feedback on optimum body position.

The next possibility for archery may involve radar systems traditionally used by the military in missile-tracking technology. Archery coaches want to be able to measure arrow speed, the force applied at the bow and the influence of the wind on the direction and position of the arrow. This is where radar technology comes in. There is a possibility that it could work with other projectile sports, such as the javelin, shot and discus.

In diving, too, technology played a significant role pre-Beijing. Traditionally, divers practise their dives on a trampoline before doing them in the pool. The drawback here is that it is inadvisable to land head first on the trampoline, so the training process is slow.

Before Beijing, Frazer-Nash Consultancy, the engineering company, constructed a harness for divers to wear to practise new dives into the pool. The coaches can control the harness, which can limit the speed of entry into the water, thus allowing a diver to go head first without fear.