On August 1, in the men's 50-meter rifle three-position final of the Paris Olympics, Chinese player Liu Yukun won the championship. Attentive viewers will find that on Liu Yukun's shooting leather suit, Chinese elements such as auspicious cloud patterns, sea cliffs, and Chinese characters such as "Liu Yukun" are embellished. This shooting leather suit, called "Champion A", was tailored for Liu Yukun by the mainland scientific research team and has completely independent intellectual property rights.
On August 1, Liu Yukun (center) was in the game. Photo by Xinhua News Agency reporter Zhao Dingzhe
"A rifle shooting leather suit is not a simple garment, it is a set of complex equipment made of special materials and special processes." Li Xiangchen, chief technical engineer of the major equipment research project for the Olympic Games and director of the Smart Sports Research Center of the Institute of Sports Science of the General Administration of Sports of the People's Republic of China, said that previously, due to the lack of technical materials, the leather clothing used by the national shooting team has been monopolized by foreign brands for a long time.
In order to solve this problem, in March 2022, under the guidance of the Department of Science and Education of the General Administration of Sports, the Institute of Sports Science of the General Administration of Sports, Donghua University, and Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology formed two R&D teams to explore the localization of shooting leather clothing.
"Shooting competitions require high precision, and within the scope of the rules, the thicker and stiffer the shooting suit, the stronger the protection, and the greater the help for the stability of the athlete's shooting movements." Li Xiangchen said that a set of shooting leather suits with high-precision technology is very important for athletes.
Athlete body data collection
Human body data analysis and plate type research
Leather clothing designed and developed by scientific researchers Image source: Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology
However, the International Shooting Sports Federation has strict index limits on the hardness of shooting leather clothing fabrics, requiring that the hardness of the hardness ≥ 3.0mm under the condition of a thickness of ≤ 2.5mm (the higher the number, the softer it is). "The technical difficulty in R&D is to find a balance between the stiffness required by the shooting leather suit and the softness required by the rules, so that the fabric is infinitely close to the standard limit, providing better support and control for athletes, and helping athletes to make accurate shots stably." Li Xiangchen said.
To this end, researchers use professional equipment to test and collect data on the characteristics of shooting sports, as well as the physiological and physical characteristics of athletes in shooting competitions, such as their posture, heat and humidity performance, and pressure perception. According to the athlete's personal comfort preferences, human body shape and action posture characteristics and other information, a comprehensive and detailed collation, and on this basis, the athlete's "three-dimensional + sports" dynamic version is customized.
In terms of the overall visual appearance of the equipment, traditional Chinese elements such as auspicious clouds, mountain patterns, and seawater and river cliffs are used to demonstrate cultural self-confidence; In terms of wear evaluation, we continue to track the wearing and training effect of athletes' customized competition uniforms, and adjust and improve the materials, versions and process schemes of "leather clothing" on the basis of try-on evaluation, and finally use them for official competition clothing. In addition, the project team also developed and produced inner functional suits and middle training suits.
At the beginning of 2024, a technological breakthrough was achieved in the research and development of domestic leather clothing. The R&D team has successively achieved technological innovation in fiber preparation, research and development of high-performance glue, preparation of standard shooting clothing fabrics, innovation of Chinese element clothing and batch preparation of ready-to-wear garments. Both teams have launched products that meet the standards of the International Shooting Sports Federation, breaking the foreign monopoly.
Source: Science and Technology Daily, Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology