Forbes Carlile discusses development of Australian sports science, 2008

Transcript of the recording

I had the good fortune to be working with the late Professor Frank Cotton. Now, he's known as the 'Father of Sport Science in Australia'. And I think we had the first sport science laboratory in Australia – one of the rooms in the old medical school, with very ancient sort of equipment, not the electronic devices we see today.

My interest of course as a physiologist was the physiological changes with failing adaption. You see, in those days people didn't know so much about training and it wasn't unusual for people to be over-trained. Now, one of the things, the fundamental things that changed, during failing adaptation would be the physiology of the person, and being a physiologist I was very interested in measuring these things. So I measured many, many aspects of the changes in the blood, and the blood pressure, and the electrocardiogram, the heart's action and so on, and produced a few papers on this.

And in 1960 I was the scientific adviser for the Olympic swimming team and we did a study there which became a pretty important study. It was the physiological changes that occur during hard training. It was hard training of two months in Townsville. Now, that paper became the centre part of a book I wrote which became, I guess, it's said to be nearly a classic book, and it started a lot of sports scientists on their way, I'm told, because there I talked about the changes that occur in the body and how you can measure these and dictate the training and when the person should rest and so forth.

So my approach was as a physiologist, but there are many, many approaches now to sport science – biomechanics, and oh, so many, psychology and so on, so we can't just look at from the point of a physiologist, but that was my approach. That was the subject in which I was studying, and I was a lecturer there in physiology at the University.