The Tech Guy Building Wearables for America’s Olympians

Some of the most advanced sports technology on the planet isn’t being created at a shoe lab in Oregon or a moonshot factory inside Google. It’s coming out of a guy’s house.

Mounir Zok, the biomedical engineer in charge of the U.S. Olympic Committee’s tech and innovation, brainstorms products and training aids from his home in Cupertino, Calif. Together with his team of engineers and specialists, he’s produced, among other training gear, a set of connected glasses for the U.S. women’s cycling pursuit team that projects performance data directly onto lenses. “Just like a butterfly can never be a caterpillar again,” Zok says, “once an athlete starts using technology to peak when she wants to peak, limit injuries, and maximize performance, she can never go back to just intuitive training.” The team used them to prepare for the 2016 Summer Games and won a silver medal.