A rather strange building stands in Berlin-Schöneweide. It has four floors and an unassuming white facade, behind which, according to the German newspapers, work the world’s most secretive shoemakers. The technicians here come up with inventions that can only be compared with those of Q, James Bond’s legendary chief engineer. “Oh, is that really what they write about us?” Harald Schaale is constantly surprised by the reports he reads about the Institute for Research and Development of Sports Equipment. The director of the high-tech development centre, which is generally known by its German initials FES, rejects the idea with a wave of his arm. “The main thing is the interface between human and machine. We study sports where athletes are very much dependent on their equipment – that has nothing at all to do with 007.” But it does have a lot to do with technological expertise. The specialists have now been tinkering away on sports equipment for twelve different sports for 46 years. How many medals are the result of FES work? Schaale doesn’t know: “The athlete’s performance is decisive. Our work is just one element. Of course, however, a bad bobsleigh doesn’t win any medals.”
André Lange is also convinced of that. The German bobsledder has already won several Olympic gold and World Championship titles with ice racers developed in Berlin. The right material, says the top sportsman, bears at least one third of the responsibility for success or failure. He only recently paid a visit to FES with fellow team members to adjust the new bobsleigh generation for the Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, Canada. “Sitting trial” is the term Harald Schaale uses to describe this process. It includes tests in a wind tunnel, experiments with new alloys and test runs in ice channels. For many months, even years, sportsmen and engineers work on minor details to further reduce the air resistance of the bobsleigh and its crew or the friction of the runners. Schaale explains that you can’t just start developing without involving the athletes themselves.
That’s why the institute’s director prefers to rely on former top athletes who have completed a technical training when their sporting career comes to an end. Roughly half of the 53 FES employees are engineers, boatbuilders, physicists and mechanical engineers. The other half are specialists in metalworking or modelbuilding. The team is particularly proud of the fact that what is designed on the computer in Schöneweide is then actually built there. The Berlin-based engineers also provide the measuring technology required for each of the sports they work on. Legendary sports equipment has been created in this way. In one of the corridors hangs a signed poster of speed skater Anni Friesinger on which she thanks the engineers for her equipment. The clap skates developed for her at FES enabled her to keep way ahead of the competition.
It is very possible that more expressions of gratitude will be decorating the walls of the institute after the Olympic Games, since it is providing material for the German canoeing, rowing and cycling teams. Schaale will not reveal any details about the new equipment. After all, he doesn’t want to give anything away to his clients’ competitors. The Berlin experts ceased registering patents many years ago. The fact that the institute’s advanced technology is highly sought-after has been demonstrated for a number of years by the repeated attempts to hack into FES computers. Its computers are now as strongly protected as the machines at the Federal Ministry of the Interior. So perhaps a trace of 007 is to be found in the white building in Berlin-Schöneweide. And perhaps the newspapers are correct in their appraisal – and FES simply has a cordial and very discreet director.
