Going for Gold: All of the Ways 3D Printing Is Used for the Olympic Games

The Olympics are my favorite sporting event—I scream at the television during sand volleyball and speed skating the way other people do during football games, American or otherwise. Nearly 29 million people, including me, watched the recent opening ceremony for the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, which welcomes about 10,500 athletes from 184 different countries. For many years, 3D printing has been in the Olympic spotlight, used to fabricate podiums, autonomous river ferries, and even advertising sets, as well as equipment used by the athletes themselves in several events.

Shooting Sports

The shooting sports group consists of sporting activities that test an athlete’s speed, precision, and accuracy in using ranged weapons. At the PyeongChang Winter Olympics in 2018, French biathlete Martin Fourcade was the only competitor out of seven to complete the final shooting round without a single error, and won the gold. His rifle was developed by Athletics 3D, founded by CEO and former Youth World Champion biathlete Clément Jacquelin in order to improve sports equipment. The company 3D printed prototypes for the design out of ABS on a Zortrax M200 3D printer.

Ahead of the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022, Athletics 3D also used its Zortrax 3D printer farm to help another French biathlete, who’d injured himself during training camp. The only way he could continue to train was by using a rifle with a modified hand stop, which was customized and 3D printed in enough time that the biathlete could get back to shooting less than two months after his injury. He made more precise shots using the 3D printed hand stop, but his shooting rate went down, so he didn’t use it during competition. But it’s almost certain he would have been unable to compete in the Olympics without the help of 3D printing.

Professional biathlon rifle with a custom hand stop 3D printed with BASF Ultrafuse PP GF30 attached. Image: Zortrax.

Athletics 3D also 3D printed a custom air pistol grip for French competitive sport shooter Céline Goberville to use in the 2021 European Shooting Championships. She won the bronze medal using this grip, but wanted a smoother surface to compete in the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics, which actually took place during 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. So the company used the Zortrax Apoller, a smart vapor-smoothing device for post-processing, to refine the finish of the 3D printed grip.

Right now at the Paris Olympics, customized 3D printed recurve bow grips are being used by the Korean men’s archery team, and some of the women as well. The archers have actually been using the 3D printed grips—created by automotive manufacturer Hyundai Motor Group—since 2018, and won gold at the Tokyo Olympics, as well as at the Paris Olympics this week.

People can see these 3D printed grips up-close and personal at Hyundai’s newly launched immersive archery experience, The Path of An Archer, in Korea. Through mid-August, visitors can experience archery via a 3.5 x 19-meter anamorphic widescreen, and look at the advanced technologies Korea’s elite archers use, including a camera-based heart rate sensor, self-adjusting shooting robot, and the 3D printed bow grips.

Sledding Sports

There are three types of high-speed sled sports at the Winter Olympics—the bobsled, which has brakes and a special rope system for steering; the luge, with no brakes and steered by the racer angling their body; and the skeleton, with no brakes or steering system. Farsoon Technologies and Wanhua Chemical Group worked with China’s bobsled R&D team to develop a new 3D printed helmet for the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022. 3D scanning helped to customize the lattice design of the lining to each athlete’s head, and each included multiple layers and buffer zones with differing hardness levels, and structural distribution of different densities in areas with higher collision frequencies. The helmet lining was 3D printed using Wanhua Chemical’s specialized TPU.

The United States Bobsled and Skeleton Federation (USABS) is already thinking ahead to the next Winter Olympics, coming to Italy in 2026. This year, it partnered with CRP USA to create race-ready 3D printed components for the bobsled. An important element to a bobsled team’s success is the start, with the riders running next to the sled and pushing it to gain maximum velocity before jumping in for a sled run that can reach up to 90 mph. The new push handles for the bobsled were 3D printed with CRP USA’s carbon fiber-filled Windform SP composite, while Windform XT 2.0 was used to print the hand grips and seat.

CRP USA pioneers 3D printed bobsled components with Windform. Image: CRP USA.

To get a leg up on the competition at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics in 2018, the US Luge Team reached out to Stratasys to design, print, and test prototype sled designs. Rather than taking weeks, or even months, 3D printing was able to shorten the lead time to a matter of days. They also 3D printed the tooling for the finalized sleds, and a composite structure at the front called the Doubles Tower. Athletes use this to accurately position their legs on the sled, but due to its complex, trapped-tool geometry, the structure is not easy to fabricate. Stratasys was able to print it in just a few days, using its sacrificial tooling material.

Team USA once again turned to 3D technologies for the 2022 Beijing Olympics, working with Creaform to improve their sled by 3D scanning the one US athlete Summer Britcher used to win the World Cup in Germany. The HandySCAN blue laser 3D scanner captured the details of the sled steels that engage the ice, and the curved horns on the fiberglass runners that steer the sled, so the parts could be reproduced. Creaform also scanned the racing pod—the platform on which the athlete lies—to create a CAD model that could be adjusted to improve its aerodynamic shape. The team then 3D printed a mold to fabricate the pod.

The US Luge Team Layup Tool on display at SOLIDWORKS World 2018. Image: Stratasys

USA Luge, the country’s National Governing Body for luge, recruits, trains, and equips the National Luge Team for both international and Olympic competitions. It’s already preparing for the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy, and announced a partnership with GoEngineer to digitize a set of handmade carbon fiber runners for a doubles sled. A Creaform HandyScan Black Elite 3D scanner captured the details of the luge runners, which were used to create an inverse model that acts as a mold. This was 3D printed out of ASA on a Stratasys FDM printer, and then used in the carbon fiber lay-up process to create a second sled runner.

Speed Skating

I assumed speed skating was all about the skates—it’s in the name, after all—but the gloves the athletes wear are just as important. At the start of a race, skaters push themselves off the ice with their fingertips; during, they brace themselves during tight bends, also on their fingertips. A skater’s glove tips are normally made of gel or resin, but Chinese speed skater Daijing Wu donned gloves with custom metal 3D printed fingertips to win a gold medal at the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang. Farsoon 3D printed the tips out of Ti6Al4V, and they were buffed and polished for a smoother surface and less drag.

Image: Farsoon Technologies.

Farsoon also helped the Chinese speed skating team take gold at the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022, this time 3D printing a short track ice skating blade. The short track event involves plenty of pushing and shoving, and the Chinese Olympic Committee wanted higher performing blades for its skaters. The blade was designed using topology optimization, with a focus on lateral strength and aerodynamics. It was then tested and iterated on Farsoon’s dual-laser FS421M, and the final version was 3D printed out of aluminum alloy AlMgSc to keep the blades strong but more lightweight.

Cycling

A major 3D printing application is bikes, from the helmets and the saddles to the frames and other parts. So it’s no surprise that Olympic cyclists want a piece of the action. UK-based Metron Advanced Equipment has 3D printed cycling components for athletes competing in the Tour de France and the Olympics, including for a whopping four different national teams participating in the track and road cycling events in Paris right now.

The Great Britain Cycling team and Renishaw have been partnering to create 3D printed cycling components since 2019, and the team went on to win seven medals at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics on the resulting track bike. They announced a continuation of this partnership in 2022 to prepare for the Paris Olympics, and they officially launched that bike this spring. The bike features, among other improvements, a 3D printed titanium crank.

Great Britain Cycling team’s 2024 Paris Olympics track bike. Image: British Cycling.

Ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, the athletes on Italy’s national cycling team wanted to improve their aerodynamic efficiency, and worked with Thor3D‘s partner 3DiTALY. A handheld Calibry 3D scanner was used to capture full body scans of each cyclist decked out in full competition wear while maintaining race position on the bike. All the scan data was sent to engineers from Pinarello for aerodynamic studies, and the bike manufacturer tailor-made a handlebar for the team cycle, which fits each athlete’s arms perfectly.

Image: Thor3D.

Pinarello upped the ante for the men’s and women’s Italian track cycling teams at the current Paris Olympics, creating two new incarnations of the Hour Record-winning Bolide F HR track bike. The women’s endurance team will compete on the lightweight carbon Bolide F HR C model, while the reigning Olympic champion men’s endurance racing team is riding the Scalmalloy Bolide F HR 3D: a 3D printed version of the Bolide F HR.

This is the strangest cycling 3D printing application I’ve seen—a 3D printed mannequin to test the aerodynamics of a cyclist’s skinsuit! In 2016, researchers at TU Delft had Dutch pro cycling racer Tom Dumoulin 3D scanned from head to toe, using a photogrammetric method. Then, they 3D printed a full-size mannequin of his body, in eight parts, using FDM technology, and measured it in the university’s wind tunnel, trying out various styles and materials of skinsuits to come up with the best one. It must have worked, because Dumoulin won the time trial at the Tour de France, and later took home a silver medal at the Rio Olympics!

Shoes

Both apparel and shoes have been 3D printed for Olympic athletes over the years. Nike worked with two Olympic sprinters for the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio, Team USA’s Allyson Felix and Team Jamaica’s Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce. The Zoom Superfly Flyknit left out any non-essential features and was less than half the weight of an average running shoe, and Felix’s shoe also featured a 3D designed and printed spike plate to align with her preferred flexibility and stiffness. For Fraser-Pryce’s shoe, the Zoom Superfly Elite, Nike studied the runner herself, and speed in nature, to help the athlete, who was experiencing fatigue near the end of the 100m sprint. The goal was a mesh sole structure with lightweight material, but appropriate stiffness, that would efficiently apply propulsive force, and the resulting shoe helped her sprint down the track .013 seconds faster.

Nike Zoom Superfly Elite. Image: Nike News.

Nike was back in the Olympic spotlight this year with Athlete Imagined Revolution (A.I.R), a line of 3D printed sneaker concepts designed with sketches, computational and parametric design, and generative AI. 13 world-class athletes, including American basketball player A’ja Wilson and British sprinter Dina Asher-Smith, were interviewed about what inspires them and how the sneakers could show who they are as athletes. The goal was to look into the future of footwear design, “beyond Paris 2024,” and while the sneakers look pretty cool, they’re not for sale, nor are the athletes actually wearing them in the Games. Maybe someday.

Image: Nike.