When Team USA travels to Tokyo next summer for the Olympics, athletes may be armed with new technologies meant to help them perform better against increasingly competitive international foes.
With other Olympic teams, including those of Australia to Britain, receiving significant support from their governments, the US Olympic Committee realized in 2017 that it would need to get creative if it were to remain competitive without a similar abundance of support from the US government.
And so, the USOC looked toward Silicon Valley. It began forging connections with prominent venture capitalists and tapped into both their intellectual and financial capital.