Here is the unabridged version of "Mason's Tale of the Tape" seen in the August 28, 2008 (63-35), p39 edition of Athletics Weekly.

While many competitors have given commentators something to chuckle about in the form of their fetching aerodynamic arm sleeves at this Olympics, another fashion trend has featured prominently in Beijing.

From beach volleyball, to swimming, to Britain’s High Jump Silver Medallist Germaine Mason, everyone seems to be sporting some shade of colourful adhesive tape. In the women’s 100m Hurdles Brigitte Foster-Hylton turned heads with the seemingly “go faster” stripes down her lead leg, leaving many people wandering if the tape has some functional benefit or if it is just another fad for fashion conscious Olympians.

While the functional significance of arm sleeves may be questionable, since the 1970s Kinesio tape has been used by therapists in Japan to treat injuries and improve performance in their athletes. In 1988, the Japanese Volley Ball team wore it in the Seoul Olympics and a decade later it was popularised in North America when Jeff Spencer began using it with Lance Armstrong and the US Postal Cycling Team in the Tour de France.

It took Japanese Chiropractor Kenso Kase 8 years to perfect the elasticised tape that today comes in shades of black, blue, pink and beige. Kinesio tape comes pre-stretched by 10% on the role and is used quite differently to normal athletic tape. If you take a strip of stretched tape and put it on a piece of paper and let go the paper pulls towards itself and buckles. With an acute injury there is an inflammatory process and the area swells up restricting the lymphatic, nerve and blood pipelines needed to get nutrients in to start healing and provide an exit route for debris. This effectively brings the healing process crawling to a halt until the swelling subsides. When Kinesio tape is applied to the skin above the injury it creates this buckling effect lifting the tissues close to the surface up and restoring these pipelines.


In addition the tape’s pre-stretched elastic properties also stimulate the sensory receptors in the skin they are adhered to. Depending on the direction in which the tape is laid down and the amount it is stretched before application, the tape can be used to make a muscle either stronger or weaker. It can also be used support muscles and as Dr Jeff Spencer, therapist to Lance Armstrong put it “because of the tape’s unique characteristics you can actually build a bionic tendon. It can do for the body what no amount of adjusting or physiotherapy can do and everyone who is a true student of the body should learn how to use it.” Lance himself was a big fan and in his book “Every Second Counts”, he referred to the tape as, "Something better than any laser, wrap, or electric massager…the special hot-pink athletic tape that came from Japan… seemed to have special powers. Every morning before the stage, they would tape us all up, different parts of our bodies . . . George's back, Chechu's knees. Sometimes we'd be so wrapped up in hot-pink tape that we'd look like dolls, a bunch of broken dolls. But the next day the pain disappeared--it was gone."

The tape’s unique characteristics make it a boon for therapists and its colourful appearance has caught the eye of athletes and fans alike. So next time you see an athlete sporting the magic tape, you’ll know it’s not just another fashion fad.