Science & Tech Quote by Mike Marsh

There is something almost comically bloodless about Marsh's phrasing, and that is precisely the point: it reads like the voice of systems, not the voice of a person. An athlete talking this way signals a cultural shift where performance is no longer just trained, it is tracked. Barcodes and RFID are retail and logistics technologies; importing them into the language around sport smuggles in the assumption that bodies, like products, can be efficiently identified, counted, routed, optimized.

The intent is managerial: data is not collected to satisfy curiosity, but to "provide management or control information". That last word is doing heavy lifting. It frames information as authority - the right to intervene, adjust, approve, deny. In the subtext, the athlete is no longer the sole owner of their own narrative of effort and improvement. A scan becomes a proxy for trust: you are present, compliant, measurable. If you are not legible to the system, you might as well not exist.

Context matters: RFID rose from warehouses into everyday life as institutions learned that frictionless tracking means frictionless governance. In sport, the same logic powers everything from kit distribution and access control to training load monitoring and anti-doping chain-of-custody. Marsh's sentence compresses that whole reality into a tidy pipeline: capture, process, manage. The dryness isn't accidental; it normalizes surveillance by describing it as mere "reading" and "software". That's how control sells itself now - not as coercion, but as operations.