California. You have to follow the county road until it ends and a guard lets you into the private development, and then you have to follow winding private roads with Spanish names past unbelievably idyllic Tudor farmhouses with white picket fences sitting alone in quiet, rolling pastures. You have to pick your way past an exclusive tennis college and an exclusive resort hotel and there, in the back, is the exclusive.Coto Research Center.

It's not that Ariel is hiding. It's just that he figures anyone who wants his services badly enough will find him. The Boston Patriots, the Kansas City Royals, Wilson Sporting Goods, Universal Gym Equipment, Kimberly Clark, Dow Chemical and AMF have all managed to find him. Today, a pair of well-heeled racehorse trainers has driven in to hear Ariel tell them how he can turn a $1,500 racehorse into a money-winner.

ARIEL Israeli Olympic team who still FORMER with a heavy

accent after fourteen years in this country. His training is in computers and exercise physiology. As he leads the trainers past the tennis court, he points out the running track, made out of a shock-resistant and waterproof material he developed, with force platforms underneath to measure the force of a human or horse running on the surface.

He opens the door to the computer room. In one corner an assistant has projected a tennis player, stopped in motion, on what is called a digitizing screen. With a special pen, he touches the player's toes, knees, hips, shoulders and head and traces the form of the tennis racquet. As he does, a stick figure takes shape on the computer screen. When he is finished, he moves on to the next frame of the film and repeats the process.

Ariel takes the group over to another computer console and puts two stick-figure horses on the screen, making them run from one side to the other. "That doesn't tell us too much," he says. "But now, if I put it on multiple frame and do the same thing"-he runs the horses across the screen again, but this time leaves the images of 30 overlapping horses in motion-"we see that this horse has more vertical displacement than this horse. This horse runs straight. This horse runs up and down. A horse going up and down usually will not be as fast because he is losing energy. When I look at this horse-this is a good horse-I can see a big hole between his legs. That means he has very little lateral motion. Now I can also look at this horse from on top." He rotates a squiggle stick and the image on the screen rotates from side to top view. From the top, he runs the horse through its paces again.

"Let's say I want to know what the force is just when he's hitting the ground." He punches in a number on the keyboard that corresponds to the hoof joint and a line appears on the screen showing hoof force in a forward direction. "What we can do," he says, "is take any horse, and, at any joint, tell you how fast it moves, in what direction it moves, how efficient the movement is. We can show on the computer whether the horse could do it better if he changed certain things. We can tell you if a horse might go lame. We can tell you he has speed but not endurance."

The horse trainer kicks at the floor with the point of his boot and asks, as politely as he can, "Wouldn't a racing form tell you the same thing? What's the advantage of filming and digitizing over the naked eye of

a man who's been around horses twenty years? I can tell if a horse stands bad..."

"How do we know it stands bad?" asks Ariel. "Maybe it stands great, but just looks bad. How it looks to the eye means nothing. I could take a ballerina; she would throw a shot so beautiful, and the shot might land two feet from her. But I could show you a champion shotputter; when he threw a shot, if you didn't know where the shot landed, you would say the guy was nuts, didn't know how to throw the shot. But when you put the data together, it's perfect. What makes a horse move are forces, not how he looks. And forces you cannot see with the eyes. You have to calculate. And that's what we do."

FOR THE WEEK-END ATHLETE, ARIEL'S STUDies have a number of applications. He can tell a football player whether he would make a better end or a quarterback, via a two-part response test. Part one tests simple reaction time: when the light goes on, move your hand to the left. Part two tests quick decisions: if the green light goes on, move to the left, but if the red light goes on, move to the right. "The guy who has the quick reaction time is the guy who can run out, turn around, catch the ball. The quarterback, on the other hand, has to be quick in making decisions. A quarterback who can run the 100 meters in 10.2 but can't make a decision whether he should go right or left has all this speed for nothing. That's the kind of thing we can identify."

For tennis players, Ariel developed a set of goggles he puts over the eyes that will tell him where the player is looking when he hits the ball. Beginners keep their eyes on the ball. Pros focus someplace on the shoulders of the opponent and start moving for a return before the opponent hits the ball. Following this advice, tennis pro Vic Braden, who runs the tennis college at Coto, teaches his students to watch body motion for cues rather than looking strictly at the ball.

For injured athletes, Ariel says he can speed recovery. "We had a girl on the volleyball team who had some cartilage removed from her knee. We had her exercise every day on a specific problem and in seven weeks she was back playing."

With his computer analyses he could tell exactly how strong the knee was and whether it was moving the same way it did before the operation.

Ariel's computer has taught him not only about technique but also about equipment. With its help, he has designed a series of specialized shoes for different sports-a jogging shoe with inflatable soles (you'll carry a spare in your pocket), a weight-lifting shoe with interchangeable heels of different heights to adjust the body's center of gravity according to the amount of weight being lifted, a sprinting shoe with no heel (since his stick figures showed him that champions never came down on their heels) and a shotputting shoe that permits full rotation on the ball of the foot but no forward slippage. For tennis racquets, he recommends a large face; the larger the face, the less torque on the handle and the less strain on the forearm, thus reducing the chances of developing tennis elbow.

He does not think much of the running shoes now on the market. "Whether it's a Nike or a Pony or a J.C. Penney, the difference is basically the price. If you take a new pair of shoes and run ten miles in them, the difference in the shoe after ten miles is more than the difference between any brand of new shoes. So after you run ten miles in the shoes, you've changed all the

PASSAGES 1982