Olympic athletes will go right to the edge The physical part of judo was easy for Travis Stevens to comprehend. The shoving and grappling. The spectacular throws. The chokeholds. Even as a kid, Stevens could see the speed and strength required. But it took several years of competing at a high level before he recognized the subtler aspects of the sport. The laundering. The tailoring. The extra starch. Most top judo players have a technique for making their uniforms - called gis - as stiff and close-fitting as allowable under the rules. The harder they are to grab, the better the chances of winning. "Sleeve length is very important," Stevens said. I've got it down to a science. In the hyper-competitive world of Olympic sports, even the tiniest details can make a difference. Just ask the swimmers who shave their bodies to glide more cleanly through the water. As the 2012 London Olympics draw closer, it's all about gaining a competitive edge. "There is a whole history of pushing the envelope," said Mark Dyreson, a Penn State professor who has studied the Games extensively. We're talking about athletes willing to do all kinds of crazy things. They are trying to go a little more citius, altius, fortius than the next guy, without doping or otherwise cheating. It's a story as old as the Olympics themselves. In ancient Greece, athletes knew their city-states would award them money and tax breaks for winning, so they developed special training regimens and ingested homeopathic substances to boost their performance, Dyreson said. Such extremes were frowned upon in the early years of the modern Games. The British, in particular, promoted a more temperate approach. The Academy Award-winning film "Chariots of Fire" featured British officials criticizing one of their own sprinters for employing a professional coach. "They had this strange notion that you're not supposed to train seriously," Dyreson said. They accused the Americans and others of perverting amateurism. Today, athletes around the world know that such restraint has long since fallen by the wayside. "If you don't go to the edge of the rules," Olympic shooter Eric Uptagrafft said, "everyone else has a bit of an advantage." That explains why shooters wear stiff jackets to help them keep steady and pass lighters over their gun barrels - soot-blackened sights cut down on glare. In the prone rifle competition, Uptagrafft used his engineering background to design an attachment that fine-tunes the barrel's vibrations. "You're trying to get that last 5% of accuracy," he said. One point could win it.