In sports science, sports medicine and rehabilitation of sports injury, the nascent fields of exercise ‘omics’ (metabolomics and proteomics) encompass the identification, characterisation, and quantification of the metabolite and protein content of whole cells, tissues, or body fluids (1). The potential for ‘omics’ technology holds great promise for talent identification, optimising elite athlete training, avoiding training addiction and overuse injury and policing fair play. Beyond the currently characterised biochemical pathways of cardiac, muscle and kidney function lies the realm of neuroscience interfaced with the psychological aspects of optimised athletic output. Exploring this untapped systems biology hyperspace is limited by current analytical technologies and requires innovative research. This is driven by the ability to identify and quantify novel saliva, sweat, plasma and urine analytes that can function as biomarkers for sculpting elite sports performance. Toxicology evidence of licit enhancers (nutritional supplements and painkillers to mask injury) or illicit enhancers (doping) may simultaneously be monitored (1,2). However, there are many challenges in translating ‘omics’ from the sports research laboratory to the sporting clinic and arena, and relatively few novel biomarkers have successfully transitioned from discovery to routine use in training. Key barriers to this translation include the range and complexity of the biological samples, a preference for minimally invasive sampling during exercise, the need for “orthogonal” biomarkers (i.e., uncorrelated with existing markers), the presence of high abundance analytes in biological samples that hamper detection of novel low abundance analytes, false positive associations that occur with analysis of high dimensional datasets, lack of routine mobile biosensor devices and the limited understanding of the effects on performance of coaching, differential training regimes, age-related development and performance anxiety. State-of-the-art analytical technologies developed by us (1, 2) focusing on nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and associated strategies to overcome these challenges are discussed.