Narrator: The first modern Olympic Games were held in Athens in 1896, and since then 26 countries have hosted the Games. As of now, the U.S. has by far the most medals in the history of the games. And this summer it’s hoping to keep that streak alive.
The 2024 Summer Olympics are taking place in Paris. There are predicted to be billions of viewers across the world and millions of people in person taking in the events.
More than 10,000 athletes will compete for glory and to represent their country. Only the best of the best will take home the prizes, and every country is doing what it can to get that competitive edge.
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As a wealthy country with access to the highest levels of technology, the U.S. is positioned to have the greatest opportunities to train its athletes.
We took a trip to the main athletic training facility in Colorado Springs to hear more about what happens there and how science and technology is changing the way athletes perform.
Lindsay Golich is a senior exercise physiologist at the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee.
Lindsay Golich: I always joke that I work with athletes from the neck down. So I’m trying to look at gaining that extra fraction of a percent in human performance and what we can do to optimize your ability to either jump further, go faster, go for longer.
And in our sports science area, which is where we are right here, we have a few different disciplines. We have sport physiology, we have sports dietetics, we have sport psychology and also sports technology.
I’ve been fortunate to work with athletes. It has been successful, so it’s gotten them on the podium at a World Cup or Olympics or World Championships. But even for the athletes that may not have reached that pinnacle, of just being able to work with them and see how they're able to optimize their performance—so maybe reaching a dream that they never thought that they would make the Olympic team, but they knew they were in some type of development pipeline that they were able to get to the next level.
Narrator: What is it that makes someone dedicate their life to a sport? The time, the sacrifice, the single-mindedness—it’s not for the faint of heart.
Kara Winger is an Olympic javelin thrower and trains regularly in Colorado Springs. She knows how useful technology can be in training and in the recovery process.
Kara Winger: This is the HATC, the High-Altitude Training Center, at the Colorado Springs Olympic & Paralympic Training Center. You can change humidity, temperature and altitude in this room.
So you close all the doors, you turn on the machines, and if you are, say, here in Colorado Springs but you’re going to a race in Tokyo at sea level, you set all the settings to the humidity, which is high in Japan in the summer, the heat, which is also high and sea level, like whatever altitude you’re going to race at.
So I think there are so many tools these days that can tell athletes about their bodies and their recovery process that just encourage recovery, encourage listening to your body and maybe taking it more easy than has traditionally happened in sport that could contribute to the longevity of an athlete.
Many, many athletes now wear something that tells them how they’re recovering, how they’re sleeping, how their body is feeling, more so, like, in a numerical sense, more so than just how they feel, and having tools that could be AI-powered to interpret what all of that data means could be really cool, from a young age, in really optimizing and specializing people’s training plans because one system doesn’t work for every athlete.
AI is, in so many ways, in our lives in the future, so I think that AI could be useful in gathering all of this data that an athlete collects on themselves, or has a team to collect on their behalf, and analyzing that data in a collaborative, like, very cohesive and full-circle ways.
Narrator: From smart swimming goggles to mobile wind tunnels for bikes to apps and wearables that track diet, sleep, stride rate, and more, sports technology is more compact and accessible than ever before, and it’s impacting the training world significantly.
Ryan Bolton is coach of the U.S. triathlon team and was an Olympic athlete himself. His training regimen in Tucson, Ariz., is cutting-edge.
Ryan Bolton: Well, I had a background as an athlete. I was a swimmer and runner growing up and also a cyclist, and ultimately that led me to collegiate running, and then I was an Olympian in 2000. And it’s just a natural progression to, to where I am today.
Triathlon is a hard sport—I mean, three very demanding and very technical sports. It’s just a lot of training, a lot of volume, a lot of intensity, a lot of commitment and all of those things combined. You know, you have to be really mentally strong, mentally tough.
Science and technology are—they’re a big part of our sport. All the athletes are wearing, you know, some type of a smart device on them. And sometimes it’s multiple devices that measure multiple different things. I would say the most basic is just a smartwatch or a computer that they put on their bikes. Those things then upload into software that we have online that analyzes everything.
So from a coaching standpoint, the coaches can see exactly what the athletes are doing. They can look at splits, they can look at heart rates, they can look at power numbers, they can look at all the analytical data, and then not only that, but then they can graph it into, like, different, like, dozens, thousands, really, of charts, depending upon what you're specifically looking for.
Barney Garrood: This will show you the CDA for each lap.
Bolton: Wow. That’s pretty cool.
Garrood: And what you can do then is once you’ve stopped recording, press the menu button. You can select laps and turn them on or off, which will show you the X there.
Bolton: Yeah.
Garrood: And that will then give you the average for the, for the runs.
Narrator: Barney Garrood comes from the world of Formula One racing. Now he’s applying the physics lessons he learned on those tracks to cycling. He’s an aerodynamicist who works with the U.S. triathlon team to maximize performance on the bikes.
The company he founded, Aerosensor, makes small, compact devices that track performance data, and these results can be read by athletes and coaches in real time, allowing them to adjust on the fly.
Garrood: This is our flagship product, and that device measures the aerodynamic drag as you cycle in quasi-real time. And what that means is after about 30 seconds, you get numbers from it.
What it does is it’s got a, a sensor on it that measures the wind speed, something called dynamic pressure, which is proportional to the square of wind speed, and also the wind yaw angle up to about 50 degrees.
So we’ve also got Aerobody. This is a device designed to measure the rider position on the bike. What we find is as riders get tired, they always start to lift up a little bit, and that can start to be detrimental to their aerodynamics. So really, if you’re doing aerodynamic testing, you want to make sure you’re in a consistent position.
And then when you’re out training or doing your, your competitive rides or races, you want to make sure that you’re staying in the optimal position. What this device does is it’s got two laser-based measurement devices that measure the height of your chest and your head. So if you’re moving your head up a little bit as you’re riding, we’ll see that instantly. It feeds it back to the rider so that they can correct that and also writes that into a file so that after the ride, you can see how consistent you were in your training ride.
Bolton: A lot of your job as a coach in this sport is actually like administering the workout, you know, standing on a pool deck and, you know, telling the athletes, you know, this is what we’re doing right now. But I would say, you know, more is on the back end of actually when you get home and looking at that data online, seeing what happened, analyzing it, and then using that data to help form future workouts but also for, you know, feedback for the athletes, like for that specific day and workout.
Narrator: Coaches now have a treasure trove of data available to help assist their decisions in creating the best training programs for their athletes.
Ben Hoffman is an Ironman athlete and an advisor for the U.S. triathlon team.
Ben Hoffman: Yeah, for me, I think, you know, technology has always been around. You know, I really started racing professionally in 2007, but it’s been very interesting to watch the progression, you know, in all three of the sports that I do: swim, bike and run. You know, when we first started racing, power meters were barely a thing on the bike, and now it’s ubiquitous. I mean, you see them everywhere.
But in the last five or six years now, we start to see a little bit more emphasis on the technology in the swimming side of things.
Now what we have is technology that’s kind of coming to the masses where you have things like the FORM goggles, you know, that are giving you a heart rate readout, they’re giving you head pitch, they’re giving you stroke rate, and then you can go back and digest that data afterwards and get a way deeper dive into, you know, what what your body is doing in the water and how to improve.
So this is a swim that we just did today. You can see it was 5,000 yards. The moving time was an hour and four minutes. The total time was probably more like an hour and 35 minutes. But it gives me my average stroke rate, 62, average heart rate. And then you’ve got things like, FORM has their own metrics, but they talk about your form.
So I’m a 76 out of 100, which, you know, there’s room for improvement, obviously. My head pitch, my peak head roll and my, yeah, basically time to neutral, set pacing, internal pacing, and then if you go into the swim details, there’s actually even more granular breakdown where it’s showing your move time, rest time, cumulative time, the distance that you did per, you know, interval and then your heart rate in each one of those.
Yeah, all this information is really great. And now, like I said, it just adds a dimension that wasn’t there before.
I think one of the things that I want to emphasize, and if I do end up being a coach, you know, to these athletes, I’d like to make sure that I emphasize not only quality training but also finding joy in the process.
Narrator: Wearable devices are generating growing clouds of data around every Olympic athlete, but all this data, though useful to athletes and coaches, can be overwhelming. In the near future artificial intelligence is likely to join the team in a big way to manage that data and probably do some coaching of its own.
Lorena Martin is an assistant professor of clinical data sciences and operations at the University of Southern California. She is an expert on the implementation of advanced machine learning and the role AI has in sports.
Lorena Martin: This is big. This AI revolution is big not only for sports but even for the workforce organizations and how they leverage that data.
So here we’re going to demonstrate a Sparta Science force plate technology.
Stand still with your feet in shoulder-width-apart stance Yep. Now shift your weight to the right until the dot moves into the bar.
Stand still on both. Balance on your left leg. And then we’ll get a report.
It gives you a lot of information in terms of center of pressure, the balance signature, which tells us how good, you know, how well he balances on one leg versus the other leg, if there’s any asymmetries that we may want to work on.
The development of the AI algorithms that are driving the wearable tech, right, so—because we’ve had wearable tech, like, we’ve had force plates for decades, we’ve had grip sensors for decades, and they’re pretty accurate, but I think that missing 1 percent, that missing 1.5 percent or that half percent, now we're really going to fine-tune it with these AI algorithms that are evolving on a daily basis.
Narrator: After talking to athletes and trainers at the top of their game, it seems like they all agree that you need a balance. There’s the human side and the machine side, and we’re not machines, but we can work with them to improve performance. We just have to manage how to do it. That’s the human part.