Amateur sports will benefit from analytics

Partnership with Canadian Tire funds project

Having overrun the fortresses of old ways in professional sports — Moneyball, in baseball, and last summer’s yet-to-benamed hiring revolution in hockey — advocates of advanced data analysis are poised to influence how Olympic athletes are identified and funded in Canada.

On Monday, Own the Podium, the not-for-profit organization that directs funding to elite amateur athletes, announced a threeyear partnership with Canadian Tire that will provide access to part of the company’s analytics division. A team of six or seven analysts will be set to work on Canadian amateur sports, trying to project medal times and medal hopefuls years down the line.

“We’ve never been able to invest this kind of rigour,” Own the Podium chief executive Anne Merklinger said. “This is predictive modelling and data acquisition and analysis that is far beyond anything we’ve ever been able to do.”

“We only can do so much with an Excel spreadsheet,” said Iain McDonald, manager of high performance operations with Swimming Canada.

The company’s analysts can pore over data from previous competitions, using it to chart a predictive curve. In swimming, for example, data from world championships could be used to help predict what time an athlete might have to clock to qualify for a spot in the final at the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo.

Historic start times, lap times and intervals can also be mined for clues. At what age have the best swimmers begun their climb to the podium? What was their rate of improvement as they climbed toward their physical peak as athletes?

The hope is that, by charting athletes on that range, coaches and executives will be able to target resources for athletes closest to the championship range.

“All the data is in there,” said Duncan Fulton, senior vice-president at Canadian Tire. “If you can begin to pull it out and make it actionable, then Anne’s team can say, ‘okay, we’ve predicted the path you need to be on for the next five years if you want to follow the same path as other gold medal contenders.’”

He said the company has “dozens and dozens” of analysts crunching numbers, based mostly in its credit-card division.