Analytics may help lift medal count for Olympics
Karen Lefsrud was happily playing hockey, knowing it would take her through university, when rowing coaches attracted by her powerful six-foot-three frame came calling.
A coach passed on her fitness testing data, showing the kind of power she can generate, and the reply from Rowing Canada was immediate: “Do whatever you have to do to get this girl in a boat.”
Two years later, the 20-year-old has left hockey and her home in Calgary and is rowing at the national training centre in London, Ont., with dreams of the competing for Canada in the Olympics.
She’s part of a growing trend of Olympic sports seeking out athletes and, if they test well, drawing them into the sport rather than waiting, and hoping, exceptional talent will turn up naturally.
Now, a new sport analytics program launched by Own the Podium, Canada’s elite sports funding body, in partnership with Canadian Tire, will take this talent identification to a new level.
Canadian Tire’s data analytics division, which decides whether someone is a good bet for a higher credit line or when it’s time to email a customer a coupon for a new coffee maker based on their recent purchases, will now turn its mind to predicting which young athletes are most likely to step onto an Olympic podium in the future. It’s moneyball, Olympics style. The $1.5-million, jointly funded three-year program hopes to answer the big question on the mind of many elite coaches: What do Olympic champions look like five or nine years out and what performance markers should they be hitting along the way to increase the odds of a gold-medal performance?
The analytics team is already using decades of data from global competitions to predict the race times a Canadian swimmer needs to meet over the next five years to be on the right path for an Olympic medal at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, said Canadian Tire’s Duncan Fulton.
That analysis will help sport bodies hone their athlete development framework and decide where to invest coaching and funding resources, said Anne Merklinger, CEO of the Own the Podium.
Sports have already been doing some of this — that’s how someone like Lefsrud was identified in the first place — but they have limited capacity with their budgets and expertise.
“We’re coaches, we’re a lot anecdotal and, based on experience, they can take information and do more robust analytics and predictive modelling,” said Peter Cookson, high performance director of Rowing Canada.
In physical testing, Lefsrud “hit some of the highest numbers we’ve ever seen for her age,” Cookson said.
Now, with the data they expect to get from this new sport analytics program, her coaches will know more about what sort of progression she needs each year to have the best shot at her dream of rowing with the women’s eight in the Olympics.
They’ll also have a good idea of just how fast that boat will need to go to meet Rowing Canada’s goal of seeing gold medals around their necks, a moment of glory they’ve been trying to get back to since 1992.