Biometrics threaten to take the mystery out of sport
Data-crunching is big business but there are risks in monitoring athletes’ every move, writes Daniel Schofield
These devices could act as ankle tags that effectively prohibit social activities
It has long been the dream of many a TV producer to be able to show a footballer’s heart rate as he prepares for a penalty shootout or to display the g-force of a Courtney Lawes tackle live on the screen as he pulverises some poor fly-half.
Much of this information, known as biometric data, is already being captured by the teams themselves. In the Aviva Premiership, nine teams use the Catapult Optimeye S5, a clip-on GPS device capable of computing 1,000 data points per second.
This does not stop at training. In the United States, the market leader in trackable software among sports teams is a device called Whoop, as advertised by Lebron James and Michael Phelps. Billed as a “continuous monitoring device”, Whoop measures everything from how much an athlete is sweating to their heart rate at every minute of every day. There is a huge appetite for this information, not just from the media but from betting firms and, in American football, the gargantuan fantasy football market. The NFL has already signed a deal with Zebra Technologies that allows fans to view a player’s acceleration rate and distance covered.
Meanwhile, the NFL players’ association signed a five-year partnership with Whoop in April with a view to potentially monetising the data in much the same way a player would profit from shirt sales.
There are hundreds of coaches and athletes who would argue the information Whoop provides has allowed them to reduce injury by monitoring their recovery rates.
But is all this extra data necessarily a good thing? For starters, it depends on how this information is used. Will teams who notice an athlete’s declining pace tailor their training to support them or merely use it as an invitation to reduce their salary at the next round of contract negotiations?
Then there are the invasive implications of “continuous monitoring” devices. In American college sports, coaches have access to a dashboard which displays how much sleep their (unpaid) athletes are getting every night.
It is only a short hop, skip and jump for these wristbands to act as ankle tags that effectively prohibit extra-curricular activities.
Some people will say good and point to the recent nocturnal activities of Ben Stokes and Manu Tuilagi. But we seem to be holding sportsmen and women to a ridiculously high standard here.
We would not expect surgeons to be hooked up to heart-rate monitors or air traffic controllers’ drinking habits to be made available for public consumption so why should sportsmen and women’s right to privacy be ignored? And who is to say that all this data will be interpreted correctly? The player who runs the fastest or hits the hardest is not necessarily the most effective. Would this technology account for the genius of Richie Mccaw in selecting the right ruck to attack?
Two of the biggest public health scandals – the demonisation of saturated fat and the promotion of diesel cars – have resulted from misinterpretations of narrow data samples.
There is no doubt that the use of data within the media has enhanced our understanding of sport, but there can be too much of a good thing.
The very beauty of sport is that it is an imperfect science; that Leicester City can win the Premier League or Exeter Chiefs the Premiership. Eliminate this element of mystery, judge athletes solely by their data metrics and you are effectively viewing sport less an art form with the potential to enthral than a binary code that can be cracked.