Canadian amateur sport moving into in-depth analysis
Partnership with Canadian Tire opens up new world of opportunity
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 previous 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 creditcard division. Those numbers can help detect patterns within regular customers — if someone buys a new tub of wipes to clean their car every three months, the retailer might know the right time to offer a deal tied to car care products.
“Anne’s mandate is to win medals,” Fulton said. “There’s a lot of decision-making they have to go through to decide where they put every single dollar to maximize the medal count for Canada.”
Swimming, rowing and cycling were offered as examples of how data analysis would be used. McDonald said the data team has already gone through two million sets of results to help model how international swim results are trending.
“That kind of information will help us track where we have athletes in the system and target our support,” he said.
Merklinger said other countries have already begun to embrace the analytics movement.
“There’s no guarantees, right?” she said. “But it’s one more piece of the equation that we’re able to provide for sports.”
As with professional sports, though, even the analysts say the new data will only be a part of shaping the final product. Athletes still need proper coaching, training and maybe a bit of luck on the big days.
“You might be identified as a talent,” former Olympic gold medal swimmer Mark Tewksbury said. “But you never get your funding until you’ve proven something.”