News Around the World
Created for one thing only – the new Sled TP52 designed by Botín Partners and built in New Zealand by Tim Smith and Mark Turner at Core Composites. Note the tiny name on the transom… this is a programme that prefers to live under the radar and do its talking on the water. Ironically the TPs to some extent compete with the Maxi72s for owners, as well as for crew, most of whom are busy in both fleets. But the racing and technical refinement is now so outstanding in the TP52 Super Series that a maxi begins to make more sense for open regattas and offshore racing rather than replicating the round-the-cans-excellence of the TP52s. Pure raceboat porn
short, intense stadium-style racing of the Extreme circuit gave those teams an edge, with sharper manoeuvres and close-quarter tactics. Now the two fleets go their separate ways again until the next world championship. Hull will continue to compete on the GC32 Tour circuit for this
season, with events in Portugal, Palma, Sardinia and Toulon. Compared with the cauldron of the world championship he is looking forward to ‘gentlemen’s racing’ in beautiful locations. Then after the European season he will ship his GC32 back to Auckland, ready to race on the harbour through the southern summer. Nor will his big red trimaran lie idle. In the decade he has owned
the Orma 60 it has amassed 18 passage records in New Zealand, Australia and the southwest Pacific islands. There are always more records to crack and, with the Transpac now catering for multihulls, new opportunities open up. And then he can always pack up the GC32 and return to Europe
to test himself against some of the best in the business. He and his crew have certainly established they belong in that company. Ivor Wilkins
AUSTRALIA Ready or not America’s Cup veteran Ian ‘Fresh’ Burns is three months into his role as deputy director of Applied Technology and Innovation at the Australian Institute of Sport, this country’s strategic high-perfor- mance sport agency and the hub of Australian sporting excellence. Seahorse Magazine: So what exactly do you do here?!? Ian Burns: I have a long relationship with high-performance sport, mainly sailing of course, so I combine these interests by going to each sport at the institute and asking them what they need, what their challenges and issues are, and then we try to supply technology that they can use to their advantage. The goal is to do this above and beyond what the rest of the world is doing. SH: We are at the AIS now viewing a basketball training session… what sort of requests would this sport bring to you? IB: The level of technology involved in every sport, not just at Olympic level, is just exploding, particularly in areas like tracking players
22 SEAHORSE
around the court to see how much ground they cover, how fast they accelerate, from what range and how often they shoot. All of this used to be done with photo images, or not at all, but now we have technology that can answer these questions immediately, allowing coaches to view this information, particularly about rotating players who they can now confirm have worked to a specific level and need to be rested for a certain time. This is one simple example for basketball, but you can expand
that to many sports that are bio-mechanically based, meaning the technique of how you do it defines how fast you go or how high you jump. We now digitise the athletes, measuring their movements with devices placed in their clothing which means we can take the best athlete in the world, digitise how they function and then use that as a coaching tool to mimic or emulate these small differences to generate better performances. SH: What tools do you use? IB: Common devices are worn on the wrist (Fit-Bits and Apple watches); we have a great relationship with Apple, working with them to obtain specialised sporting information from these devices. We also have sensors in shoes which give basketball players an idea of their foot movement even if they are stationary, as foot movement is critical to how they perform. Plus we have sensors built into the basketballs and footballs,
and what we call wearables – the clothing has electronics embedded in the fibres, particularly for sports like swimming or water polo where they can’t really wear monitoring devices. We are now close to getting live feedback from underwater sports – that has its own challenges with data transmission through water so we are part- nering with third parties around the world to develop those tools. SH: How many athletes and sports would this involve? IB: Australia has quite a diverse profile on where the athletes live, so here in Canberra for example we have athletes developing their skills and that number is in the hundreds, but Australia-wide we have roughly 3,000 athletes who are on our AMS athlete tracking system. This means they log in daily to give updates on training and condition, diet and much more, all of which is kept on this management system to allow us to track them every day and help
INGRID ABERY
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