their coaches make good decisions with their training. SH: What sort of timeframes are you working on? IB: It is very much sport specific, and coach and athlete specific. Some athletes will be preparing just for the Olympics, with everything else a training run to prepare for that, other teams and coaches focus on world championships as a precursor, to allow them to gauge their levels against the competition; so the team sports are world championship to world championship, but with some longer timeframes with cyclic training based just on Olympic aspirations. SH: And how do you manage your time and demands with so many events going on? IB: It is a challenge but we have a great team of performance analysts and performance directors. These people are very much focused on their own sport and athletes, and they become the interface to us, about planning for when things need to come online. We need to be mindful of what the athletes require and fit that into the correct timeframe; this is challenging, as technology is never finished early… it is usually late! Every department has a strict budget and they are spending everything they have and maybe a little bit more to get the best outcome for the athletes. SH: Is this a new role you have at the AIS? IB: This department has always been functioning in different incar- nations and there has always been a strong technical base within the AIS. We have created a number of technologies in collaboration with the university here, allowing start-up companies to emerge from ideas generated here, with PhD students taking it onto global success, and that is our goal. Innovation is almost impossible to force, it needs to be self-germinating, and whether that happens inside or outside the AIS it is important to develop those skills. SH: How did your last role at Oracle differ from this position? IB: My role in the last America’s Cup was performance director for Team Oracle USA. That involved a lot of data analysis coming from the boats, methods of analysing that data, then presenting it to the sailors and interacting with them on the technical level, helping to get the best out of both the sailing and boat design groups. We have a number of sports we deal with at the AIS, both the Olympic sports and a number of iconic sports – rugby union and league, cricket, AFL, hockey, basketball – meaning roughly 40 sports that we work with regularly, so I often say it is like running 40 America’s Cups at the same time… There are technological advantages to be discovered in every one of these sports, some are commercially available and some are blue sky stuff that has never been done before, and we have 20 people in my group all passionate about making these advances happen. SH: Your options after Bermuda, and why take this role? IB: After Bermuda there weren’t many teams immediately vying to race in Auckland, and so chatting with the director of the AIS Peter Conde and Iain Murray, the performance director of Australian Sail- ing, about the role here at the AIS, the idea of being involved with multiple sports and also doing it at home in Australia was an exciting prospect. I have had a huge passion for sport my whole life and that is shared throughout the people I am working with, so to come back home and be involved was obviously very tempting. SH: Moving towards the Australian Sailing Team part of your brief, where would you see immediate cross-fertilisation from other sports – the obvious and perhaps some not so obvious? IB: The sailing world is at an interesting stage with the classes of boats we are sailing. Some are well-established and fairly tightly constrained so the scope for altering the boats or identifying an opportunity for a breakthrough in those classes isn’t that large. There are other boats, the Nacra 17 for example, which is a very new configuration and to some extent still under development, and so I don’t feel the teams have the best out of that boat yet. This means there are opportunities to do things a little differently, so we have been doing a bit of work in that area led by the sailing team and Iain Murray. One of our AIS engineers is with them full-time now and they are coming up with great boat set-ups and techniques. We can also help them with data techniques, which is often hard to achieve for a small team with few technology guys in the group. Secondly, because I know a little bit about flying multihulls [ahem… Blue] I can give them a hand, and am looking forward to doing that over our Australian winter.
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