News Around the World
Endplate, bonus sail area, America’s Cup catamarans… nah, this is the Thames barge Edme racing at the 2018 Medway Barge Match, and the dinghy is slung thus not by accident but because on a long reach the skipper is doing everything it takes to win, ‘flying’ his clinker skiff for a bit more shove. For the uninitiated the Thames barge was designed to be sailed by one man, a boy and a dog (sic)
SH: You are dealing with athletes who have different levels of exposure from this sort of high-performance training – Jake Lilley was with Artemis in Bermuda, for instance. Does your language or delivery change much for each athlete? IB:My personal interaction with athletes is relatively small because we have a large structure that the athletes and coaches are part of. Athletes and coaches are a very tight group, and dealing with those individuals has to be done carefully because there is a long history of people crashing into the middle and not necessarily helping, often doing more harm than good. Our policy is to assist, and lead by demonstrating. SH: Which other countries are strong in this field right now? IB: The British have shown the way in many sports including sailing. This has been a combination of sailing being popular and therefore a strong sport in the UK, plus they also have great funding from their national lottery. They have some very good people involved, from senior coaches right down to people washing the boats at the end of the day so that the athletes don’t have to do it. I don’t think that’s essential, but it is helpful. You can contrast that to the New Zealanders, who are incredibly
successful per head of population and astoundingly successful in sailing; they don’t have the British budgets but they have an incred- ible focus on what is the most important thing, be it in the America’s Cup or the Olympics. In the last Cup they emerged looking really smart in the first steps that they took in that process, and so obvi- ously we can learn a lot from that in other sports. We’re definitely mindful of what other teams and countries are doing. The Olympics are challenging… they come round whether you are ready or not. SH: And how much information would you have on other teams? IB:Because international regattas are quite long there is a significant
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amount of interaction at the boat parks. Most of the athletes know each other and there are often good friendships across teams, so most have a general idea of what other people are doing. In Olympic sailing it is pretty hard to hide a great deal unless you save it until the very end of a cycle which has its risks. There are also a number of services you can subscribe to that provide you with results data, particularly with swimming and athletics; you can receive any result from any event in the world, which means you notice athletes who are accelerating their development. SH: Speaking to Chris Nicholson in Auckland, he managed the data side of the AkzoNobel VOR performance programme. Two key pitfalls he spoke of are incorrect data and poor delivery to the athletes. IB:Both are key problems. The amount of data we collect now com- pared to even five years ago has probably increased tenfold, maybe more, so one of the challenges with the explosion of new sensors and devices is you often don’t know how good that data is. We have some fantastic professionals who have focused on
quality assurance at the AIS for close to 30 years; one of them, Kate Fuller, has probably tested every piece of sporting equipment in Australia, to ensure that the results we get in western Australia match up with Queensland and Victoria. Kate tests VO Max measurements, power meters, everything, and she is very good at the statistical analysis to ensure things are correct today and stay that way until the next equipment test. Athletes know they can buy a bit of hardware and fit it to their
bike or boat and get data, so it is a battle to confirm quality assurance and be aware of the pitfalls of getting bad data, particularly in sailing, with a moving platform and the environment always changing. Sailing is unusually prone to getting the wrong data in situations like this.
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MUNGEY
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