News Around the World
The oldest boat in this year’s Atlantic Cup, First Light was one of the early Class40s from Imoca designers Owen-Clarke. Class40 no37, she was built by Jaz Marine in South Africa and went afloat in 2007 when Class40s were now appearing from every direction. She did well on this 650nm leg from Charleston to New York, finishing 4th, but retired from the second offshore leg with sail damage
SH: And the athletes receiving this technology? IB: One of the challenges with athletes is they come from different technical backgrounds, as have the coaches, many of whom have been doing this for a long time and are successful because they have a formula they stick to, and so shoving data right in the middle of this sometimes isn’t necessarily fruitful. We are very, very mindful of this, and have many programmes on how to support the coaches in what they do, offering techniques on this, which is surprisingly well-received with most coaches giving these programmes a go. Then we weave new technology into that. Our policy is that if we can’t demonstrate to the athlete and coach that this process and technology are better, then we haven’t done a good enough job. SH: As with the America’s Cup, time is everything – you can waste a lot of time going down a wrong path. How do you manage those traps and pitfalls, identifying reefs and shoals? IB: It is difficult because making something means visualising it, and if you haven’t created this before, you can’t grasp all the pitfalls in front of you – that is not unique to sport, but to life. By having good people in the team we minimise the risk… that is all you can do. Certainly we will have failures, and when I talk to individual sports and the state bodies I say we are here to support you but we can’t guarantee that we will always get it right. What we can guarantee is that we will: a) Consult you, b) Involve you, and c) When we screw up we will put our hand up and fix it. SH: Who owns the information? IB: The management of health records, which is what a lot of this is all about, is well-regulated by government and our own governance committees and this is very strict. We have very tight controls on the data, how it is stored, how it is transmitted over the internet.
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We have also to check the data right back to source to confirm the provenance. SH: Are other nations trying to get access to your intellectual property here? IB: I think everyone would like to know what others are doing, but I don’t think any country would do this overtly. We are often subject to people attempting to hack into our system – whether they are state or sport-sponsored or just individuals, we have no idea. There have been occasions when data has been leaked from sporting records to make a particular point… you would have to think it was more orchestrated than a random hacker finding this stuff. We know this and we strive to keep our systems as strong as we can. SH: What are you busy with over the coming months? IB: The next few months we are hiring several new people to increase our capacity to build more things – we are really focusing on making things that specific sports cannot afford to make themselves. We have a team of software developers that we are increasing so that when people ask us complex questions we can provide answers or create models to show to athletes live or very soon after they have finished. The goal is to turn this information around in hours or days at the most, not weeks or months as it used to be. We also have a number of new initiatives specifically for the next
Olympics and targeting our failures from previous Olympics. It is quite a monumental experience for someone who has been training for four, six, eight, 10 or even 15 years, when they finally get to the Olympics, and so we don’t want our athletes to under-perform. We now have programmes for this, on decreasing injuries, partic- ularly the recurring ones that cost so much time. Above and beyond this, my night job is to develop software for specific sports that
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