British Rowing Hopes Analytics Will Power Team GB To Olympic Glory

British Rowing plans to use Big Data analytics to boost the British rowing team’s chances of securing gold medals at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro and to increase membership at grassroots level as part of its role in promoting the sport.

The UK governing body has agreed a three year deal with SAS to provide its visual analytics platform and marketing tools to achieve these goals, with the hope that coaches and rowers will be able to make better decisions from the data available and peak in time for major championships.

SAS’ software has traditionally been used in the financial sector to detect fraud and risk, but it is confident that the application of its platform in the sporting world can be just as successful and hopes to capitalise on being associated with such a prestigious sport.

Improving elite rowing

Rowing is one of Britain’s most successful Olympic programmes and is the only sport to have delivered a gold medal for the country in every games since 1984. But there is an acknowledgement at British Rowing that it must continue to innovate if it is to remain on top.

Sir David Tanner, performance director of the GB Rowing Team, welcomes the development as it will allow him and his coaches to combine biomechanics, performance and medical data sets and model it in such a manner that it can become useful.

“I’m not interested personally in computing or any of that, but I am interested in the potential of this kind of information being distilled in a way that I can lead the business a little bit better,” Sir David told TechWeekEurope. “I should be able to access information more coherently. “I would expect the techies who are producing it to say ‘look David, this interesting, we think you should see it.’”

Rio 2016 impact

He said trends detected could be used to predict injuries or to make alterations to a squad or an individual’s training programme and this could have an impact on the team’s performance at Rio 2016, especially in a sport where races can be decided by the finest of margins.

“It’s down to us to do something with it,” he said. “We should be better informed and make better decisions. If we’re not doing it, our opposition will.”

The platform could also have a longer-term impact, specifically on British Rowing’s Team Start programme which aims to identify athletes who could become successful rowers for Great Britian. Almost a third of the team has come through the Start programme and Sir David says performance data could determine how far a rower has progressed and whether there is a chance they could make it at an elite level.

This data could be vital when the organisation is bidding for Lottery Funding from UK Sport, especially since rowing gets the most of any discipline – £32 million over four years.

“Our gold dust are rowers and we need to find them,” he says.

Grass roots impact

But it’s not just at the top of the pyramid that British Rowing believes analytics can help it. Neil Chugani, interim CEO, says it can be instrumental in helping the sport at grass roots level uncover the Team GB rowers of the future.

He said that although membership has trebled in the past 20 years thanks to the ongoing success of Team GB, he wants as many people as possible to take up the sport. He says analytics can monitor the behaviour of British Rowing’s members, find out why they don’t renew, and even locate areas where the organisation has to do more to encourage participation.

“We would love to have as many talented athletes as possible take up the sport of rowing,” he told TechWeekEurope. “It’s good for our sport, but we also think it’s good for them. But this is also to help us do more with the reach and the pool of talents we already have. It’s about enabling that pool of talent at the top to get better.”

Are you a tech Olympian? Find out with our sporting IT quiz!