Article: Data and Sports— How Tech Is Pushing Athletes to Greater Heights

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Barriers to human athletic achievements in all aspects of sport, from endurance to power and speed, continue to fall. Coaches and trainers, in collaboration with researchers and analysts, now use an increasing flood of data collected from athletes to help improve performance. Nowhere does data and analytics use come into play than in ultra-endurance races such as the Ironman Triathlon. Athletes from Germany, France, and the UK have traditionally dominated the sport. However, lately, a Norwegian athlete has smashed records with the support of intense analytics and changed the face of endurance athletics—Kristian Blummenfelt.

Kristian Blummenfelt, a 28-year-old, Norwegian, endurance athlete, won the Olympic gold medal in the Olympic Triathlon at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. The Olympic triathlon comprises a 0.9 mile swim, a 24 mile bike ride, and a 6 mile run. The longer Ironman Triathlon race starts with a 2.4 mile swim followed by a 112 mile bike race and finishes with a marathon run of 26.2 miles. On June 5, 2022, Blummenfelt became the first human to complete an Ironman in under seven hours. In the same year, he also won the World Triathlon Championship and the Ironman World Championship. (slowtwitch.com) His success is partly attributed to his coach, Olav Aleksander Bu, who carefully crafts every training moment based on a sea of data collected from his athlete.

In an interesting interview with Rich Roll, Olav Bu, an engineer by training, notes that advances in sensor technology and analytics have changed how to structure training for his athletes. (youtube.com) An athlete under Coach Bu must accommodate wearing sensors to measure heart rate, core body temperature, hydration, and much more. Additionally, the athletes must give blood and swallow carbohydrates containing a rare form of carbon to study how they metabolize the food they eat. Moreover, in a test called VO2max, the athlete wears a mask over the mouth with the nose plugged to measure all the incoming oxygen and outgoing carbon dioxide. The VO2max measures how much oxygen gets to the muscles and the efficiency of turning that oxygen into energy at maximum exertion. The coach even tests bone density with an x-ray device called DXA. This data creates mechanical, metabolic, and velocity profiles that build over time. The coach studies these profiles to recommend the optimal training regimen to prepare for races and achieve peak human performance.

Athletes from early times have pursued peak performance to become the best in their sport. The same holds today, especially in extreme endurance sports such as triathlons such as the legendary Ironman Triathlon that covers 140.6 miles with swimming, bike racing, and running. Recently a Norwegian athlete, Kristian Blummenfelt, won Olympic and Ironman championships and became the first to complete an Ironman in under seven hours. Kristian’s new dominance in the competitive international field has captivated athletes and fans of endurance sports. His success partly comes from Olav Aleksander Bu’s data-driven coaching. Bu pokes, prods, and measures many aspects of the athlete’s function, including metabolism, energy usage, and peak oxygen transformation, into muscle power. Bu uses this growing body of data to carefully optimize every minute of the athletes training in preparation for each race. Bu said, “I don’t believe in the human limits that have been established in research so far. I believe that we can go far beyond it.” (youtube.com) If recent results are any indication, he may be right in his data-driven pursuit of peak human performance.

Dr. Smith’s career in scientific and information research spans the areas of bioinformatics, artificial intelligence, toxicology, and chemistry. He has published a number of peer-reviewed scientific papers. He has worked over the past seventeen years developing advanced analytics, machine learning, and knowledge management tools to enable research and support high-level decision making. Tim completed his Ph.D. in Toxicology at Cornell University and a Bachelor of Science in chemistry from the University of Washington.

You can buy his book on Amazon in paperback and in kindle format here.