By John Portch

USA Swimming is currently the only American national governing body to have an in-house mental health provider.

Emily Klueh is the Manager of Psychological Services at USA Swimming.

“She’s a former National Team athlete, which is fantastic,” Lindsay Mintenko told the Leaders Performance Podcast of Klueh’s work in mid-July. “She understands the stressors that athletes are going through.”

Mintenko, the Director of the National Team at USA Swimming and a two-time Olympic gold medallist herself, explained that the NGB was listening when their athletes indicated in the wake of the 2016 Rio Games that they wanted and needed more mental health support.

Perhaps this collective demand emboldened Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian in history, to go public with his story at a mental health conference. “Really, after every Olympics, I think I fell into a major state of depression,” Phelps said at the 2018 Kennedy Forum in Chicago. He felt his “hardest fall” was after the 2012 London Games when he could spend anywhere between three and five days in his room, not eating and barely sleeping while “just not wanting to be alive”.

It was a shocking admission but, in the subsequent six years, more and more athletes are speaking up. Some will be competing in Paris, such as seven-time Olympic gold medallist Caeleb Dressel and five-time Olympic medallist Simone Manuel, both of whom have withdrawn from competitions in the past citing mental health concerns.

Below, we take a closer look at how USA Swimming is supporting its Olympians.

Mental health = physical health

USA Swimming sees mental health as analogous to physical health. “It is essential to recognize our brain is a muscle, and just like any muscle in our body, we can work to make it stronger,” Klueh told USA Swimming’s website in May. “We all fluctuate along the continuum based on life events, genetics, and other environmental factors. Having support, resources, and tools to enhance our brains is crucial to our overall health and well-being.” The team’s swimmers are supported at every camp and competition. They can also call upon support wherever they live, as Mintenko revealed. “We provide a stipend for our National Team athletes to go to a mental health provider of their choice,” she said.

Fighting the stigma

For all the progress that has been made, there is still a stigma attached to mental ill health, as the Paris-bound Regan Smith highlighted at this year’s US Olympic swimming trials.

“I used to be afraid to talk about it, because I was afraid of being perceived as weak or washed up because women are really attacked I think in sports, like people are quick to judge us,” said Smith, who won three medals in Tokyo. “The second that you vocalise what you’re going through, I think it makes it a lot easier, because you realise that you’re not alone, you realise that it’s so normal to experience these feelings and then it makes it a lot easier to overcome them, at least in my instance, I’m really thankful for that.”

Smith admitted her mental health remains a work in progress, which adds credence to Klueh’s view that sport must normalise conversations about the topic. “I am very passionate about increasing the frequency and opportunities for conversations, reducing stigmas, and enhancing support for people who want to improve their minds,” she said.

The impact on performance

As Klueh explained, a clinical diagnosis may or may not have a tangible impact on athlete performance. It is important to understand that mental health exists on a spectrum. At one end, depression can make it difficult for a person to participate in group activities; it may also present mental and emotional challenges in training. Research also suggests a significant link between anxiety and disorders of the digestive system, which has implications for nutrition, fatigue and recovery.

Klueh made the case for prevention before cure. “On the other end of the spectrum, when looking at sport optimization, the way we talk to ourselves has an impact on how we engage,” she said.

“If we possess the tools to effectively self-talk, we can more easily focus and concentrate on specific tasks rather than give into fatigue, second guess ourselves, or worry about outcomes.”

USA Swimming’s senior leadership team also has a role to play. “I want to be able to provide them an opportunity to do their jobs and make sure they’re given a chance to promote themselves,” said Mintenko.

Striking a balance

Klueh believes that athletes should accept their daily struggles in the pursuit of striking a comfort level that works for them. “When we work with our minds, we can find intention and purpose in what we do, which in turn increases satisfaction and potentially decreases mental health struggles,” said Klueh, who believes this approach enables individuals to better process their emotions and, ultimately, make smarter decisions.

She wants to help set athletes on a successful trajectory, which is why it is incumbent on Mintenko to provide a safe and fun environment where medals are not the sole focus.

“We find other ways to measure success that aren’t just winning.”

Listen to our full interview with Lindsay Mintenko below:

Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Overcast, or your chosen podcast platform.

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

Even during his pro football career that spanned two NFL seasons with the Seattle Seahawks and five with the CFL’s Montreal Alouettes — including two Grey Cups — running back Kerry Carter always was tinkering with side projects.

The Stanford grad went on to work for business-to-business mobile solutions company Viva Vision before starting a pair of consultancies. The first, JumpIt Media, Carter began with former NFL teammate Joe Tafoya, and the second, Apex Agency, he started on his own.

In 2016, Carter, now 43, joined Atavus, a tackling analytics company that had roots in rugby before expanding to football. He was promoted to COO in 2020 and to CEO in January this year. He recently spoke to Sports Business Journal about getting his start in the business world and his plans for growing Atavus through AI.

On preparing to transition out of pro football…

I played NFL first, went up to the CFL, and that whole experience offered me a little different perspective on things because of the schedule. At the time I was playing, we didn’t do a lot in the offseason. You were there from June to November, and then you were off pretty much until the next season.

I’m a pretty curious guy. So every offseason, I just tried something new or different. I did insurance and financial services. I did some marketing stuff. I did some event stuff. And the last couple years of my career, I really got into technology. An old teammate of mine, Joe Tafoya, was out here in Seattle, and we reconnected. I was just learning about what they were doing in the technology and mobile space. So that was my first foray into, “OK, what can I do as I transition?”

On his first business job after his playing career…

We put together a group to acquire Viva Vision that was a software development company that already had clients in a bunch of different spaces. They were working with some big brands, but they were transitioning over to smartphones. This was in like 2008, ’09, ’10, around there. Obviously social media was continuing to ramp up in different ways, so I just dug into that. We started to do some work there — learned a lot, but I really wanted to do something in sports.

NFL and CFL veteran Kerry Carter’s path to technology came through other industries. [Photo courtesy of Atavus]

At the time Joe and I decided to step out on our own, we started our own marketing consultancy where we worked with athletes and helped them with technology, digital media, social media, events, nonprofits — we combined all those things. And, man, we did a lot of crazy things. We went for the Guinness record for the loudest cheer in the stadium, and so we actually put that together here for the Seahawks’ stadium. I think we did it first, and the Kansas City Chiefs came and beat it. And then we went back and we did it again. All of that was just learnings around fan engagement and digital and social, and how do you inspire and push fans and players and athletes?

We built up brands like that. We worked with athletes directly. Where it all came together for us, we did this celebrity softball game to launch Richard Sherman’s nonprofit. And this was 2013. We partnered with Richard. We produced the event. We did all the digital and social and website. Coming out of that, we got a lot more requests from athletes, from brands. That was our business, where we were connecting the two on the event side, and there was always a charitable component to it.

For a while, we owned the Legion of Boom trademark, and we licensed that to Nike. That’s back when Richard, Kam [Chancellor], Earl [Thomas], Brandon Browner were doing their thing. I did some of that while I was finishing my [playing] career. I was in Year 9 — my goal was always to get to 10 years — but I had to make a decision back in 2012.

I always say it’s the best decision I made because Montreal had just released me, and we had started to move things along with the company. I had other teams call me. Do I go back [to football] or do I continue what we’re doing here because we have good momentum? I decided this was probably the right time, so I stepped away. And another reason why it’s the best decision I made: A week later, I met my wife.

On getting started with Atavus…

After having our second daughter in 2016, we were doing so much. I actually wanted to slow things down a little bit. A friend of mine was doing PR for Atavus at the time. They [started] in rugby and were making the transition into the football world. I went to an investor event that they had, and I really got to understand what they were doing. I was like, ‘Man, this is really cool, unique, different and adds value to the game that I love and protects athletes and kids.’ It’s funny, I wanted to slow things down, so I joined a startup — that’s not usually the way it goes.

I started on the business development side, and they really gave me carte blanche to be able to explore every aspect of the business. I really love marketing, so I did a lot on that side. Operations, design. I helped us launch our first SaaS product into the market, Digital Tackling Academy. We designed our training for our analysts, and then we built our entire grading and reporting platform. Then I even got to go out and pitch and raise money for the company.

On how Atavus does its analysis…

It’s honestly still a very manual process in terms of our tackling technique. There’s a lot of stuff you can pull from third-party data — you can pull down-and-distance information, yards gained, all those things — but when it comes down to our actual [evaluations], we still have a team of analysts that we bring in every year, similar to what PFF [Pro Football Focus] does. They’re breaking down film, they’re tagging it and then we’re scoring it. We don’t just give data, but we actually give insights by position group, by the entire defense, and then we have a tackle plan. Here are the things that you need to focus on going into the next week, into the offseason, into the preseason.

On what they assess…

On a weekend, we have bunch of high school clients, college clients and we’ve had NFL clients — we don’t have any at the moment. It really only takes about a couple of hours to do it, but we get it back to the team within 24 hours with a full breakdown of every tackle made or missed. Anyone that’s involved in the tackle gets analyzed, and we’re looking at pre-contact and contact. Are they continually moving towards a ball carrier? How are they avoiding blocks? Are they maintaining their leverage? Are they taking a good angle towards the ball carrier, and then, once they get closer and into the contact zone, now we’re looking at footwork. We’re looking at which shoulder they are using. Is your head involved? There are a lot of safety components.

If you involve your head a lot of times, then it’s higher risk. Because of what we do and how we break it down, we’re able to show that performance and safety are not mutually exclusive. You can actually do both. So when you’re in contact, you’re using your shoulder, you’re driving your feet, you’re punching through the ball. The higher incidences of shoulder contact lead to less yards after contact, higher performance on defense — and we don’t say reduction in injury, it’s just reduction in exposure.

On how AI can help…

How do we improve speed, accuracy and all those things with our analysis? We’re looking at, No. 1, computer vision. How can we leverage computer vision to speed up our process? We’d reduce our grading time and efficiencies, which obviously reduces cost for us.

You can get to a mass market with that. Right now the NFL, obviously, has wearables, so everybody’s using it. It’s a lot easier to track all those things. You can get the most data. But it’s not everywhere in college. And when you get down to high school, which is our biggest market, you don’t get that at all. So we’ve been looking for a solution that will fit into that market. Where we start with computer vision is using pose recognition to try to identify what’s happening on a play, track where athletes are at the start of a play and the end of the play, how far they’ve traveled, their angles — leverage all those things.

And then the generative AI piece, for me, I want to look at how we future-proof the business. What we call our tackling analytics engine — that’s our grading and reporting tool — as we look at expanding that, it’s, “How can we take in as much information as possible?” Whether it’s our analysts manually putting it in, or we’re getting third-party data, or some wearable data or computer vision data.

So how do you take in multiple input points and use this generative AI process — where we’re training a model specifically on our style of tackling and the way that we grade it and the things that we look for — to produce the outputs of an individual tackle for an individual athlete? Then that just scales up to the position groups and gets up to the entire defense.

The company breaks down a player’s tackling technique and overall performance. [Courtesy of Atavus]

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

By John Portch

Few people, if any, have a definitive answer when it comes to the role of psychosocial skills in talent development.

Nevertheless, the Leaders Performance Institute decided to raise the topic with two distinguished individuals: Kit Wise, the Dean of the School of Art, Design and Social Context at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology [RMIT], and Budi Miller, the Co-Artistic Director at the Melbourne-based Theatre of Others.

Both took to the stage at Melbourne’s Glasshouse in February to discuss their approaches to talent development as well as managing challenges as they emerge.

Here, we explore Wise’s work with art and design students at RMIT, where he readily admits his role is to “damage their minds just enough”.

Inspiration, aspiration, expectation

Wise’s philosophy of talent development in art and design is configured to help students further develop mental and social skills such as cognitive reframing, goal-setting, self-talk, and the coping skills needed to move beyond expertise into the realms of creative productivity or eminence[1].

It boils down to three things:

1. Inspiration: he wants to ignite a passion in students and give them the drive to create something “beautiful or wonderful”. He said: “I will lead with that because that’s the one that’s the most exciting. It’s the most fun. It’s the most liberating. Inspiration is what gives people that fire in their belly that allows you to do something.”
2. Aspiration: this involves a student understanding the ‘why’ behind their actions, with a focus on values and purpose. Artists are not as selfish as sometimes perceived, according to Wise. “They want to make the world a more beautiful place, or a more just or fair place, and that aspiration, that value base is really important.”
3. Expectation: Wise will encourage students to have fun and think deeply, while holding them accountable through what he calls “productive tension”. He said: “it’s about raising your expectations progressively as people become creative.”

Risk-taking and raising expectations

Wise argues that risk-taking – another psychosocial skill – is a crucial part of an artist’s creative process and he sees certain parallels between the worlds of art, design and sport. “Risk is fundamental,” he said. “It’s how you innovate, it’s how you come up with something that hasn’t been done before.” Risk-taking is an accompaniment to traits such as openness to experience, tolerance for ambiguity and an ability to move beyond one’s earlier ideas with courage[2].

Wise wants artists to step out of their comfort zones and dare to do something different or unexpected. That includes deliberately setting out to break the rules. “There’s a quote from Picasso – a very problematic figure for me – who said: ‘good artists copy. Great artists steal’. What he means by that is that good artists imitate; great artists take all the knowledge and experience of others and repurpose it.” Risk is about challenging people and pushing them to achieve more than they thought they could. It is also about raising expectations progressively as people become creative.

Navigating RMIT’s ‘critiquing culture’

Risk is about transformation and change; moving people, impacting them and changing their thinking. With this is mind, Wise advocates for a “critiquing culture” that enables students to develop their mental skills, including, mastering anxiety and distractions, tactful self-promotion, and knowing how to play the game[3]. “Almost by definition, it sounds like an attack. Of course, it’s how you challenge and grow and do that damaging I talked about.” He has developed a culture at RMIT, defined by its shared language, trust and a series of team dynamics that create a safe environment that breeds confidence and gives everyone in the room a voice.

All that said, it is not a comfort zone, which raises its own challenge. “Empathy has to be central,” said Wise. “So the role of care alongside risk. I guess it’s a bit like flow state where you have the pain end of the spectrum and the comfort end of the spectrum; and you’re pushing things up towards the pain as much as you can.” He draws the line by setting ground rules for interpersonal conduct and, as a tutor, a simple but important reading of the room for social cues. Still, it can be close to the bone. “I’m on record saying that ‘every art student should cry once’,” added Wise. “It’s about transformation, it’s about change. If they hadn’t experienced something that really does move them or impact them or change their thinking, I haven’t done my job – that’s [on me to do] that in a caring as well as risky way.”

Fun and playfulness

For all the talk of tears, there is fun and playfulness inherent in this process of talent development. On one hand, that means being embodied and engaging in what one wants to do, whether that’s painting or playing sport. “Pleasure is part of that process,” said Wise. On the other hand, there is fun in risk-taking. “That transgression: it’s rule-breaking; it’s another word for innovation and creativity. You can’t do that rule breaking if you’re in a body that’s rule-bound.”

[1] Olszewski-Kubilius P, Subotnik RF, Davis LC, Worrell FC. Benchmarking Psychosocial Skills Important for Talent Development. New Dir Child Adolesc Dev. 2019 Nov;2019(168):161-176. doi: 10.1002/cad.20318. Epub 2019 Oct 29. PMID: 31663255.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

Main Image: Joe Lemire / SBJ Tech

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

The Sandbox series is where we share our experiences testing products, gear, solutions and more in the sports tech space. Previous iterations have included demoing Apple Vision Pro apps from MLB and MLS, taking the new F1 Arcade for a spin, trialing AiFi’s cashierless checkout at the Prudential Center, using Nextiles and Rapsodo for improved pitch velocity and physiological testing at the Gatorade Sports Science Institute.

* * * * *

So pronounced were my pull tendencies in Central Park softball some 15 years ago — long before defensive overshifting became so commonplace in Major League Baseball that a rule was passed to ban it — my New York Press League opponents did it to me, pulling the second baseman to the shortstop side of the base.

They were smart to do so. I was flatly incapable of hitting a groundball to the right side. (I also usually hit the ball in the air, so I don’t think I actually lost many hits as a result of the shift.)

The irony, it seemed to me, is that my golf swing produces almost exclusively shots to the right. I have since learned, however, that a slice is a common ailment of former baseball players: the left wrist (for a righty batter) needs different positioning for golf — more of a flexion than an extension.

Could an app and an Apple Watch help me overwrite four decades of motor learning? I put Golfshot to the test on a recent evening at the Chelsea Piers driving range in New York City.

SBJ Tech’s Joe Lemire puts his swing to the test. (Ash Gilbertson)

And this wasn’t just any Apple Watch but the Ultra 2, whose myriad features include a high frequency motion API that can collect data at 800 hertz and dual-frequency GPS. The former allows the accelerometer and gyroscope to sample at four-to-eight times the precision of what Golfshot used to receive of 100 to 200 times per second from the motion sensors.

“As hardware gets better, we can also get better,” Golfshot CTO John Hawley said. “So Apple Watch Ultra and really this high-frequency motion API that came out is something that was a gamechanger for us. These metrics just get much cleaner, much more accurate.”

The enhanced GPS permits more accurate shot lengths, locating where each shot was taken and calculating the distance between them, though on this day the focus was the driving range.

At Apple’s invitation, a select group of reporters tried out Golfshot’s new Swing ID On-Range experience. The app, which is developed by a core group of about 25 people within a larger company called Golf Genius, has been around since 2008, with Apple Watch features introduced in 2015.

The Apple Watch Ultra 2 and accompanying watchOS 10 both were released in September 2023, helping power Swing ID, which is the ability to track swing mechanics. Golfshot first offered that feature on courses where the number of non-putted shots can be about 40 or 50 for competitive players. The range was a scale problem, requiring a new data architecture and storage plan with ardent players logging 10 times as many practice shots.

I only took 34 shots recorded in the app — eight with a six-iron, nine with a driver and then 17 with a three-wood — but that was a sufficient sample to realize that, yes, I do swing with a wrist rotated too far open and, mercifully, the issue seems to be somewhat corrective for me. And I’ve been told I have the raw tools for golf, even if my technique remains barely molded clay.

There are nine key metrics generated on every swing by Golfshot. Some, like tempo and backswing arc, could be improved, but they don’t appear in critical red coloring in the app the way wrist path and wrist rotation do for me. (Of note, the Apple Watch is obviously affixed to my wrist, not the club face, but it’s a helpful, albeit imperfect, proxy.)

On the watch, I was able to select a metric of focus and, after every shot, that datapoint and a visualization of the swing — showing, for instance, my swing path versus the suggested path — would appear on my wrist. It was a helpful way to track progress (or lack thereof) without fiddling with my phone each time. A tripod nearby held the device, where I could use the app for more detailed review of my metrics.

SBJ Tech’s Joe Lemire was able to review his swing metrics on Golfshot (Ash Gilbertson)

Golfshot’s app only offers normative datasets in broad strokes (pun intended), because it has found that swings are too individualized for hard guidelines to be helpful. But reviewing what data I saw — plus a short consultation from PGA professional Jonathan Doctor, the Northeast sales director for Golf Genius — helped mitigate my wrist supination, at least for a few fleeting moments.

My wrist path, which should be 0 degrees for straight contact, usually ranged between 15 and 20 degrees out-in; again, that can work in baseball, but less so in golf. And my wrist rotation, which should also be around 0, instead averaged around 30 to 40 degrees.

As Aristotle should have once said, the whole shot can be greater than the sum of its poor component metrics. In my case, I hit a handful of good golf shots interspersed between a larger number of bad ones. But at least I felt encouraged when, near the end of my session, I hit back-to-back three woods on a straight line into the netting 200 yards away.

It’s a helpful start, but I’ll need more monitoring and instruction to keep it up, which, conveniently is on the Golfshot road map.

“Going out and practicing is one portion of it, but making a plan to practice is really the greater aspiration here,” Hawley said. “Part of this developing practice plans is also going to be integrating with apps like [Golf Genius-owned] CoachNow, where you can communicate directly with your coach. Your coach could even get alerted after you play a round. ‘Here’s the round, let’s review his shots.’”

Hopefully alerts of my play include trigger warnings, but maybe someday I’ll work up the courage and play on a course. I take solace knowing that the Apple Watch Ultra 2 is chockfull of safety features — Emergency SOS, Backtrack GPS, siren and international orange action button that can be used for compass-based wayfinding — so no matter how deep my slice goes into the woods, I won’t get lost.

This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.

Main Image: Orreco

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

Orreco’s heritage is in analyzing blood biomarkers to improve athlete recovery.

It became a leader in supporting women athletes through its pioneering free app called Fitrwoman. It developed a holistic athlete management system called Recovery Lab and devised machine learning algorithms to identify injury risk based on an athlete’s movement signature.

All those modules and have been built in-house from the same data architecture, laying the foundation for its newest innovation, Orreco.AI, to improve efficiency for performance coaches. They can now interact through voice and text prompts, plan training sessions based on expected workload, model injury risk automatically and even guide return-to-play protocols with an auto-pilot drone.

“We built it from the ground up so that the AI layers through it all,” said Orreco CEO Brian Moore, whose company won SBJ Tech’s Best in Athlete Performance award in 2023. “It’s the operating system, really, for the body.”

Built under the direction of Orreco’s Head of Engineering, Matt McGrath, the new AI products rely on custom-built large language models that can generate its own recommendations of athletes who need additional attention, complete with relevant video clips, datapoints and relevant research to guide the practitioner. Educational resources can then be sent to the relevant player via his or her use of the accompanying @thlete app.

“It’s surfacing that information for you in real time, and it’ll tell you what to look at,” Moore said. “So rather than having to go into each of these different systems, now it’s just telling you this is the athlete to look at, these are your priorities and this is why. It’s also giving you suggested outcomes for the player.”

Image: Orreco

The generative AI also enables someone to type or dictate a command such as “show me Player X’s high-speed running as a bar chart” and see exactly that rendered within seconds. Add prompts for inflammation levels or number of decelerations, and those lines get superimposed over the graph to help connect trends.

A new Drill Planner enables users to select any number of athletes from a roster, select the focus for training, the number of sets, duration, field size and other variables to predict the expect load for each player and the group, to help create an appropriately targeted session based on the club schedule.

The most dramatic application of AI is in the use of drones to help rehabbing players. Current RTP plans can’t fully replicate an athlete’s distinct movement patterns, but the drone can be programmed to mimic his or her typical running based on position and preference — and all done with ascending intensity. As the drone flies, the athlete tries to keep pace, cutting and pivoting to stay close.

“The return-to-play [protocols] are typically in a straight line, but we haven’t been able to understand the twisting and the turning,” Moore said. “So it’s basically being able to hyper-personalize and say, I think you’ll be able to get more efficient with your training. You need to do these very specific moves at these very specific times. It’s like an inoculation dose.”

A Data & Innovation podcast brought to you in collaboration with

Harjiv Singh, a performance and development scientist at the Orlando Magic, is another example of a practitioner who suffered their own debilitating injuries.

Hot on the heels of Andrea Hudy, who recounted her own story of ACL troubles in episode one, Harjiv told the tale of a pickup basketball game that ended with him tearing his ACL and meniscus while also suffering an avulsion fracture.

The 16 months of rehab stoked an interest in sports science that not only led him to the NBA but, since January, roles at the Grand Rapids Rise women’s volleyball team, as Director of Performance Science, and the University of Michigan, where Harjiv teaches out of the Human Performance and Sports Science Center.

John Portch and Joe Lemire could not have wished for a more engaging guest on this finale to this People Behing the Tech podcast series, where Harjiv delved into the sports science principles that define his work.

He also shared his thoughts on training drill design [15:39] and the transferability in competition – a relatively new area of enquiry. “It could be as simple as, in basketball, you’re putting a defender in front of you,” he says. “But it can also be as complex as the angle and the approach of that defender, the people in the vicinity of the athlete, where the athlete is starting from, their position on the court. And that’s merely the introductory part of this.”

Then there’s his thoughts on the “neglected” cognitive component to ACL injuries [6:41]; the need to know your audience when visualizing data [27:38]; and his ability to ask applied questions in the lab at Michigan.

Check out episode two:

Five Years on from the USWNT Introducing Menstrual Cycle Tracking, Sports Science for Female Athletes Remains Under-Developed. So What Can Athletes and Practitioners Do about it?

Joe Lemire LinkedIn | X

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Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Overcast, or your chosen podcast platform.

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

You can’t have a discussion about sports technology today without including athletes in that conversation. Their partnerships, investments and endorsements help fuel the space – they have emerged as major stakeholders in the sports tech ecosystem. The Athlete’s Voice series highlights the athletes leading the way and the projects and products they’re putting their influence behind.

* * * * *

Oscar Piastri raced his way to Formula 1, winning three consecutive tiers of developmental circuits: Formula Renault Eurocup in 2019, Formula 3 in 2020 and Formula 2 in 2021.

The native Australian driver spent 2022 as Alpine’s reserve F1 driver, while also testing with McLaren and then joining McLaren’s Formula 1 team as a full-time driver in 2023.

In his rookie season, Piastri claimed two podiums — third in Japan, second in Qatar — and he claimed a further second-place in Monaco last month. Piastri, 23, currently sits in sixth place overall in the driver standings, and he spoke with SBJ last month just before the Miami Grand Prix, at which he finished in P13.

On what makes the Miami Grand Prix unique…

It brings a lot of star power to the calendar. Now that we have Vegas as well, we have two American events that are in pretty prime locations. We have Austin as well, which is, let’s say, a more traditional circuit. But yeah, having Miami on the calendar is very cool. It’s a place where a lot of people want to go. There’s a lot of celebrities and stuff, and it just adds a lot of stardom to the event, really.

On the start to the season…

It’s been a pretty good start to the year, I think, for the team. It’s been very positive. We’ve established ourselves as the third-quickest team at the moment on average. And for me, personally, it’s been a pretty good start. The last couple [before Miami] were a little bit more of a struggle in certain areas. But on the whole, it’s been a nice, clean start to the year. Definitely a much better place than we were 12 months ago.

On being teammates with Lando Norris…

You always utilize your teammate to try and go quicker. With Lando and especially his experience knowing how to drive a Formula One car in the best way and knowing how to drive a McLaren F1 car in the best way as well — because all the cars are going to be a little bit different across the grid — he’s been very useful for that. There’s certainly been things I’ve learned from him along the way.

We’ve been both pushing each other to become quicker, and that’s what you want out of out of a teammate, really, is to be able to push each other and find little bits and pieces here in different corners. Every driver on the grid is going to be looking at their teammate’s data. It’s how you go quicker, especially if there’s corners where they’re there quicker than you. It’s a good idea to look at what they’re doing and try and learn from that.

On the data he checks first after a race…

The first thing is you just look at where everyone’s finished in the race because you often don’t really know how exactly it’s gone. We make a graph of how everyone’s race has gone, so there’s a bunch of different lines, and you can see where people have been quick in their stint, where they’ve been slow in their stint, what their tire degradations look like. And the next thing is then looking into the data itself. You’re looking into what you do in every session like in practice and qualifying the race, looking at which corners you’re better in which corners you’re worse in, looking at how the tires are being used and stuff like that.

On his points of emphasis in development…

It can change a bit from weekend to weekend. For me, managing tires is probably the biggest thing I’m working on at the moment, which is difficult because you need to go as fast as you can but use the tires in a way that’s as friendly as possible for them. So that’s probably the biggest thing I’m still getting to grips with.

On simulated race time…

We do a lot of dedicated simulator work at McLaren trying to prepare the weekends, so the track is as close as possible to the real thing. We’re trying stuff with the setup, trying to get used to the track again, build up some references. I play some iRacing every now and again, as well, but more just for fun, because I enjoy driving racecars. So that’s more what I use that for, rather than actually using it to train or anything like that. It’s more just for a bit of fun in my free time. So yeah, mainly the sim work at McLaren to get a bit of a starting point for the race weekend.

On his fitness training…

Data certainly influences it, for sure. There’s certain metrics that you want to improve, which is, I guess for everyone, trying to get your muscle up and your fat down. But there’s some specific things as well. The biggest strain for us as a driver is our neck, so trying to build that up. And it’s not just your neck muscles that you need but the supporting muscles around it as well, to try and to build that up and see progress in the numbers that you can sustain when you’re training it.

We always log that and monitor that and see where I’m at. Same with my running and cardio side of things, always trying to improve your VO2, trying to get your pace down for a similar heartrate. We monitor all of that kind of stuff, just trying to improve your general fitness because you use a few weird muscles that you wouldn’t normally use in everyday life. But even just with the schedule, with all the jetlag, having a good cardio base is also important. Just so you stay healthy, and you’ve got to get to be able to concentrate for a long time.

On cognitive training…

Everyone’s a little bit different with that. You train your reflexes just by driving in some ways, and we drive so often that you’re always keeping it topped up. I do a bit of reaction training before the session, with tennis balls or whatever, just keeping your mind and hand-eye coordination switched on. We always try to improve our reactions for the start as well, but for me, a lot of that is the state of mind that you’re in, rather than actually training for it. You gain more by knowing whether you need to be revved up or relaxed, or whatever you need to be.

On help from McLaren’s partners…

All of our partners are pretty incredible. To be working with the likes of Google, with Coca-Cola, Dell, just to name a few, working with those kinds of big brands is pretty special. It’s good fun. Of course, they support us in going racing, in all kinds of ways — through financial support, of course, but especially with a lot of our tech partners, with a hands-on approach to helping us, whether it’s through computers or better ways to analyze our data, quicker ways to analyze it. That’s all very important to us. I always enjoy that side of things, the data and, and tech side of things. So yeah, being able to work with some of those big companies like that is very special.

We rely a lot on our partners, especially for our simulator, which we completed not that long ago in the grand scheme of things. Having all the computing power for that, being able to run the graphics well enough, being able to update the model quick enough in real time — I know exactly how important that is when I’m driving it because you know, when you’re lacking in that area.

On Netflix’s Drive to Survive…

I’m still pretty new to Drive to Survive. So I think people are still catching up with me on that. But it’s cool. The benefits it has brought to the sport are pretty incredible. All the sort of new fans that is brought in is very, very cool and positive for the sport. They’re not particularly intrusive on our weekends, so it’s OK. At the end of the day, it’s a good way of getting our sport out there more, and it’s exciting to watch as well.

This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

The sampling rate of sensors and frame rate of cameras are typically measured in the tens or hundreds. The new technology from LLume has collected data at 250 kilohertz — that’s 250,000 datapoints per second when few others on the market even get to one thousand.

The core IP is the “LL” in the product name: Light Lace. Spun out of Professor Rob Shepherd’s Organic Robotics Lab at Cornell, LLume uses red LED light to measure, for starters, respiration, heart rate, joint motion and impact detection. It’s an exceedingly versatile tool when inhibited only by the speed of light.

“We are right now the only solution that has such high precision, and that’s because we’re using fiber optics instead of electrical sensors,” LLume CEO Ilayda Samilgil said during a recent SBJ visit to its workspace in the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston.

Following several years of development — during which time it won the NFL’s First & Future innovation contest, received grants from the Department of Defense and did early testing with an MLB club — LLume is now launching its first commercial product in beta.

The LLume strap resembles a standard chest worn heart rate monitor, only it doesn’t need to be worn directly on the skin and its initial focus is respiration. (LLume does monitor heart rate but initially won’t report that in the app until it has more time for validation.)

Most measurements of VO2 and — VO2max, a limit of oxygen consumption during exercise that is increasingly understood to be the single best predictor of fitness and longevity— need to be done either in a lab setting or else with expensive portable equipment, such as the VO2 Master that retails for $6,295.

LLume’s beta price tag is $199, with possible discounts for high usage. The early target market demo is the cycling community, with a preference for those near Boston for additional support testing.

“We’re going to start direct to consumer mainly to get feedback from the customer, but I think eventually — whether it’s with apparel companies or something like Peloton or iFit equipment or gyms — we’re definitely very open to going B2B2C instead,” Samilgil said.

The LLume strap doesn’t use a mask to quantify oxygen intake and carbon dioxide exhalation but rather uses its high sample rate to detect minute changes in the chest as a proxy for lung ventilation. (Though capable of higher sample rates, the team realized anything over 400 hertz is overkill for biometrics.) The idea is to provide personalized exertion monitoring that’s more precise than the standard wearable’s heart rate zones.

“Heart rate is affected by how you breathe,” LLume biomechanist Riley Edmonds said. “So that zone can change quite quickly if your breathing is not controlled. So if you want to look at the step behind what’s powering your heart, breathing is what does that so it gives you a more accurate, precise control over your zones.”

Image: LLume (Melanie Lyons)

This chest strap for endurance athletes is a starting point, but future adaptations are nearly limitless. With its baseball partner, LLume has been working on sleeves to track pitchers’ elbows and shirts to monitor their shoulders — those motions might be tracked at 20 kilohertz, they said. It can capture rapid accelerations in the joints, which Edmonds said is a more actionable datapoint than torque.

The 250 kHz measurements have been used by the military in research contracts to measure impact and trauma. LLume has developed algorithms that enable the device to sample at moderate rates continuously but then automatically increase when triggered by, say, a potentially concussive explosion.

Impact monitoring is, of course, applicable to sports such as football, hockey and rugby. The potential for embedding Light Lace into helmets or uniforms is possible but it hasn’t attempted that yet. The company’s winning pitch in the NFL competition — for which it received a $50,000 grant — was for tracking respiration and muscle fatigue.

At the time, LLume was doing business as Organic Robotics Corporation in a nod to its roots, especially with Shepherd remaining with the company as co-founder and CTO. But the name proved confusing to the marketplace, leading to the change. LLume has that double L, is pronounced as “loom,” which is relevant for its ability to be embedded into textiles and “llume” also means “fire” in Asturian, a regional dialect in Spain — fitting for a company whose core technology is red light.

There are future opportunities to make the Light Lace glow either as a fashion accessory or as an indicator — maybe it blinks twice when you reach a set respiration target. It’s another idea yet to be realized, on a long roadmap of possible destinations for the adaptable technology. And often when Samilgil looks at her iPhone, the auto-generated memories will be a picture of earlier product form factors.

“I’ll get a photo of an older prototype,” she said, “and I’ll be like, ‘Oh, my God, this is only like three months ago. We’ve come such a long way.’”

This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.