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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.

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Jake Paul, the popular influencer and PFL-signed fighter, shared a video clip from a June women’s flyweight fight and wrote, “The next MMA superstar…Dakota Ditcheva.”

Ditcheva, 25, is undefeated as a pro (13-0-0 with 11 wins by knockout), including August’s first-round TKO of Jena Bishop in their PFL [Professional Fighters League] semi-final match in Nashville. She is a Manchester, England native known for replicating Man City goal celebrations after winning bouts. Her mother, Lisa Howarth, was a World Kickboxing Association champion, so Ditcheva grew up in a gym and later won a gold at the 2016 International Federation of Muaythai Amateur World Championships before switching to MMA.

Now training at American Top Team in Coconut Creek, Florida, Ditcheva won the PFL Europe tournament in 2023 to claim a $100,000 purse and gain entry into this year’s larger PFL draw. She has rapidly gained a large social media fanbase after a video of her weighing in last December was viewed nearly 19 million times and gained her 100,000 new followers.

On getting started in kickboxing at her mom’s gym…

It wasn’t something that I would say I always wanted to do from being young. I was involved in it straight away because my mum had a gym before I was born. So as soon as I was born, I was in the gym, pushing my little dolls’ prams while she was coaching and things like that. So it was always something that I was around.

I did train when I was, like, four years old. These like videos and photos of me fighting and stuff I did two, three fights when I was four, and then from that point, I didn’t do it at all until I was 13. It wasn’t really something I was interested in. And my mum was never one to say, ‘I was a fighter. Now, I want you to be.’ She actually didn’t want me to fight.

It just so happened that I came back to it myself when I was 13, after trying loads of different sports. I did netball, football, I did basketball, I did gymnastics, I did everything. To be honest, I tried so many different things. My mom and dad are the type of parents that are like, ‘Stay involved in sport. And it doesn’t matter what you choose to do. Just stay active, stay fit.’ So that’s what I did. But then when I was 13, I was, like, starting to train again. Obviously, my mom, still having a gym, I was older, understood it a little bit more, and that’s where it just went from there.

On the benefit of playing multiple sports…

Definitely, 100%, especially in martial arts like this. You need so many different qualities for this sport. And you get that from other sports. [From] gymnastics, you need the balance. You need the weight, the sense of gravity in this sport you need, which I probably got from gymnastics. I got loads of different things from playing sport.

And I think, as well, it just made me realize how much I wanted to do it. That was the main thing. It was something that I came back to myself, so being able to try different sports, see what I enjoyed, what I didn’t enjoy, what I loved. And that’s probably why I stuck to it so much now, because I wasn’t forced to do it. Doing all different sports built me to the person that I am today and showed me what I love the most.

On choosing to sign with the PFL…

When I signed a few years ago, 2022, I was at a point in my MMA career, where I was fighting on different shows, and even though I was winning and getting a lot of exposure from the shows, I didn’t feel like I was building up a set fan base with a promotion. So I felt like it was the right time when they approached me, especially with them approaching about the European season.

First, I wanted to stay close to home and build good support closer to where I’m from, in the UK. So it just really appealed to me at the time. And obviously the tournament money, the format and things like that was good for me because I like to fight quite regularly. And obviously, with this tournament, it’s back-to-back fights throughout the year, so just loads of things that really appealed, and it was lucky for me to get a promotion that said they would get behind me and push me as the brand for myself and not just get me fights.

On moving to Florida and training at American Top Team…

I was going through quite a difficult stage in my career and in my life in general. This is a really tough sport, a very selfish sport. I was probably a little bit lost. I was having great success in my career, but I was struggling to accept the fact that it’s a very different life to what my friends have. A few things at home, like relationships and things like that outside the sport just weren’t working out. I was feeling like I didn’t know what direction I was going.

It was hard to get the balance inside the sport as well. I was traveling a lot to different gyms to get the right training up and down the country. So it was just perfect timing for me to go over to America before I sign with PFL and just find that one base that I really felt at home at. And as well, the sunshine — in the UK, we don’t get much sunshine. Now, this is a tough sport, and people like said to me, ‘You can’t make it easy for yourself just because you’re waking up in the sun.’ And I’m like, ‘But why would I not want to better my life if I’m still working just as hard, waking up in Florida sunshine and still having a few sessions a day and working really hard, like, why wouldn’t I do that?’

On tracking sleep and recovery…

I’ve actually got a Whoop on. I do [track] a little bit. I got out of a bit of a routine because it’s difficult to wear this under my gloves sometimes because it can be a bit hard, but I do like to track it, mostly the sleep and the recovery. I think that’s a really important part for fighters, rather than the actual exercise. We know we work hard and we burn the calories, there’s no denying that — that’s not necessarily what I use it for — but the recovery and how well I’m sleeping and things like that is what I tend to track. That’s why I try and get in a routine of wearing something like this or other monitor [devices]. People just think we base everything off training and how hard we’re working, but, actually, it’s the recovery that we need to get on point as well.

On a habit she has changed based on the data…

Caffeine probably being one of them. My nutritionist has put a cap on what time I’m allowed caffeine now. So I actually see a lot difference in the amount I sleep, and the way I sleep when I’ve had caffeine too late. So that’s quite an interesting one to see. But you can check if I tend to have this [Celsius energy drink] a little bit too late, then I see a little bit of a difference in my sleep pattern.

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.

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By Joe Lemire

The defending champion of the America’s Cup is given wide latitude to establish the design parameters for the next competition’s sailing yachts, with strict limits on testing and prototyping. That “can limit your ability to take big technology risks, because you’re going to make sure that you’ve got a boat that works,” said Mike Cazer, CEO of the American Magic, the US entrant in the global regatta.

In order to explore new ideas within those confines, American Magic contacted a dozen engineering firms specializing in AI and simulations and partnered with Altair to build a digital twin of the AC75 yacht to serve as the basis for prediction models on how the boat will perform and how it can be sailed most effectively.

“Coming out of the last America’s Cup, we saw a huge opportunity in the area of advanced simulation, high performance computing and AI,” Cazer said. “We had some experience, particularly on the on the simulation side, but it was really more rudimentary. We thought that this could be a big part of this campaign and especially going forward.”

Altair has deep experience with the America’s Cup, dating back to 1995 — it most recently supported the Italian boat, Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli, in its runner-up finish during the previous competition. Altair technical manager of simulation and design Julien Chaussee said the inputs are “all-encompassing” and include historical data from prior America’s Cups, design tools, fluid dynamics, structural analysis and also digitally-generated simulation data. (Altair has also done significant work in golf manufacturing, among sports ventures.)

Cazer noted the complexity of the challenge with the sailing yachts that must contend with the environmental conditions of both wind and water, which requires pulling from the fields of both aerodynamics and hydrodynamics. The AC75 can hit speeds of 55 mph and briefly become airborne.

American Magic has a simulator at its training site in Barcelona, (where the races began last week), which enables the sailors to test the boat in all conditions. They can complete an entire race in the simulator under the precise details of that day’s weather and that opponent’s typical strategy. The simulations can also help brainstorm new tactics through artificial intelligence.

“When we use the AI bot to sail 24/7, it’ll start exploring areas of data that the sailors may not intuitively go to, and it’ll start recommending, ’In this condition pattern, here’s a way for you to sail the boat differently and potentially better,’” Cazer said. “A lot of times it’s wrong because the algorithm doesn’t quite have it exactly right, but a couple of times it’s pushed their thinking on how to actually control the boat and maneuver differently. And so then we start exploring that on the water, and ultimately it helps us get to be a better sailing team.”

The Preliminary Regatta was last weekend in Barcelona and it will be followed by the Challenger Series and final, best-of-13 series taking place between October 12 and 21.

“From a technical point of view, I always like to say, ‘There’s only one way to find out if you’re the best, and it is to go measure yourself with the best.’ You can’t just hide in an environment like the America’s Cup,” Chaussee said. “It’s really enabled us to push the tools and push the technologies and, in some cases, uncover limitations that we were able to overcome.”

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.

By John Portch with additional reporting from Joe Lemire

Ellie Maybury, the Founder of the Soccer Herformance consultancy, has spent two decades working as a sports scientist in the women’s game.

She cut her teeth at the Football Association and Birmingham City Women in her native England before crossing the Atlantic in 2015 to join US Soccer. She served the federation in several roles and would spend four years as the Head of High Performance for the USWNT between 2019 and 2023.

In June, she came on the People Behind the Tech podcast to discuss the gains made, particularly during her time with the USWNT, but did not attempt to mask the problems that face female players in comparison to their male counterparts.

“Female athletes want to be equipped with the information that’s going to help them succeed,” said Maybury, who now works with a multitude of players, coaches, clubs and federations. “Quite honestly, the way in which we can deliver information at the moment is very grey.”

The ‘grey’ stems from the male bias in sports science research. Females have tended to be lumped in with males and so there is limited understanding of what female athletes require when it comes to training, preparation and recovery.

Maybury mitigates the grey on a daily basis and we return to our chat to lift three quick wins for any practitioner in women’s soccer.

1. Be honest about existing limitations

There are numerous unknowns in female athlete health so it’s better to take control of that narrative. “[Players] want a black and white answer where really a lot of our knowledge and research in this area is still limited,” said Maybury, who stressed the importance of building trust and managing expectations. She may have an answer tomorrow, in six months’ time or she may still be searching in a year. “I’d rather be comfortable saying ‘hey, I’m going to hold on this. I can’t give you everything you need right now’, than rely on something that maybe has come from a different environment or, deep down, looking at the information, I know isn’t going to give them the most accurate, honest answer”.

2. Embrace the subjective…

You may have fewer resources than you like, but don’t dismiss what you’ve long been doing. Subjective data is critical. “It’s something I will always rely on and have always relied on,” said Maybury while explaining that tech supports were scarce when she first worked at Birmingham in 2007. “Although the game has transitioned and technology has transitioned, I really try to hold onto some of those key lessons and experiences I had when we weren’t as fortunate and lucky enough to have technology at our hands.”

She added: “Our intention is to know enough about the athlete and their trends so that we can get ahead of any negative effects, whether it’s a bad night’s sleep or whether it’s issues with menstrual cycle symptoms”.

Maybury’s emphasis on the individual is shared by Richard Burden, the Co-Head of Female Athlete Health & Performance at the UK Sports Institute. At last September’s Leaders Meet: Driving Step-Change in Female High Performance, Burden observed that case studies are undervalued in the hierarchy of evidence due to their small sample size. “I don’t care what the mean for the whole group is – I need to know why athlete X is different from athlete Y,” he told the audience at Manchester’s Etihad Stadium. “Case studies are really impactful for us – if you can collect case studies then you start to build an evidence base. When trying to understand things like the menstrual cycle, generalised approaches just aren’t going to cut it.”

3. … and build a bigger picture of female athlete health

Female athletes have long been overlooked in the tech space. “A lot of the technology we have absorbed into the women’s game has come from the men’s game or from men’s sporting environments,” said Maybury. “Maybe some of the processes and metrics that we use with the associated technology get transferred as well.” That picture has to change, but never stop leaning into your relationships with athletes. “It really was about those side conversations and those continuing conversations,” said Maybury of her time with the USWNT. “Then [it was] the individual capacity to gauge buy-in and just continue those education messages.”

Listen to the full conversation with Ellie Maybury below:

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By the SBJ Tech team

In April, the IOC launched its Olympic AI Agenda, an initiative full of innovation that could dramatically affect future Games.

A pilot project in Senegal is using AI to identify athletic talent and improve access to athletic opportunities for future generations. Judges for sports such as gymnastics can use computer vision that will bring more structure to the scoring process.

But at the Paris Games, one such AI effort was of immediate benefit to all the world’s best athletes — a monitoring system to protect them from abusive comments on social media. Kirsty Burrows, the Head of the Safe Sport Unit for the IOC, told SBJ this is part of the organization’s greater mental health efforts, and its constant evolution helps creates holistic athlete support.

“We know the enjoyment people get from competing and participating in sport,” Burrows said in July. “But ensuring athletes have a positive, healthy experience where they can thrive on and off the field of play requires specific actions to be taken to support that and to make it so.”

The service, provided by a third party the IOC declined to name, scanned all major social media platforms to flag potentially abusive or harmful messages — an immediacy that hopes to address them and have them taken down before athletes can even see them. Specifically, Burrows said, the system uses AI to look for posts that are either criminal in nature or conflict with community guidelines — for example, guidelines on X include stances against abuse/harassment and hateful content. This service can also pick up emojis and other imagery while navigating more than 35 languages for the 206 delegations (10,000-plus athletes and 2,000 officials).

Burrows highlighted that the IOC wanted to be helpful with this protection but not overly intrusive. It didn’t scan athletes’ DMs, maintaining their privacy. They can opt out of the service as well.

This tech was tested during Olympic Esports Week last March, with the IOC saying that more than 17,000 social posts were analyzed from various platforms. Of those, 199 were highlighted as potentially abusive, flagging 49 of them.

Burrows pointed to the need for social media monitoring around esports because online abuse can be endemic in competitive gaming. The positive learning that came out of that, though, was the flexibility of the system — Burrows said the IOC tried to anticipate issues while also having the capability to swiftly respond to a situation, such as when a player suddenly starts receiving a barrage of targeted abuse.

She feels that this will be an evolving protection that hopefully improves with time and more data. And the need for this learning is only growing — when unveiling the AI monitoring system in April, Burrows estimated that the Paris Games would produce roughly half a billion social posts.

Kirsty Burrows (r), who heads up the IOC’s Safe Sport Unit, speaks with Lindsey Vonn about protecting athletes online.

A former athlete’s take on this system

Emma Terho is uniquely positioned to talk about the need for athlete protection from abuse. She is the chair of the IOC Athletes’ Commission, as well as a two-time bronze medalist (and five-time Olympian) with the Finnish women’s hockey team.

In her playing past, coaches suggested avoiding all outside messaging — whether that was media coverage or, later, social media platforms — during the team’s biggest competitions. “Reading the wrong comment can be detrimental to your self-confidence,” she said.

But so much has changed about social media and the way athletes use it for personal branding and fan outreach. It’s not something that they can brush off. Quite frankly, it’d be detrimental to do so, especially for an athlete who only gets to compete on such a large stage every four years.

Terho’s online experience includes interactions with negative comments. She remembers harsh responses after losses that featured her mistakes on the ice. There’s also the experience of teammates and fellow athletes, some of whom were attacked based on their appearances.

Her recollection resonated ahead of Paris, the first Games with full gender parity. Earlier this year, England’s Loughborough University released an IOC-commissioned study showing that social media abuse toward athletes is rising.

More troublingly, a third of social media posts observed during the study featured negative content directed toward athletes after triggering events (which can be performance-based, social issue-based or reactive-based, according to the Loughborough research). It also discovered that female athletes were especially targeted by “hateful, discriminatory and emotional forms of harassment.”

Factor in the broader conversations about the recent mental health battles of the biggest female star athletes — like Naomi Osaka’s withdrawal from the French Open in 2021 or Simone Biles’ experience at the Tokyo Games — and the need for this AI rings even more clearly.

“Our main goal is to make sure that the Olympic experience is the best possible for the athletes,” Terho said, “and allow athletes to focus on the performance and that they’re not going to get abuse in the wrong moment.”

Burrows mentioned that the IOC has steadily built out its mental health support since 2016. The Summer Games in Rio were the first Olympics to feature safeguarding officers, providing human resources on the ground.

The Safe Sport Unit was established in 2022, and the support effort has continued to grow. Another new tech-bolstered feature of these Olympics was the Athlete365 Mind Zone, an activation sponsored by Powerade that will utilize VR mindfulness exercises in “disconnection pods.” The space, which was in the Olympic Village’s fitness center, was also staffed with members of the Safe Sport team.

“We want people to experience the broad benefits of sport participation,” Burrows said. “And that means ensuring a healthy and safe environment through which they can participate in sport.”

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.

By John Portch

There are echoes of coaching eras past in the way Adrian Blake Mitchell describes his ballet schooling at St Petersburg’s renowned Vaganova Academy.

“My teacher was extremely intimidating and that’s how he got good work out of us,” he told an audience at June’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit at Red Bull.

Mitchell teaches at the highly regarded Westside Ballet School, which is just across the road from Red Bull on Stewart Street in Santa Monica.

“Our training approach is really very much about fostering their love of the art form,” he continued. Rather than teaching from fear or intimidation, this “results in better artists, kinder and healthier people at the end of it”.

Those words chimed with Leaders Performance Institute members at the summit, where Mitchell spoke alongside Eileen Strempel, the Inaugural Dean at the prestigious Herb Alpert School of Music, at UCLA.

Here, we pick out four lessons in how the performing arts nurture their young talent.

1. The teachers must engender a sense of playfulness in students

If a love of art is essential, then it follows that the teacher – or coach – has to fit the bill just as much as any prospective student. “We’re also hiring teachers and thinking about the ecosystem,” said Strempel. The Herb Alpert offers a range of courses from musicology and ethnomusicology to composition and conducting. “What energies are those faculty bringing into our school?” She explained her belief that a love of art stems from playfulness. “We don’t actually talk about ‘working’ in music – we play music – and retaining that sense of play is absolutely integral.” The key is to foster an environment where the students are “playing with and inspired by each other”.

2. Individual development is about finding ‘other ways to win’

Ballet and music, much like sport, are ensemble activities and the risk is that the development of the individual can be overlooked. The Westside and Herb Alpert counter this by surfacing a student’s intrinsic motivation. Strempel said: “The solution to a problem might be X or Y, but we try to bring more profound questions such as ‘what is this piece of music about? What am I trying to convey? What am I bringing to this piece as an artist?’”

It speaks to what Mitchell called “winning in other ways”. He said: “This ties into the idea of improvisation and allowing us to experiment and find different moments in our work that can create success.”

3. They provoke failure

From the coach’s perspective, individual progress is about trying to develop solution-minded individuals who can adapt, adjust and improvise on the fly. This can lead to increased rates of failure, which the Westside readily accepts. “Sometimes when I’m really pushing my students we will repeat a variation three or four times without a break; no corrections,” said Mitchell. It provokes a level of fatigue akin to a performance but in a lower-stakes setting. “It’s important for that experience to be out of the way for them.”

At the Herb Alpert, teachers might introduce violin students to one of the two Stradivarius violins in their possession. Such is the difference in sound, colour, breadth and depth that it takes even an accomplished player six months to get to grips with the vintage instrument. Or if a student has been practising in the western symphonic orchestral tradition the school might introduce them to the completely different world of Afro Latin jazz. “The challenge is finding ways to expand the range of possibilities that allows an individual to extend themselves,” said Strempel.

4. They connect that failure with motivation and resilience

The Herb Alpert’s approach to creating a caring and nurturing environment does much to foster resilience but, as Strempel explained, it also comes back to a student’s intrinsic motivation. “If you keep it on the level of ‘I just want a great performance’ or ‘I just want to win the game’ that leaves so much creative potential on the table,” she said, being sure to include a sporting analogy. “You have to tap into intrinsic motivation to do that right, whether it’s because you want to give back to your community or because you’ve got something you want to say. It’s not about being a better musician, dancer or athlete but being a better human being”.

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By Joe Lemire

BreakAway Data, creator of an athlete-centric data passport app, is expanding its capabilities to include secure access to electronic medical records.

The new product, BreakAway Pro, aggregates health information from all practitioners — all clubs, national teams, private consultants — through an athlete’s career where it can be displayed and compared against game stats, tracking data and training workload. It is available for all interested leagues and unions, with a custom-build for a first, unnamed partner almost complete.

Since launch, BreakAway has secured deals with the NFLPA, NWSLPA, WNBPA and Athletes Unlimited, among others. Its founders, Dave Anderson and Steve Gera, regularly heard from agents, athletes, investors and other stakeholders that adding EMR capabilities would be a helpful addition to the product.

“We didn’t know we needed to move this mountain in order to give all athletes access to their data, but this was the key piece and the key thing that was missing in sports that we’ve now got,” Anderson said, adding that the topline benefit of this fingertip retrieval is ensuring that what “costs them time, money and effort are now guaranteed and done quickly and swiftly.”

While the data infrastructure was largely in place, meeting the standards for EMR access required significant outlay from BreakAway — a 2023 SBJ 10 Most Innovative Sports Tech company honoree — to add higher levels of insurance, meet HIPAA compliance and build maximum digital security, including a revamp of its AWS storage. Anderson estimated that this project consumed about 75% of the company’s time, money and effort for most of the past year.

Athletes register using multi-factor authentication that is verified by government ID, and all records are stored in a secure server, with none of the information stored locally on a mobile device. Users can manage settings over who has access to what information, toggling permissions on and off as they change teams or seek additional opinions.

“Players have been advocating for better access to their data for a long time, and BreakAway was the first company to build a product specifically tailored for players,” Meghann Burke, NWSLPA Executive Director, wrote to SBJ. “They have set a new standard for what, how, and when information should be delivered. It’s no surprise that they continue to innovate in the digital space, providing players with functional and accessible data solutions.”

Anderson, who had a six-year career as an NFL wide receiver, recounted his own experience attending NFLPA-backed health and wellness testing at the Cleveland Clinic. When he returned to the same facility three years later for an additional checkup, the computer systems had changed, and the doctor couldn’t easily see his past records. Anderson had to bring his own paper copies, making him think, “There’s got to be a better way to do this.”

While that’s an acute pain point in elite sports, it’s also an issue for everyday people who change medical practices.

“We’re the first company that is daring enough to take it on. We built this for players, and let’s see how it works because this really doesn’t even exist in the normal world,” Anderson said. “It’s a huge build, and something hopefully that resonates well beyond just sports.”

Intelligence within the app helps provide context and comparisons to normative datasets. Visual tagging of joints and muscles is one of several ways to filter the information a user is searching for. BreakAway Pro also is agnostic to other EMR providers and supports all types of medical imaging as well.

“We heard from enough leagues and we heard from enough people that we were like, ‘All right, let’s just go all in. Let’s bet the farm on our company on this,’” Anderson said. “We claim to be the athlete data company and to have the app where they put all their information, and if this is the most important piece of information that they want, what are we doing here? It is the core piece that ties everything together.”

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: Saucony

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By Joe Lemire

After winning the Canadian 10K Championship in late May, Malindi Elmore made a detour to suburban Boston to visit Saucony’s Human Performance and Innovation Lab to make sure she was best equipped to run the Olympic marathon in Paris.

Saucony staff affixed 80 motion capture markers to her body and shoes to detect her movement to sub-millimeter accuracy in front of two Vicon camera systems. They placed a mask and air tube over her face to measure oxygen intake and exhalation. And then they asked her to run 11 miles per hour on an instrumented treadmill that can collect force data — and do it four times, each while wearing a different pair of sneakers.

Ultimately, the best fit for Elmore proved to the Endorphin Elite 2, which Saucony bills as its “most aggressive race-day performer” thanks to a carbon fiber plate and responsive foam cushioning.

“We saw how her body reacts, and we saw how much of a percent decrease in energy she uses per shoe,” Saucony Product Performance Analyst Andrew Lynch said.

Saucony Performance Engineer James Allen described that as her “metabolic savings” and explained that the preferred shoe was determined by a combination of Elmore’s biomechanics and physiology, her subjective feedback and the shoe’s mechanical response.

“One thing we try to do here a lot is trying to match subjective opinions to actual objective measurements,” Allen said, with Lynch adding that, in Elmore’s case, the two lined up well.

Ultimately, the best fit for Elmore proved to Saucony’s Endorphin Elite 2, which features a carbon fiber plate and responsive foam cushioning. (Photo: Saucony)

The eight Vicon Vero cameras track the motion of the reflective markers. That data is processed by Vicon Nexus software and syncs to the force data from the treadmill, which is considered alongside the VO2 datapoints of energy expenditure — which quantifies the effort needed to sustain that 11-mph pace. EMG wearables monitor muscle activation.

A separate markerless motion capture system from Vicon is easier to use and, with advances in computer vision and processing from Theia3D, its accuracy and usefulness is growing closer to the gold-standard marker-based mocap.

Elmore, a Stanford All-American who competed in the 1,500 meters in the 2004 Games and will have run the marathon in the 2020 Tokyo and 2024 Paris Olympics, holds the Canadian national record in the marathon with a 2:24:50, which equates to a pace of nearly 10.9 mph for the full 26.2 miles.

“Testing shoes is really a fun and rewarding process, seeing the changes over time and getting on the treadmill,” Elmore said in a video shared by Vicon. “You’re trying to understand the nuances between the different shoes and what the small, subtle changes are that could make a big difference over the course of a marathon.”

In this case, Saucony used its Innovation Lab to fit Elmore, a service available to all its brand ambassadors, although she is the lone Olympian among the group. But the high-tech data collection is also used to make improvements in shoe design.

Allen and Lynch noted that innovations in foam to reduce impact and preserve energy have been a big focus for the Wolverine Worldwide-owned company. That’s been beneficial as they ensure the sneakers serve all wearers and not just the elites.

“In testing those foams and trying to match and see, if we exert a certain additional amount of force, does that change the foam’s mechanical property, looking at the duration of that force, trying to match it to how much time the foam is under compression during a gait cycle,” Allen said. “Of course, that’s going to be different for everyone. But just testing these various things to see how the mechanic properties will change for different variables.”

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.

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:

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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]

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By Joe Lemire