performance salute?

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This summer, the eyes of the world will be turned to Rio to follow the most publicized event on the planet: the Olympic Games. A meeting awaited by hundreds of athletes who will once again try to mark the history of their discipline. Four years ago, thirty-two records fell in London. These performances coincide with the progressive use of smart health connected tools intended for high performance sport. As performance sensors, vital data or movement detectors, smart health connected objects have an essential place today in professional sports structures. Placed in the jersey, under the cap, the racket or at the top of the stands, sensors come in many aspects to offer athletes optimal expertise in their data, which more than ever the heart of the sporting challenge.

Long assimilated to the work of bookmakers, sports data are now omnipresent during training sessions. Football, athletics, swimming, tennis, rugby, rowing: these are all disciplines that rely on them today to achieve results. Data collected by wireless sensors, generally placed around the athlete’s body to calculate and analyze their physical abilities.

This is called “sport tracking”, a technology nowadays used by de many teams and federations. In France, society Mac Lloyd Sport dedicate the monopoly of this tool and already supplies several professional teams such as Olympique Lyonnais or Racing 92.

(Embed) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pNDbKaWiYM (/ embed) 

These “intrusive” systems come in the form of GPS wearable sensors integrated into equipment or an object, communicating with a receiver smart health connected to a digital platform. The tool transmits more than 150 indicators and 1000 data per second in real time, consultable by the technical staff and the trainers. Heart rate, GPS position and acceleration data can be immediately analyzed by the physical trainer to interpret the physical condition of the athlete and the team. Objective aimed by this device: better individualize the players' performances on the field in order to be able to adjust the intensity and the training volume of the players during their daily sessions.

A tool “still in the testing phase”

For the past two years, Mac Lloyd Sport's “sport tracking” technology has been on board the boats of the France Aviron team. A new tool at the service of a French team that claims to the podium in international competitions, as for the two French lightweight men's pair, reigning world champion and trained by Alexis Besançon. "We are still in the design and testing phase but in four years we will really see the impact of this technology on our performanceHe explains.

Committed to the Rio Olympics, the coach knows how essential it has become to scrutinize every piece of data to go even further in training and strive for excellence. "We are looking for the smallest hundredth in competition. The retransmission of the cardiac data, the speed, the amplitude and the cadence of train is done live, which allows us to be more effective during training sessions and to gain speed".

Barely adopted by the French rowing team, Alexis Besançon however prefers to remain pragmatic and waits to see its effectiveness in the long term. "We don't yet have enough perspective to know if it really affects our performance. We will really know in four years. But what is certain is that it brings us (to coaches, note) more comfort, and the rowers feel they are more efficient". Despite everything for him there is no doubt, in a few years “all rowing teams will use this technology".

Technology already victorious in Rio

Before being able to prove its efficiency this summer on the athletics tracks and pools of Rio com Janeiro for the Olympic Games, “sport tracking” had already broken out at the Maracana for the 2020 Football World Cup. Richard Attias, founder of New-York Forum and Davos Summits, explained two years ago on his blog how Germany knew how to take advantage of these sensors to prepare for and ultimately win the competition.

"For several months before the World Cup, the Mannschaft trained with software that analyzed biometric data and player movements, as well as the history of matches played by their opponents."The technology was linked to cameras to analyze players' movements and reactions to their opponents, and whether the players were following the tactics or not.

Furthermore, biometric data would have been decisive for the coaches of the Nationalmannschaft, especially during training sessions. "The performances were optimized, the rest periods better planned and the risk of injuries reduced.”A proven technological cocktail.

If individual performance can be subject to expertise and can be optimized, what about the prevention of injuries, fatigue and other physical problems due to the practice of high performance sport? A French start-up thinks it has the solution.

Bodyconnect, the t-shirt that wants to go even further

A t-shirt is called went even further in the process of monitoring high-level athletes: bodyconnect. Initiated by a French start-up, this new technology would broaden the field of collected data and their interpretation thanks to new algorithms. Benjamin Lanquar, one of the two entrepreneurs behind the project, tells us about the birth of this smart health connected t-shirt.

"One day during a match we asked ourselves the following question; how could we know when to stop a player to avoid any physiological risk. The idea then came to us while playing Playstation: we would need a power bar like in games."A simple idea, but one that turns out to be much more complex to implement.

Unlike other technologies that mostly provide only heart rate information, bodyconnect offers a real ECG medical (electrocardiogram) transmitting precise data on the performance of the heart, allowing to warn when the athlete has reached certain limits. "IMVS technology (monitoring Vital Sign) integrated into our T-shirt gives extremely precise information”Insists Benjamin Lanquar.

The heart rate and pulmonary pressure are collected and combined to give a very precise result on the energy remaining and / or consumed by the athlete during exercise. All searchable thanks to graphs and diagrams readable by all on a smartphone / tablet / computer / smartwatch application. All of the individual squad data will be available online and will allow the coach to judge the fatigue rate and speed of recovery of each player, and thus to orient his training exercises or his coaching during the matches.

“Preventing risks for top athletes”

This “non-intrusive” t-shirt will concern all sports, collective or individual, amateurs or professionals and will provide its data thanks to a data logger of less than one centimeter, placed in the t-shirt below the neck. Bodyconnect will also integrate 3D displacement sensors to follow each movement of the sportsman, correct his gestures or even measure the impacts in rugby for example.

"We will be able to analyze the entire season of an athlete, including at the time of injuries, and detect, for example, heart and lung failure, to better prevent risks for high-level athletesSaid the entrepreneur.

A dehumanized sport?

A strong argument at a time when sport and business have never been so linked and where top athletes represent a real investment for clubs, but also for sponsors. Four years ago at the London Olympics, 86% of medalist athletes already used these data analyzes.

But would their abundance not go against the values ​​of sport which in essence wants to be an inexact science, attached to the inherent notion of human factor, of chance? In reality, this “dating” of performance tends above all to confirm that high performance sport raises many financial challenges, for professional teams and the athletes themselves, more and more assimilated to record machines, for titles , and other juicy contracts.

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