Training Olympians Try Data Crunches

Super-heavyweight power lifter Shane Hamman squeezes his face into a grimace as he grips a metal bar and hoists nearly 400 pounds of iron disks over his 62-inch chest, past his signature braided goatee and above his spiky brown hair before letting the weights crash to the platform.

Sheer strength, of course, is largely responsible for the performance. But so is a setup known as a bar tracking system -- a collection of wires, sensor pads and a video camera that records his lifts.

When Hamman calls up a clip of one of his lifts on a computer screen, accompanying charts and graphs tell him where he put pressure on his feet, how much power he exerted and whether he was able to keep the bar horizontal, among other sorts of feedback.

The Olympian uses the data to adjust his stance in various ways to make his lifts more effective. America’s strongest man -- so called for his U.S. record of lifting 518 pounds -- credits the technology for perfecting the technique he hopes will propel him onto the medals podium in Athens, after having finished 10th at the Games in Sydney four years ago.

“I feel a lot more confident with this new technology,” said Hamman, a native of Mustang, Okla., who at 32 is probably competing in his last Olympic Games. “I’m able to see I have room to improve, and this shows me the way to do it right.”

The U.S. Olympic Training Center here is bristling with laptops, cameras, PCs, sensors and wireless data transmitters designed to give U.S. athletes an advantage in Athens. Cutting-edge technology has also been installed in the U.S. Olympic Committee’s two other training centers, in Chula Vista, Calif., and Lake Placid, N.Y.

Long jumpers use the gear to download the last gold medalist’s winning leap to compare with their own. Gymnasts can see why not gaining enough elevation or coming out of a tuck too early made them blow their dismounts. Soccer teams can stream video archives of an opponent’s penalty kicks to seek clues about where a striker is likely to aim the ball.

“The progress in technology in the last few years has been exponential,” said Tanya Porter, the training center’s head of performance technology.

The big breakthrough since Sydney was in the portability of notebook computers and the power they pack. Today’s laptops do the complex data processing that only a few years ago required high-end desktops costing twice as much, Porter said.

Laptop-equipped coaches and athletes can connect wirelessly from a stadium or an airport lounge to servers in Colorado Springs and access statistics on thousands of athletes around the world.

Even the U.S. Olympic Committee isn’t sure how much is spent to keep American athletes technologically up to date. Dozens of governing bodies, covering sports as varied as archery and yachting, acquire their own computers and other gear, and no official keeps a tab on the total.

The technological progress hasn’t been universal. Competitors from many countries can’t afford the basics, such as gymnasiums, pools and proper training shoes, let alone laptops, video cameras and cutting-edge software. The Olympic committee for Laos, for instance, can afford only a single notebook computer.

So athletes from less-developed countries find themselves at a disadvantage even before the opening ceremonies begin tonight in Athens.

“There are certain sports that are completely technology-driven,” said Olympic historian David Wallechinsky, author of “The Complete Book of the Olympics.” For instance, sailing, rowing, archery, shooting and even canoeing involve complex machinery and high-tech materials such as Kevlar. “You’re not going to see many countries win medals,” Wallechinsky said, “because not many can afford to build the machines.”

Technology has played a role in elite athletic competition since electric timing was introduced at the 1908 Summer Games in London. By the 1940s, pole vaulters were using poles made of fiberglass, whose flexibility allowed athletes to launch themselves over higher bars. In the 1960s, the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries developed sophisticated sports labs with specialized training equipment to turn out top athletes who would win international prestige, Wallechinsky said.

By the time the Summer Games came to Los Angeles in 1984, cutting-edge technology involved 16-millimeter film. Peter McGinnis remembers shooting athletes with a bulky camera, then developing the film, digitizing it and manipulating it to obtain stick-figure animation sequences that showed athletes how they could improve performance.

“The film was expensive, and it took a turnaround of six to eight months for athletes to get it,” recalled McGinnis, a professor of biomechanics at State University of New York at Cortland. “It was mostly helping to plan training for the next season.”

These days, a swimmer like Ed Moses can consult a video of his breast-stroke performance several times during a single workout. Often, after completing some laps, Moses jumps out of the pool and huddles, dripping wet, over a laptop computer with his coach to examine video that was just shot. Then he dives back in and makes adjustments.

“I break it down stroke by stroke,” said the 24-year-old from Burke, Va., who won gold and silver medals in Sydney. “My head could be an inch or two too high. We’re talking about a sport where hundredths of a second matter.”

Indeed, $1,500 laptops are the latest must-have equipment for athletes in training. The U.S. team uses them to tap into hundreds of hours’ worth of archived workouts and competitions.

Athletes and coaches can compare two competitors side by side or superimpose one on top of the other for a more direct comparison. For instance, a video of two women performing the same dive off a 10-meter platform showed that the one who got slightly less altitude at takeoff had a split-second less to straighten out before ripping into the water’s surface.

During a recent workout here, as she straddled a stationary bike, 25-year-old track cyclist Tanya Lindenmuth took some deep breaths and began pedaling furiously. Her muscular thighs pumped in a blur, like pistons in a dragster engine. Teammates gathered around her, cheering and shouting encouragement for a raucous 18 seconds meant to pound the red-white-and-blue-suited rider to exhaustion.

It did.

But those 18 seconds also provided a wealth of data, gathered from sensors attached to Lindenmuth’s legs and collected in a little red box near the rear wheel of the bike. Downloaded into a laptop, the information showed Lindenmuth and her coach whether she reached peak power at the right time, how long it lasted and when fatigue set in.

“The quick results are one of the best things about being here,” said Lindenmuth, from Trexlertown, Pa., who is an alternate for cycling’s sprint event in Athens. “It’s good to see right away that I did better than last time.”

These are advantages athletes didn’t have as they trained for the 2000 Summer Games. Back then, people were only beginning to load home videos onto computers, and Internet connections were painfully slow by today’s standards.

The pace of technology change is “amazingly fast,” said Greg Seremetis, a marketing executive with Gateway Inc. who is in Athens to hook up Wi-Fi wireless networks to link the U.S. team to the servers in Colorado Springs. “Wi-Fi was hardly available just four years ago. Now it’s in most laptops.”

As the U.S. Olympic Committee’s official technology partner, Gateway has given it computers and other equipment worth more than $40 million over the last four years, according to sources familiar with the arrangement.

To some, the technological disparity is merely a new manifestation of a condition that is as old as the modern Olympic movement, launched in 1896.

“It never has been a level playing field,” said Kevin Wamsley, director of the International Center for Olympic Studies in London, Canada. “Even training and funding of sports is related to the GDP [gross domestic product] and the economy.”

The International Olympic Committee tries to mitigate the imbalance by offering monthly stipends and training abroad to promising athletes through its Olympic Solidarity Program and other assistance efforts.

But it’s not enough for an athlete to buy a computer, said Emmanuelle Moreau, a manager for institutional affairs with the International Olympic Committee, which is based in Lausanne, Switzerland.

In any case, she added, “the majority of athletes in developing countries are more concerned with basic training facilities.”

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Video training

Athletes and coaches can instantly analyze long jumps, platform dives and other sporting feats with the help of laptop computers, video cameras and software. For instance, a video of one practice dive can be compared with that of another to see which techniques produce the greatest rotation and the smallest splash. Athletes can also compare themselves with competitors.

A video camera films a diver and feeds the images to a laptop computer, which can also access video of previous dives.

Software analyzes the video and superimposes one dive on top of another.

The diver and coach can now compare form and technique.

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Source: Dartfish