What if you could push a button and beat the fastest turn in the world for the 100m backstroke? For Swimming Australia, a more unified view of data was essential to optimizing athlete performance at the Tokyo Olympic games—and bringing home nine gold medals.
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With a data lake on the cloud, Swimming Australia has improved athlete performance at essential parts of a race, created new swim meet formats, and connected top trainers with talented swimmers. Swimming Australia specialists partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to apply machine learning to the data, providing coaching and performance staff with data-driven insights, and enabling athletes to focus on winning big in the water.
Building a single source of truth for race data
With approximately 100,000 registered members, Swimming Australia is the top governing body for swimming on the continent. They are on a mission to enhance athlete performance in races, create more meaningful fan experiences, and use machine learning to identify the next generation of Olympic athletes.
In 2019, coaches recognized a need to harness and unify performance data to help athletes swim their best. Until recently, key metrics and swimming statistics were siloed across the organization, making it nearly impossible for coaches to effectively track performance.
Since spreadsheets were the primary method for recording athlete development, manual data entry proved time-consuming, inefficient, and left the team vulnerable to human error. For Jess Corones, performance solutions manager at Swimming Australia, the sheer volume of data was a challenge. “The problem was that we had a lot of data in swimming,” Corones said. “We knew there was great insight and knowledge in that data that we weren’t maximizing.”
Seeing an opportunity to extract peak performance data on the cloud, team leaders with the help of AWS built a data lake that unified athlete statistics and metrics in a single location. For Corones and her team, “The potential for the data is huge. We’ve started dipping our toes in the water with machine learning and AI to tell us things we didn’t even know.”
Extracting peak performance in the pool—and on the cloud
With more than 5.5m million people participating annually, swimming is one of Australia's most popular activities for both work and play. Facing fierce global competition, relay teams are winning or losing races within 0.1 of a second. Given such close margins, data accuracy and the use of machine learning for applications such as predicting squads to be deployed by rivals, is critical. New performance insights are constantly being generated on the cloud, enabling coaches to analyze how fast athletes are swimming, track physiological testing, and automatically predict individual trajectories across a multi-year training program. With direct access to AWS dashboards, coaches and athletes can easily track progress in real time from their phones.
If you’re looking to up level your data strategy on the cloud, here are some lessons to learn from Swimming Australia’s application of analytics and machine learning:
- Keep track of competitors. Machine learning insights don’t have to be confined to your organization. You can track competitors, if competitor data is available. For Jamie Salter, Performance Pathway general manager at Swimming Australia, tracking the competition is a key use of the data lake: “With AWS, we can capture all eight finalists in a championship and dovetail that with stroke mechanics, how they pace the race, the distance of stroke, and the stroke rate.” With competitor insights in hand, you can develop a winning strategy for your own team.
- Tailor your strategy. If you’re dealing with large data sets, you need to be focused on what’s relevant to your business. From swimming starts to turns, machine learning is helping Swimming Australia coaches zero in on the specific data they need to create bespoke training sessions for individual swimmers. Much like a coach might prioritize data on stroke mechanics over stroke rate to improve a swimmer’s form, business leaders should strategically target data to help achieve designated business outcomes.
- Pivot as needed. Whatever sector you’re in, chances are the landscape is constantly evolving. Don’t hesitate to pivot how you use your insights and the business problems you’re trying to solve. For Corones, Swimming Australia’s journey with machine learning is focused on constant improvement: “It’s kind of like a race to the moon. At the end of the day, it’s how you use that information and how you can apply it.”
Swimming Australia innovated with machine learning to help its swimmers win gold, but they’re far from finished. Since leveraging AWS’s data lake at the Tokyo Olympics, top athletes have already broken world records—including in the women’s 100m backstroke. If the team’s nine gold medals are any indication, this is just the start of their journey.
Learn more about how your organization can put data into action with AWS.