Norway’s Sporting Edge: AI, Data and Better Gear (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: When it comes to the Winter Olympics, Norway is by far the leading nation, having won the most medals in history. I've come here to the Olympic Training Centre in Oslo to find out how advances in technology are helping this small nation compete at the highest level.

[00:00:25] Speaker 2: Our goal is to enable the whole team to improve, and technology can be a very important tool in your whole toolbox.

[00:00:35] Speaker 1: One of the technology department's main roles is helping test and develop the best equipment for athletes. And for Norway, there's one sport above them all. One of the most successful sports is skiing. Does that take up a lot of your time, focused on that sport?

[00:00:53] Speaker 2: Well, cross-country skiing, biathlon, it's more like a religion in Norway, so it engages lots of people. And of course here, it can make huge differences having the right equipment, and prepare the equipment the right way in addition. It can be that you're the best athlete, but if you have the wrong equipment, the wrong set-up, you will not be on top of the result list.

[00:01:20] Speaker 1: But technology in sport goes beyond just the equipment. Monitoring athletes' training and performance relies heavily on data. And artificial intelligence is unlocking new ways of tapping into that information. Norway is quite a wealthy country, certainly in comparison to other Olympic nations. Does that give you a real competitive edge in being able to develop and adapt this technology?

[00:01:45] Speaker 2: I wish I could say yes. I don't know what the situation in other countries is. I think we should be more pushing the boundaries, and it would be nice to have better facilities. So I think things could go faster now with AI, things getting faster, so that's nice. Things are good here, but they could be better.

[00:02:05] Speaker 1: What would be better? What should teams have access to, do you think?

[00:02:09] Speaker 2: So the athletes' monitoring systems are getting more and more powerful. It's a very interesting topic, because you can identify changes in your stress level, regeneration states, and are you getting fatigue, or should you reduce your training load. But also a very dangerous one, because we experience that people, athletes especially, they have to know their body. What is exciting you most about technology and sport at the moment? We can realise the ideas from analysis to prototype or product is so much faster. With 3D printing, with new materials, with AI.

[00:02:50] Speaker 1: Of course, technology is not the only reason why Norway has so much Winter Olympic success. It's a small nation with a big culture of active living, and that goes beyond just winter sport. At Oslo Tennis Arena, we're seeing Sport.AI in action. They're a Norwegian-based company working to make data analysis in racket sports accessible to all.

[00:03:19] Speaker 3: So you can start to look at everything from biomechanics, so technique of a serve, for example, all the way into kind of tactical analysis, my positioning on the court, where is the ball landing after I'm hitting it. How am I working together with my teammates? All these things that can be analysed using computer vision in a way that was never possible before.

[00:03:40] Speaker 1: Sport.AI's model has been trained to take video footage gathered by standard cameras around the court, or even just a mobile phone, and within seconds give analysis.

[00:03:50] Speaker 3: So we'll go and have a look at some of the video that we took at the training session today. Here's Sebastian. You can see he's a great player. He gets a fantastic score from the AI. But we track all the way his body joints, the angles, and his swing curve. Now we can delve into the analysis. And you can kind of keep it as high level or go as deep as you want. So things like biomechanics, power, contact point. You can look at the kinetic chain, so how you create power from rotating the hip and the shoulder, wrist. And go into all sorts of details around how the timing works together to create power when you're hitting a shot.

[00:04:28] Speaker 1: The challenge really is analysing it and being able to get something that you can work with. How do you actually coach people with Sport.AI? Yeah, so it's not just about data collection. It's really understanding what that data means. For me, compared to my previous experience with AI, it's really about understanding what it means to be a sport.

[00:04:37] Speaker 3: It's not just about data collection. It's really understanding what that data means. For me, compared to my previous session, or to my peers, or compared to what my coach has been telling me to work on over the last few weeks. It's really putting it into that context and understanding what it's telling you.

[00:04:54] Speaker 4: That's a fantastic one.

[00:04:55] Speaker 1: The tool is able to deliver that information in different ways. Including picking out highlights from a match.

[00:05:01] Speaker 4: Okay, you see the program is putting markers on your body.

[00:05:05] Speaker 1: It's also being deployed by professional coaches to enhance their work. With new technology, there are always people that are resistant to adopt it. How is tennis adopting to this kind of tech?

[00:05:16] Speaker 4: I see more and more that the information coming from AI is something that players trust. Players have asked, well, I don't like analysers because I don't want to see when I do things wrong. But you can turn it around and say, I use technology to show you what you're really doing well. And that is what we also have to remember. That this is not only to try to figure out what's wrong. You have to figure out also what's right.

[00:05:42] Speaker 1: You've used new technology throughout your career, I imagine. Are we at the peak, do you think, of performance because of what we have now? Or have there been other times where you felt like people were playing better?

[00:05:54] Speaker 4: I can remember back when we saw super slow motion. Then we saw exactly what the racket was doing, hitting the ball. Then we started to know what's going on. We had the belief before, but then we understood. So now I think it's the same. It's the same that we think we see things, but AI is guiding us to even now know even more. And the quality of tennis will go up. Long follow through. Yes, I like it.