Team GB: Using Analytics (and Intuition) to Improve Performance
Becoming an elite athlete — or coaching a team of this rarified breed — has as much to do with talent and skill as it does with experience and intuition (not to mention some serious hard work).
And data is increasingly part of that mix at the highest echelon of sports: the Olympic Games.
At Team GB — the name used by the British Olympic Association (BOA) and British Paralympic Association for their Great Britain and Northern Ireland Olympic team — analytics are used to both monitor the performance of athletes and to predict how well a team will perform. But what could the future hold? Evidence-based coaching — and training — that is as much a factor of sports as evidence-based medicine is now a factor of healthcare.
That transition is easier said than done. The blending of the age-old art of intuition and experience and the newer practice of using analytics to guide strategy is a path beset with both successes and challenges (in sports and in business).
Dr. Marco Cardinale, Head of Sports Science and Research of the British Olympic Association, in conversation with MIT Sloan Management Review contributing editor Renee Boucher Ferguson, explains how data analytics are used within Team GB, the future of analytics within the team and the sporting world at large and the cultural issues that need to be overcome to achieve the potential of analytics.