Xavier McKeever and his cross-country ski teammates as soon as experimented with ChatGPT to create a coaching plan. The 22-year-old from Canmore, Alta., described it as ‘the craziest coaching plan we’ve ever seen.’ It really helpful depth periods every single day, together with three hours of snowboarding adopted by an hour of excessive effort, repeated a number of occasions, then a full week off. ‘We all know you may’t do this,’ McKeever famous. ‘It was fairly humorous to see… ChatGPT can’t write a coaching plan, and that we want our teaching to assist us with that.’
AI Integrates into Athletes’ Routines
Synthetic intelligence now performs a key position within the preparation of Canadian athletes competing on the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics in Italy. Gadgets like Apple and Garmin watches, together with Oura rings, monitor sleep and heart-rate information to supply restoration scores. Inertial measurement models on athletes’ our bodies allow three-dimensional positioning evaluation.
Andy Van Neutegem, vice-president of efficiency sciences, analysis, and innovation at Personal the Podium, Canada’s high-performance sport funding physique, clarifies that ‘the phrase “synthetic intelligence” or “AI” is so misunderstood.’ He prefers the time period ‘machine studying.’
Coaching Device Over Competitors Assist
Canadian athletes view AI primarily as a coaching assist somewhat than a contest instrument. They prioritize intuition and expertise alongside information. Freestyle skier and triple Olympic moguls medallist Mikael Kingsbury emphasizes this steadiness: ‘In my sport that’s efficiency on demand, it’s essential to have some information, however have an excellent really feel for the snow.’ He provides, ‘In a sport the place issues change loads as a result of we’re outdoors, I don’t need numbers to be my indicator.’
Superior AI in Sport Science
Nations guard their technological edges carefully throughout Olympic and Paralympic occasions. Van Neutegem highlights heavy AI use in sports activities like snowboarding and freestyle for monitoring biomechanical physique positioning. ‘It’s about physique shapes. Are the physique shapes optimum?’ he explains. This depends on laptop imaginative and prescient, a department of AI that mimics human eye capabilities by object recognition.
In sliding sports activities, native positioning techniques mixed with AI establish the quickest monitor traces. ‘You’re bringing a rare quantity of knowledge into a pc, which is computing it and spitting out an interpretation of whether or not that is optimum or not optimum primarily based upon information that’s been collected over a protracted time period,’ Van Neutegem states.
AI’s Rising Function in Judging
The Worldwide Olympic Committee’s AI Agenda, launched almost two years in the past, goals to remodel judging and refereeing, in keeping with former IOC president Thomas Bach. The Worldwide Gymnastics Federation examined an AI judging platform on the Paris 2024 Summer season Video games to help human judges.
Snowboard judging drew scrutiny at Beijing 2022 when Canada’s slopestyle champion Max Parrot admitted touching his knee as an alternative of grabbing his board—a element judges ignored. The X Video games has commercialized an AI judging system known as ‘The Owl AI,’ first trialed on males’s halfpipe snowboarders on the 2025 Aspen occasion.
Canadian freestyle halfpipe skier Rachel Karker remembers, ‘They have been utilizing AI to see if it might name the tips to make it possible for that’s what somebody did.’ She stays cautious: ‘I nonetheless suppose it’s actually essential to have a human set of eyes… Everybody kind of spins on a unique axis and kind of has a barely completely different variation to it. It would battle to select up on nuances like that… I’m torn on whether or not it’ll make it higher or make it worse.’
