Insights from Bertrand Daille and Babak Amir-Tahmasseb
One of the key initiatives that Olympic and Paralympic organizations must take into consideration is how, by working with a technology provider, insights gleaned from data and the solutions used to gather data can empower the entire ecosystem. Cited in the N3XT Sports Digital Transformation in the Olympic Movement report, the importance to establish the organization as a service requires a clear understanding of what its stakeholders need, so as to provide them with the correct services and products.
By way of an example, the French Institute of Sport, Expertise, and Performance (INSEP) developed an Athlete Management System (AMS) available to all French sports federations. As part of a Sport data hub (SDH) designed specifically for athletes, it is designed to help improve athlete performance throughout the country. To find out more, N3XT Sports connected with INSEP’s Chief of the performance department, Bertrand Daille, and Director of International relations and grand INSEP network, Babak Amir-Tahmasseb, to discuss their strategy two years out from Paris 2024 and how INSEP connects national athletes and coaches with the technologies they need.
1. What is the role of INSEP as a service provider to the national federations and high-performance institutes? And what kind of digital and data services do you provide to them?
In order to understand how and why INSEP serves as a service provider, we would like to give some background. By 2019, the largest national federations in France had created their own data centers for managing clubs and licensing, and for fan data collection, but few were using digital tools and data to improve performance. Recognizing that opportunity, we partnered with the sports’ ministry and the newly launched French national sports agency, ANS, to create a sports data hub to help Olympic and Paralympic athletes.
INSEP’s AMS is now used by various French national sports federations, involved in high performance level. Our job at INSEP is not only to provide our ecosystem with the right tech tools such as the AMS but also to help the athletes and their coaches understand that these tools can help them.
2. What’s the role that data plays in athlete performance?
Data can play many roles within athlete performance. The area we focus on at INSEP is to individualize athlete training, covering injury prevention and workload monitoring. These are the two ways we leverage data to optimize performance. As an organization, we can go further by comparing the performance of French athletes and to monitor an athlete’s rate of improvement. This is one way we can help federations decide where funding should be allocated, for example, including which athletes are going to make the biggest gains in the coming years, based on theirs and their competitor’s performance data.
In order to do this, we take athletes through three stages. The first is to collect data, the second is to analyze the data, and the third is to present the data in a way that the athletes and their coaches can visualize the data clearly. We cannot request athletes to use data analytics technology if they don’t want to use it. It’s therefore important that we understand upfront what the data is going to be used for. In order to make the most of the data, the athlete and their coaches must align the data they request with the goals they want to achieve. That’s where we can provide support.
“Data can play many roles within athlete performance. The area we focus on at INSEP is to individualize athlete training, covering injury prevention and workload monitoring. These are the two ways we leverage data to optimize performance. As an organization, we can go further by comparing the performance of French athletes and to monitor an athlete’s rate of improvement.”
Bertrand Daille, Chief of INSEP’s performance department
3. How does INSEP ensure that athletes, coaches and the rest of the staff are well informed and educated about the different tech tools and data available to them?
It is new for us to educate athletes to digitize their training information and, sometimes, can be a real issue for us. Athletes spend a lot of time on their phones and social media but when we ask them to give us some digital information about their health, for example, it can be a challenge. The coach acts here as the supervisor of this information. If the coach is not following up on data, the athlete won’t be doing so.
In some cases, when athletes enter some “bad” information about their health, and they see that the coach is not reacting, they find it useless entering this kind of data information. We are working on automatic data instead of declarative data, where athletes wear a watch and we can track their information.
This is a challenge for us in France, as we know that British athletes, for example, disclose their data. Therefore, we want to make sure that the coaches are first interested in data and that the athletes are ready to declare it, as it is very important information for their training.
4. How are you building advocacy for INSEP’s performance analytics tech among athletes?
As INSEP continues to help athletes meet their goals through the power of performance data, the coaches who are introduced to INSEP in elite sports often like to integrate the technology into other, smaller training camps. Therefore, when the athletes arrive for training at the beginning of the season, there will be some who have already experienced this monitoring standard within the federation and with other coaches.
This achieves two things: (1) when new athletes are introduced to the elite program, they come primed with their latest performance data; and (2) once a federation accepts the monitoring and data analytics process, it builds advocacy among other coaches in training centers across the country. As a result, we see the technology becoming more widely used by coaches and athletes in France and greater levels of adoption.
We also understand the need to adapt depending on the athlete and the types of data they require for their individual training program. By working with younger athletes, it makes it easier to connect with them and their coaches in the early stages of their career and build a relationship with our monitoring processes for the years to come.
“As INSEP continues to help athletes meet their goals through the power of performance data, the coaches who are introduced to INSEP in elite sports often like to integrate the technology into other, smaller training camps. Therefore, when the athletes arrive for training at the beginning of the season, there will be some who have already experienced this monitoring standard within the federation and with other coaches.”
Babak Amir-Tahmasseb, Director of International Relations, INSEP
5. What’s next for INSEP, what are some of the projects that you guys are working on?
We have a specific research project that is exploring ways we can automatically collect performance data at the end of a training session or competition without the interaction of the athlete. Some athletes and coaches are not so keen to interact with monitoring technology, so we are constantly looking for new ways to measure and improve an athlete’s performance without impeding on their training or performance.
As performance technology becomes more common in elite sports coaching and competition, our method for trialing new monitoring processes is to test it within one sport first before we look at how it can be adapted to other sports. With the upcoming Paris 2024 Olympic Games and Paralympic Games, one of our goals is to demonstrate how the research we’re doing in the build up to the Games can benefit the French ecosystem more broadly, and through to the Los Angeles Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2028.