Swimming Australia hopeful AI can deliver Olympic gold
“Currently it takes about 30 minutes to process each race because of the sheer complexity and compute needed,” Corones said. “With AWS we want to give coaches immediate access to all race metrics so they can have real-time conversations with athletes.
“Our coaches are not tech people, and we don’t want them to be. We want them to remain world-leading coaches who can utilise and interpret the most up-to-date data around them to support their decision-making and coaching.”
Corones describes Sparta, a custom-built race analysis system developed with Amazon Web Services, as Swimming Australia’s secret weapon.
Swimming Australia has also developed a relay app, which can accurately predict teams that opponents are likely to pick, the order they are likely to swim in, and the times they are likely to deliver.
It has had a commercial partnership with AWS since 2019, and the terms were not disclosed.
Sparta has already had a significant impact, according to Corones, and will now be rolled out to training pools around the country, in what will make Australia one of the first countries to install the capabilities in a training environment.
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“The challenge is that race competitions only have one swimmer per lane but in a training pool you’ve got swimmers sharing lanes in the pool, multiple swimmers in each lane, swimming different strokes, drills, sets and repetitions, with coaches on the side yelling stroke rates and times from their stopwatches,” she said.
“It’s a much harder place than an actual race to accurately measure and compute what’s happening in real-time because of the complexity of the environment.”
Amazon Web Services’ Paul Devlin, who leads global sports business development, said the swimming pool presented unique challenges compared with the likes of rugby, football or basketball.
“We’ve got a camera picking up a feed, and then the athlete disappears underwater, and it’s a really hard challenge to solve that,” he said.
“Performance analytics is a big part of our business. At the moment, we’ve got lots of our sports customers talking to us about how they can take their data, transform it, and create insights for high-performance coaches, and then also to engage their fans at a deeper level.”
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