Australia is surrounded by water, so swimming is as much a part of the culture as throwing another shrimp on the barbie, but for Swimming Australia, it’s more than recreation. It’s about performance and gleaning as much from data as it can.
Jessica Corones, general manager for performance support and Olympic campaign for Swimming Australia, is charged with various duties, including overseeing performance support and the data and tech teams. She sees a lot of synergy between those seemingly disparate functions. At AWS re:Invent 2023, I had the opportunity to talk to Corones about how her organization is tapping into Amazon Web Services technology to improve the swimming team’s performance.
“It’s a really nice synergy — making sure that our data and tech stays performance-focused and impacts performance outcomes in the pool,” she told me in an exclusive briefing. “We started a partnership with AWS in 2018, which we just stumbled across. We didn’t know a lot about AWS. This has been a massive transformational journey for us.”
Before moving to AWS, most of the data was simple. It was about the full heat, split times and only a little else. In addition to those times, the organization gets most of its data through camera vision, which it analyzes in minute detail. Wearables, common in other sports, aren’t as useful underwater. Corones told me they might have anywhere between 15 and 20 fixed cameras above the water and up to 20 movable cameras underwater.
Unlike other sports, such as F1 or the NFL, no consistent measurement points exist, nor is there the ability to put RFID chips on player equipment. So instead, it uses 4K video to measure a swimmer’s head position and the splash to calculate stroke data — including rate, distance and velocity. This data is critical to understanding the performance of an individual athlete and far more enlightening than mere heat time.
AWS also enables athletes to use competitive data. “We’ve got some really rich competition data,” she said. “We’ve got a lot of international competitive data that also gives us intel on world benchmarks. We can analyze the whole field to understand how the events move and improve over time.”
Using this data in AWS, Swimming Australia can predict where the next improvement might come. And the team can adjust its training with that goal in mind.
“We’ve got historical data for each athlete, so we can see how their performance is trending and track it over the years,” she said. “The data also tells us where their strengths and weaknesses are. So, we’ll provide those data drill downs to the coach, which gives them direction on where they need to train, whether it’s their weakness or a strength.”
The organization downloads all that data to an AWS-powered web portal called Lane 4. The name Lane 4 is a play on words, as the fourth lane in a pool is considered the fastest.
The team now also uses wearables out of the water, such as rings and watches, to extract lifestyle data, including how well someone is sleeping. In AWS, this data, combined with the wealth of info from in the pool, provides a complete picture of the athlete’s entire life.
The contrast between Swimming Australia pre- and post-AWS couldn’t be starker. Corones told me that, in the 2016 Rio Summer Olympics, the team got on podiums 50% of the time. The move to AWS showed almost immediate results at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, where the Australian swim team medaled in every relay. Looking at world rankings, the team from down under has gone from fifth in the world to No. 1.
Swimming Australia has worked with AWS to make the data usable by coaches. Corones explained, “The coaches are not technical people. We use Amazon QuickSight as our dashboard and set up filters for them,” although she admitted the view is simplistic. Corones is excited about what Amazon Q can bring as a way of diving deeper into the data
“The use of Amazon Q can be groundbreaking for us as the coaches have insightful questions, they want answers to that will help them coach better,” she said. “They do not know how to turn their question into a technical language, but Q lets them ask things in natural language.”
When I was first invited to meet with Swimming Australia, I wondered how a swimming team would use analytics. Since nalytics is often thought of with sports such as F1 racing and the NFL, I brought that up with Corones. She agreed with that, used that as the benchmark, and told me, “Our goal is to be the Formula 1 of Olympic sports.” It appears it’s on their way.
It’s interesting to speculate how else the data cloud can be used. The NFL uses AWS Next Gen Stats to educate its current fan base and engage the casual or new fans better. The thesis is that an educated fan is a more engaged one. Instead of watching a bunch of swimmers go back and forth, if a viewer was told that Swimmer A lost a quarter-second because of a bad turn, that can cause some tense moments as people watch and see if the swimmer can make up the gap.
AWS is a powerful tool for data analysis. And for the Australian team, it has been the difference between lingering in mediocrity and leading the pack.
