Analytics August 19, 2019 • By Yves Mulkers

How Data and Technology augment the Fan Experience in Sports

SailGP Event 4 Season 1 Cowes UK
4 min read

What has data to do with sports, will you think. 

Even more than ever technology and data is put to play during sport happenings to augment the fan experience. Data is used to optimise team performance and drive innovation in material development and techniques in sporting. 

Sailing a sea of data

A recent visit to the Oracle Sail GP, revealed how data and technology is put to use in the high foil catamarans racing. 

During the development of the boats, fiberoptics are used to capture resistance of the foils and monitor hydrodynamics. These insights through data allow to develop high resistant foils, and find optimum point for speed to get maximal lift of the boats. Thanks to these insights the catamarans recently achieved a new world speed record of foil boats. 

France SailGP Team helmed by Billy Besson compete in a practice race ahead of Event 4 Season 1 SailGP event in Cowes, Isle of Wight, England, United Kingdom. 8 August 2019: Photo Eloi Stichelbaut for SailGP. Handout image supplied by SailGP
Great Britain SailGP Team helmed by Dylan Fletcher sail alongside the Queen Elizabeth ocean liner as they practise on The Solent ahead of Event 4 Season 1 SailGP event in Cowes, Isle of Wight, England, United Kingdom. 8 August 2019: Photo Lloyd Images for SailGP. Handout image supplied by SailGP

Teams have limited practicing time during the races. By sharing the 1200 data points, constantly captured on all the boats, teams can analyse position, lift, position of the sail, wind speed, and so many other technical details to optimize the configuration of their own boat. Since all teams have the same boat type, data analytics and models give the teams a gigantic advantage – these insights are not shared amongst the teams. 

Cloud and Edge connecting the sea and the shore 

SailGP proprietary IP is build on top of an Oracle open platform. Oracle plans to replicate the model for additional sports applications. The SailGP electronics team build some of their own gear, using some conventional marine electronics sensors, feeding real-time info to on-board displays for vital boat performance and position on the race and on the track. 

Every race boat has individual SIM cards, hubs, and their own bandwidth, and their performance data is relayed in real-time via telemetry across a low-latency, custom-built LTE (4G wireless) network built with multiple antennas around and upon the waterfront race area. 

The sensor data (and audio, and video) collected on each race boat flows into a popup data center and into the cloud in Oracle’s autonomous database, at 200 ms. Live video screens onshore, on coach boats, course marshal boats and other displays are powered from a 100 ms from SailGP in London. All of this info mashes up into the SailGP app, so fans can immerse in the race. 

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Agile hackaton of the datascience team 

During the race event, Oracle’s innovation and data science team take benefit of the huge real-time data streams to challenge their teams to find insights in the data.  

We spoke to John Abel, Vice President of cloud and innovation for U.K and Israel, to learn how he runs his teams, keeps them motivated and drive the mixed teams to generate quick and new insights during 1 day sprints. 

The insights coming out of the hackatons, are then again used in innovation and customer engagements. 

Yves Mulkers

Yves Mulkers is the founder of 7wData and a widely followed voice in the data and AI community. He curates the 7wData and AI Beat newsletters, reaching hundreds of thousands of data and AI professionals, and writes on data strategy, analytics, AI, and the evolving data ecosystem.

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