Topic: News: Technology aiding performance at Olympic Training Center

[Chris Ⓐ LeRoux]

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Technology aiding performance at Olympic Training Center
By BRIAN GOMEZ

Jackie Berube first noticed the hulking cameras. Then she saw the shiny TV monitors.

A steely glare and sigh of frustration followed as she sulked toward her weightlifting platform at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, uneasy about every aspect of her workout being caught on tape.

"I don't know if I'm going to like this," Berube said she thought two years ago when a state-of-the-art video replay device was installed. "It's going to be distracting."

The Eye on Performance system, featuring 70 digital video cameras and 50-plus large-screen, high-definition TVs, has been more of an attraction than a distraction, changing the way athletes train and approach competitions.

Nearly all workouts in gymnastics, volleyball, weightlifting and wrestling are captured by 360-degree cameras with five preset viewpoints. The footage is displayed on 42- and 65-inch monitors after a delay between 10 and 40 seconds, and it can be transferred onto a computer by coaches and e-mailed to athletes.

For athletes, the system is a sophisticated method of learning how their bodies need to function so they can hang with the world's best. For coaches, it eliminates the headache of one-dimensional handheld cameras, low-quality tapes and tangled extension cords.

Plus, going high-tech didn't blow the U.S. Olympic Committee's budget. USOC sponsor AT&T committed $3 million to the OTC and facilities in Chula Vista, Calif., and Lake Placid, N.Y., and Panasonic, also a USOC sponsor, waived installation charges.

"It's the best individual tool I've seen used since I've been here," said USA Gymnastics men's national team coordinator Ron Brant, who has worked at the OTC for 19 years.

Brant helped write the proposal for Eye on Performance, inspired by an advanced training tool at the Japan Institute of Sports Sciences in Tokyo. The USOC sport science division tweaked Brant's ideas, then developed the software and implemented the system.

Upgrades are being discussed following the 2008 Olympics, where the U.S. won two team medals and eight individual medals in gymnastics, a silver in women's indoor volleyball, three medals in wrestling and no medals in weightlifting.

With 16 cameras in two gymnasiums, Brant said the system "creates conversation, and that's a big value between the coaches and the athletes. You can over-coach and over-talk. It's good for the athletes to take it in themselves."

On heavy lifts, Berube often detects she's leaning forward or raising her hips. Sometimes she can tell she's standing on her toes or not displaying enough force in her finish.

"The video tells you what you're feeling," Berube said. "A lot of the athletes, it makes a huge difference for them to see it. When they watch it with the video, it's completely different, and they completely understand it."

Colorado Springs wrestler Sally Roberts finds the system most beneficial before tournaments, when she's trying to perfect head positioning and hand movement.

"We'll work a move, and we'll go through and watch," Roberts said. "It really hammers the message home that I'm not doing something right and that if I want to win and be successful, I need to do something different."