One of the most watched spectacles in the Australian sporting calendar is the State of Origin, a best-of-three rugby league series pitting players who began their careers in New South Wales and Queensland against each other. Late in the second game, Queensland’s Johnathan Thurston — who had remained on the pitch despite a season-ending shoulder injury — lined up a possible game-winning conversion kick.
A heart-racing, nerve-wracking moment, right? Actually no.
Thanks to a landmark deal between the National Rugby League, the players, wearable tech company Catapult Sports and broadcaster Channel Nine, some tracking data was shown live on the sponsored Telstra Tracker. Thurston’s average heart rate for the match had been 168 beats per minute, with a peak of 195, yet his pulse actually lowered to 161 as he lined up the match-deciding try.
“His heart rate came down just before he was about to make the kick when a consumer would probably think it goes up, right?” Catapult chief operating officer Barry McNeill told SportTechie from Melbourne. “He’s done it 10,000 times and actually managed to get his heart rate to the lowest it had been for the whole game, just as he was about to kick the biggest kick of the game. That’s huge, right?”
That’s an unprecedented insight into the mental and physical training of elite athletics. In post-match interviews, Thurston confirmed that he did feel nerves but, at the same, time relied on his usual preparation of controlling his breathing to slow his heart rate down.
“They’re the moments that you live for,” Thurston told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “I was just going through my process of what I do, keeping calm, making sure [I stuck to] the process that I do a thousand times before, keep my head down and strike through the ball. Straight through.”
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This one data point is a tantalizing glimpse of what’s to come in Australian sports coverage, as such broadcast deals with the country’s National Basketball League and, most recently, Australian Football League have also been announced.
The AFL deal — which also includes event-statistics tracker Champion Data in the partnership — arises from the sport’s most recent collective bargaining agreement, in which the players agreed to license the GPS data to broadcasters with some limitations. While Major League Baseball’s recently published CBA prohibited the commercialization of wearable tech data, the NBA is merely exploring the idea with the potential for in-game use and commercialization down the road. NFL players recently acceded to the same idea with their wearable Whoop data, only Australia is years ahead in the implementation of the idea.
No country has the same progressive sports science culture as Australia. McNeill gave another example: Three days before Australia’s World Cup qualifier against Japan in Melbourne’s Etihad Stadium last October, the idea of having the players wear small chips for use with Catapult’s ClearSky technology — which communicates with installed stadium transmitters for indoor use when GPS satellites won’t work — and McNeill, who used to work in European soccer, thought there was no chance of success.
“Literally we had the whole Australia team kitted up with these devices for the game — a hugely important game — and there was just no resistance whatsoever,” he said.
What fans of the AFL can expect for the use of player tracking data in broadcasts in the early going are numbers that are recognizable without a lot of context. Many sports teams use Catapult in training to measure work load, but conveying some of those metrics won’t be meaningful to, say, the casual fan watching in a pub.
Instead, McNeill said, the expectation for now is that broadcasters could display heat maps tracking a player’s positioning over the pitch, average speed, heart rate and so on, typically ranked as pinnacles, or top-fives, in local parlance.
“Our advice is to not drown the consumers in too much data,” he said. “A thousand data points per second per athlete is a pretty scary statement from us. What the hell does that mean, right? We want to enrich the experience for our consumers. Let’s not forget that’s the objective.”
Catapult and Champion will eventually work toward merging their respective data feeds with the video for more complex analysis.
“Pull the two together,” McNeill said, “and you can tell a better story.”
While the full text of the new AFL CBA is not yet available publicly, the website for the players’ union describes the broadcasting of GPS data to be a fan benefit, along with an open-ended promise to consider such innovative ideas: “The players will approach the next six years with an open mind as to how they can innovate and explore new ways to make the game better for all.”