For Hockey Canada, the only goal in the Olympics is gold. With 20 total medals, 13 of them gold, Canada is the most successful country in Olympic hockey. Both the women’s and men’s teams took home gold in Sochi and Vancouver — the previous two Winter Olympics. This year in PyeongChang, Canada will not have the help of NHL players like Sidney Crosby or Jonathan Toews, but they will have technology.
Catapult Sports is a company that creates wearable performance analytics devices designed to maximize performance and minimize injury, and Hockey Canada has been working with the company since 2015. Catapult has had to adapt its systems to gather accurate analytics on the ice.
“Most of our tech has been built to capture athletes who are running, not skating,” said Ryan Warkins, Catapult’s VP of Analytics. “In hockey, you move your legs side-to-side. The force the athlete is applying to themselves is much different.”
Catapult is constantly creating new algorithms like stride recognition and the explosive ratio of movements to better capture on-ice performance. Once new algorithms are created, they can be retroactively analyzed with data from years past.
Adam Douglas, the Manager of Sports Performance for Hockey Canada, noted that one of the main benefits of using Catapult is reducing human bias in training.
“Catapult eliminates an athlete or coaches personal perception of workload,” he said. “The data is a true objective measure of the effort put forth.”
While the data is crucial to improve training, it was Catapult’s willingness to collaborate that first drew Douglas to the company. With NHL players no longer competing in the Olympics, suddenly the national team is comprised of professional players in Canada and Europe. This posed a problem for the team, how do they compile metrics when players only trained together once every four years?
“Our biggest issue was decentralized players,” Douglas said. “Catapult created a way for me to monitor remotely. They created docking stations that charge the device but also download the files directly to a shared Dropbox folder.”
With players coming from a variety of professional leagues, schedules were sporadic and preparation was far from uniform.
“We got 25 guys on 25 different preparation loads coming into camp,” Douglas said. “We worked to get everyone on the same page and we made sure people coming late had Catapult units so we could download their data.”
Besides the men’s team in 2006, Hockey Canada has taken home every Olympic gold since the turn of the century. The team doesn’t have NHL star power but they are still a good bet to return to the podium in PyeongChang.
For Catapult, the company already works with nine NHL teams but its work in hockey is still constantly evolving.
“We are not stopping. We want goalie specific metrics. What is the impact of how many times they go down to the ice? Or how the body turns for a save?” Warkins said. “Our goal is to create a holistic view of everything that is going on on the ice.”