The TCS New York City Marathon will be beta testing a new feature behind-the-scenes this year that will offer real-time predictions on race winners.
Leveraging its data analytics platform, Ignio, TCS for the first time will start to predict winners. Since TCS launched Ignio in 2015, the platform has used artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automation to power enterprise IT services at major Fortune 500 companies.
This year, out of the sight of marathon attendees and spectators on TV, TCS marathon workers will quietly deploy Ignio behind the scenes and use data points, such as each professional racer’s historical performance and real-time analytics, to generate predictions on race outcomes.
TCS isn’t sure yet whether Ignio will make a public appearance this year. The system might be used to offer soundbites for the television broadcast, but Michelle Taylor, TCS’s head of sports sponsorships. said the company is beta testing Ignio in hopes of possibly integrating it within the app and broadcast in 2019. Further down the road, the company may have ambitions to gamify that data somehow, though it does not currently have plans to support sports gambling in any official capacity.
“We wanted to apply the tool to the marathon in a way that could allow us to predict the probability of which pro athlete would win the race,” Taylor said. “We were looking at the race broadcast, thinking ‘How can we make this more engaging?’ Gambling is not the soul purpose of this, but people love guessing who is going to win and if we can leverage this cognitive automation tool and apply it to the marathon, it’d be interesting to see if we can predict the winners.”
If Ignio is rolled out in an official capacity in 2019, TCS will likely look to display the data in some sort of graphical way, whether as on-screen percentages or a ranking based on prediction data.
Separately, the marathon is debuting a number of new tools on the app that will aid runners and spectators and help make it the “most technologically-advanced marathon in the world,” said Michelle Taylor, TCS’s head of sports sponsorships.
Fans can anticipate a range of new features on the official marathon app. The biggest addition will be a tool that enables spectators to track their best routes around the race course so that they can catch the runners they want to see at as many spots as possible.
Users will see a map of the course that highlights all the spectator points. When they pick their first spot, all the other spots that are physically impossible to make in time will red out, allowing spectators to more easily plan their cheer routes ahead of time. The tool will then connect with Google Maps so that users can see the quickest and best way to get from point A to point B. It will additionally connect with an existing athlete tracker to show the real-time position of runners on the course, then alert spectators when they should leave to make their next location. Users should be able to reach three or four places during the race depending on how many runners they’re following and the cheer route they choose. Spectators can also set up a route that allows them to track and watch multiple runners.
Supplementing all of that functionality will be a new voice control feature integrated into the tracking tool that will enable users to look-up racers by talking directly to their phones.
“The tracking feature is the most popular feature of the app because it truly solves a problem for spectators,” Taylor said. “Now that we’ve cracked the code on that and had some success, we’re looking to see what new tech is available to make the experience better.”
SportTechie Takeaway
These new app features will enhance the spectator and racer experience by enabling cheering squads to more efficiently find runners. However, fans should also keep an eye out for winner predictions, which could debut in an unofficial capacity on the broadcast.
While the prediction tool wasn’t built specifically for sports gambling, the beta comes as event organizers across professional sports imagine how to leverage data in the face of real-money wagering. Sports betting can help to increase viewer interest in events, and adding real-time data to the marathon broadcast, as well as opening the door to real-money wagering based on that data in the future, could put endurance racing on the sports betting map.
Correction: A previous version of this story may have created the impression that sports betting was a motivation behind the development and use of Ignio. A spokesperson for TCS, however, subsequently confirmed that “the Ignio tool was not built with gambling application in mind.”