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They play hard. they play often, and they play to win. Australian sports teams win
more than their fair share of titles, demolishing rivals with seeming ease. How do
they do it? A big part of the secret is an extensive and expensive network of
sporting academies underpinned by science and medicine. At the Australian
Institute of Sport (AIS), hundreds of youngsters and pros live and train under the
eyes of coaches. Another body, the Australian Sports Commission (ASC), finances
programmes of excellence in a total of 96 sports for thousands of sportsmen and
women. Both provide intensive coaching. training facilities and nutritional advice.
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Inside the academies, science takes centre stage. The AIS employs more than 100
sports scientists and doctors, and collaborates with scores of others in universities
and research centres. AIS scientists work across a number of sports, applying skills
learned in one - such as building muscle strength in golfers - to others. such as
swimming and squash. They are backed up by technicians who design instruments
to collect cata from athletes. They all focus on one aim: winning. 'We can't waste
our time looking at ethereal scientific questions that don't help the coach work with
an athlete and improve performance; says Peter Fricker. chief of science at AIS.
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A lot of their work comes down to measurement - everything from the exact angle
of a swimmer's dive to the second-by-second power output of a cyclist. This data is
used to wring improvements out of athletes. The focus is on individLals, tweaking
performances to squeeze an extra hundredth of a second here, an extra millimetre
there. No gain is too slight to bother with. It's the tint. gradual improvements that
add up to world-beating results. To demonstrate how the system works, Bruce
Mason at AIS shows off the prototype of a 30 analysis tool fer studying swimmers.
A wire-frame model of a champion swimmer slices through the water, her anms
moving in slow motion. Looking side-on, Mason measures the distance between
strokes. From above, he analyses how her spine swivels. When fully developed,
this system will enable him to build a biomechanical profile for coaches to use to
help budding swimmers. Mason's contribution to sport also includes the
development of the SWAN (SWimming ANalysis) system now used in Australian
national competitions. It collects images from digital cameras running at 50 frames
a second and breaks down each part of a swimmer's performance into factors that
can be analysed individually - stroke length, stroke frequency. average duration of
each stroke, velocity. start lap and finish times, and so on. At the end of each race,
SWAN spits out data on each swimmer.
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'Take a look,' says Mason, pulling out a sheet of data. He points out the data on the
swimmers in second and third place. which shows that the one who finished third
actually swam faster. So why did he finish 35 hundredths of a second down? 'His
turn times were 44 hundredths of a second behind the other guy,' says Mason. 'If he
can improve on his turns, he can do much better.' This is the kind of accuracy that
AI$ scientists' research is bringing to a range of sports. With the Cooperative
Research Centre for Micro Technology in Melbourne, they are developing
unobtrusive sensors that will be embedded in an athlete's clothes or running shoes
to monitor heart rate, sweating, heat production or any other factor that might have
an impact on an athlete's ability to run. There's more to it than simply measuring
performance. Fricker gives t he example of athletes who may be down with coughs
and colds I I or 12 t imes a year: After years of experimentation, AI$ and the
University of Newcastle in New South Wales developed a test that measures how
much of the immune-system prot ein immunoglobulin A is present in athletes'
saliva. If lgA levels suddenly fall below a certain level, training is eased or dropped
altogether. Soon, lgA levels start rising again, and the danger passes. Since the tests
were introduced, AI$ athletes in all sports have been remarkably successful at
staying healthy.
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Using data is a complex business. Well before a champ·ionship, sports scientists
and coaches start to prepare the athlete by developing a 'competition model', based
on what they expect will be the winning times. 'You design the model to make that
time.' says Mason. 'A start of this much, each free-swimming period has to be this
fast. with a certain stroke frequency and stroke length, with turns done in these
times.' All the training is then geared towards making the athlete hit those targets,
both overall and for each segment of the race. Techniques like these have
transformed Australia into arguably the world's most successful sporting nation.
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Of course. there's nothing to stop other countries copying - and many have tried.
Some years ago, the AIS unveiled coolant -lined jackets for endurance athletes. At
the Atlanta Olympic Games in 1996, these sliced as much as two per cent off
cyclists' and rowers' times. Now everyone uses themT he same has happened to the
'attitude tent', developed by AI$ to replicate the effect of altitude training at sea
level. But Australia's success story is about more than easily copied technological
fixes, and up to now no nation has replicated its all-encompassing system.

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