Swimming Australia hopeful AI can deliver Olympic gold

Swimming Australia is racing ahead with using artificial intelligence, rolling out the technology across its training pools nationally as part of a bid to top the swimming medal table at the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics.

Australia secured seven gold medals at the recent Paris Olympics – just one shy of the US – and team executives are hopeful their new technology road map can help them reach the top spot in three years’ time.

Much has been made of how artificial intelligence and machine learning can potentially help improve labour efficiency and boost productivity, but Swimming Australia general manager Jess Corones is hoping it can shave milliseconds off lap times for the nation’s fastest swimmers.

Swimming Australia general manager Jess Corones.

Corones describes Sparta, a custom-built race analysis system developed with tech giant Amazon Web Services (AWS), as the organisation’s secret weapon. Sparta uses advanced computer vision and machine learning to track swimmers across all eight lanes of the training pool, measuring metrics such as stroke rate, breath, distance per stroke, and velocity, then gathering it together in Swimming Australia’s data lake.

“When you think back to the golden era of Australian swimming, when we had the likes of Susie O’Neill, Grant Hackett and Ian Thorpe, they trained in squads. It was a lot of group training,” Corones said.

“Training is much more individual now. And thanks to cloud computing we have much deeper insights into individual performance, which means we can get that information into the hands of the coaches and sports scientists, who can then plan and prepare better for the individual athletes.

“We’re always chasing the Americans. They’re fantastic competitors, and we want to go into LA as the best prepared team and a lot of that is about using technology and data.”

Swimming Australia has trained advanced machine learning algorithms on the footage of swimming competitions from around the world – including the World Aquatics Championships – and added data on competitors to enable coaches and swimmers to benchmark their progress. Coaches can query the data using their natural language, asking questions about technique or which turn was the fastest.

“Currently it takes about 30 minutes to process each race because of the sheer complexity and compute needed,” Corones said. “With AWS we want to give coaches immediate access to all race metrics so they can have real-time conversations with athletes.

“Our coaches are not tech people, and we don’t want them to be. We want them to remain world-leading coaches who can utilise and interpret the most up-to-date data around them to support their decision-making and coaching.”

Corones describes Sparta, a custom-built race analysis system developed with Amazon Web Services, as Swimming Australia’s secret weapon.

Swimming Australia has also developed a relay app, which can accurately predict teams that opponents are likely to pick, the order they are likely to swim in, and the times they are likely to deliver.

It has had a commercial partnership with AWS since 2019, and the terms were not disclosed.

Sparta has already had a significant impact, according to Corones, and will now be rolled out to training pools around the country, in what will make Australia one of the first countries to install the capabilities in a training environment.

“The challenge is that race competitions only have one swimmer per lane but in a training pool you’ve got swimmers sharing lanes in the pool, multiple swimmers in each lane, swimming different strokes, drills, sets and repetitions, with coaches on the side yelling stroke rates and times from their stopwatches,” she said.

“It’s a much harder place than an actual race to accurately measure and compute what’s happening in real-time because of the complexity of the environment.”

Amazon Web Services’ Paul Devlin, who leads global sports business development, said the swimming pool presented unique challenges compared with the likes of rugby, football or basketball.

“We’ve got a camera picking up a feed, and then the athlete disappears underwater, and it’s a really hard challenge to solve that,” he said.

“Performance analytics is a big part of our business. At the moment, we’ve got lots of our sports customers talking to us about how they can take their data, transform it, and create insights for high-performance coaches, and then also to engage their fans at a deeper level.”

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