Bertrand begins hunt for swimming’s secret weapon

Swimming boss John Bertrand has turned to Silicon Valley for technology to help the national team win in Tokyo.

Swimming Australia president John Bertrand is leading the hunt for new technology to help the Australian swimming team succeed at the Tokyo Olympics in 2020. Picture: Stuart McEvoy.

Champion sailor John Bertrand has begun a search for the swimming equivalent of the legendary winged keel that helped Australia break the American stranglehold on the America’s Cup in 1983.

Bertrand is now the president of Swimming Australia and last month led a delegation of high-ranking officials to Silicon Valley in search of new technology that Australia’s high-performance coaches could use to give the ­national team an edge at the Tokyo Olympics in 2020.

The Australian team finished second on the medal tally in the pool in Rio last year with three gold medals, but the US dominated the competition with 16 gold medals.

Bertrand learned the power of new technology when he skippered Australia II, with Ben Lexcen’s radical keel design beneath the hull, to victory in 1983 and he’s now keen to exploit any technological advantage he can find to put Australian swimmers on top of the world.

Swimming sponsor Optus arranged appointments for the swimming officials and coaches to meet with senior executives from Apple, Facebook and Google and they also met with a range of start-up companies doing cutting-edge research and development. Bertrand said they were trying to look “over the horizon’’ to identify the expertise to succeed in 2020 and beyond.

“We know the level of performance and expertise will be higher than what it is today — history tells us that,’’ he said.

“Our objective is to get there faster than any one else in the world. It’s about understanding world-best practice. We saw a range of technologies that already exist and could be applicable to swimming.’’

He said the US-based companies did not hesitate to assist the Australian team. “The interesting thing is that very few people ask them, so it’s just a question of being inquisitive,’’ he said.

Bertrand did not want to telegraph Swimming Australia’s discoveries to competitors but he said they were particularly interested in technology that would enable coaches and sports scientists to “monitor the athlete in the water in real time’’.

National head coach Jacco Verhaeren said they hoped to find a system that would replicate the GPS-tracking devices that land-based sports have been using for years.

“GPS doesn’t work in water so at the moment we don’t have access to the same technology as some other sports,’’ he said. “We want to figure out how to do the same sort of tracking with ­swimmers.

“We think we’ve found some useful tools but we need to have them working in the next year so we can take full advantage of them by the Olympics,” Bertrand said.

Beyond tech companies, Swimming Australia has established links with Australia’s SAS regiment, the Red Bull Formula One team and the Queensland Ballet, to learn about their processes for achieving excellence.

“Physically and mentally, the push is to perform at a high level.’’

As part of the quest for knowledge, Bertrand left for Bermuda at the weekend, where he will spend two weeks studying the current America’s Cup competition and looking for innovation that is also applicable to swimming.