Case study
How British Athletics is using data to help its athletes go for gold
Together with British Athletics, we built a cloud analytics platform that gives its coaches and athletes unique insights into their performance. By making data-informed decisions, the team is gaining competitive advantage as it seeks to win more medals in elite competition.
The challenge
In elite sport, small changes can make a big difference. British Athletics wanted to give its coaches and athletes a competitive advantage by providing them with unique data insights that would enable them to make better decisions in training and competition. This would complement the experience and expertise of coaches, giving the team a better chance of reaching the podium.
The approach
To achieve this goal, British Athletics worked with our data intelligence team to reimagine its data processes and technology, as well as building a data-led culture within the organisation.
The first step was to improve the way British Athletics collects and analyses data. Together, we created a list of 20 criteria that impact on athletic performance, including nutrition, strength and conditioning, biomechanics, sleep patterns, and injury history.
We then designed processes that would let the team collect and clean this important performance data, so British Athletics could build a consistent view of how its athletes were improving over time. Crucially, the athletes’ own performance data was also benchmarked against historic competition data from the past 25 years, so the team could see how they were tracking against previous champions.
Our data intelligence team took on the challenge of bringing all this data together by working in agile two-week sprints. They were able to bring in expertise from across PwC to work on data cleansing, warehousing, modelling, and advanced analytics, turning disparate datasets into tangible insights.
To enable British Athletics to build a culture of data-led decision making, it’s crucial that the insights and performance trends are easy to access and understand. We worked closely with British Athletics to build a custom website and app called Torch, where athletes, coaches and senior leadership can securely use data insights in simple dashboards.
The impact
The data intelligence platform has given the team a "huge advantage" by enabling athletes and coaches to make better decisions in training and competition.
It adds that extra dimension to help athletes understand even more where they can improve and enable coaches to analyse their performance in a different way.
As the platform develops and the dataset becomes richer, British Athletics will benefit from new insights, such as the relationship between training intensity and injury, or between sleep quality and recovery. This represents a major evolution for British Athletics and the way it manages, uses and gets value from its data.
"This has been a hugely exciting project, with both organisations eager to push boundaries and develop new ways to help athletes win more medals. While the work we’re doing here is unique, it’s ultimately about using data to optimise your performance and achieve your goals, which is important in any industry."
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