Carolina Marin: How Big Data gives the Olympic champion the edge
For 15 years, the reigning Olympic champ from Spain has been harnessing the power of data to give her an edge on the badminton court, now big data, AI and VR could help her to a second straight gold medal at Tokyo 2020
Big Data is helping power Carolina Marin's bid to retain her Olympic badminton crown.
But using numbers is nothing new to the reigning women's singles champion, who has been guided by data and stats to hone her training, monitor her physical fitness, and create pre-match strategies against her rivals for over 15 years.
"We have been working with big data and specific analysis for a really long time and it makes things much easier for me," Marin told Olympics.com, "because I can know my rival much better, I can be more calm when I step on the court."
By 2006 Marin and her team were already analysing data on her opponents manually from video, using Excel's dynamic tables to figure out opponents' game patterns so that she had an advantage before a single shuttlecock was struck.
Since then, giant leaps in Big Data, Machine Learning (ML), and Artificial Intelligence (AI), mean that Marin can use their valuable bank of unique data on herself and all her rivals to give her an edge. This database is something that no-one else in the world of badminton has.
Sports analytics technology has advanced so far that AI and VR (virtual reality) can use all this data to allow Marin to visually see a game before it even happens.
"We call them ‘virtual matches’," Marin continues, "we analyse the data of each rival and use it to do the preparation and the strategy before the big events."
"Above all it helps us work out my rival's weaknesses and come up with a game plan for every opponent," Marin told El Pais recently.
Emerging from the toughest year of her life, Spain's trailblazing shuttler has two clear goals in 2021:
Defending her Olympic title in Tokyo, and winning the BWF World Championships for a fourth time in her home town of Huelva in the south of Spain in December.
"Right now I don't see any limits," she told Spanish sports paper Marca at the end of April.
Big data, bigger achievements across sports
Marin and her team have brought to badminton a data success story that we've seen in other sports.
Like the fairytale of Leicester City FC when they stunned the world of football by winning the English Premier League in 2015/16, powered partly by Big Data.
The team wore a palm-sized device during training and matches fitted with a dozen sensors that collected information on acceleration, heart rate, position, collision impacts, and a lot more.
It helped them gauge the physical wear and tear on each player, and coming towards the end of the season, Leicester City had fewer injuries than any other club in the league.
Data has been dominating decisions at the Olympics for some time now too:
The British cycling team took on a numbers-based approach in 2004 and at Beijing 2008 won 14 gold medals, 10 more than they did four years earlier.
Later, at the London 2012 Games, the South African swim team trained with an activity tracker which relayed swimmers' lap times, number of strokes and heart rate to the team in real time, Chad le Clos and Cameron Van Der Burgh both went on to win gold medals.
Marin and her team were way ahead of the curve in her sport, and young Carolina was the test case in Spain's great badminton experiment when she arrived at the country’s sporting high performance centre at 14 years of age.
"Carolina has been our guinea pig," coach Fernando Rivas told El Pais' Sara Cuesta Torrado, "we have been experimenting with her over all these years."
Carolina Marin: Team player in an individual event
Badminton singles maybe an individual event, but it's hardly a surprise that Marin often uses the plural 'we' when talking about wins and losses, success and setbacks.
Her team includes:
Head coach Fernando Rivas and assistant Anders Thomsen, technical coach Ernesto Garcia, physiotherapist Diego Chapinal, fitness coach Guillermo Sanchez, sports psychologist Maria Martinez, and personal psychologist Fany Barembaum.
It gives you an idea of what goes into the making of of an Olympic champion.
In the end, it's all in the detail, it's all in the data.
Collecting data for sports analytics is the new normal, but it's all about how you use the information on the court. Just because you know the patterns of another person's game doesn't mean you don't need to play brilliant badminton and improvise, and so much of sport is in the mind, in the moment.
Next-level technical preparation, data, and sports tech creates the environment for success, but in the end it’s Carolina Marin who has to execute out there on the court.
Big data to help Marin defend her gold at Tokyo 2020?
It's been a tough ride for Carolina Marin over the last year-and-a-half. When asked how she's managed to regain her form and find motivation, she told Marca:
"The main secret has been getting back to being myself again. Everyone knows what I've been through... The pandemic, my father's accident, his death... It's been a hard year and I hardly had any time to mourn because I had to compete. Over Christmas I feel like I found myself again and I got back to enjoying badminton and the desire to keep achieving big things."
After the injury in January 2020 and her recovery, Marin has returned to the court with that same fighting spirit that characterises her, and her goals are clear.
With the science of numbers in her corner, those goals are looking more and more attainable. In that interview with El Pais, coach Rivas says, "Big Data might be the difference between gold and silver, but the key is mental strength."
Lucky, then, that Marin is one of the mentally strongest women in sport. "Making history is a motivation for me," Marin told Marca. No-one in the history of women's badminton has won back-to-back Olympic medals on top of three world championships and four European titles. History awaits at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics in 2021.