Eric Alard: Between adrenaline and algorithms, sports in the digital age

Former athlete Eric Alard is a regular at the Olympics. Now working in the digital field, he explores the increasingly close links between sports and technology, for both athletes and spectators.

Hello Eric Alard, could you start by introducing yourself?

I am the Director of School-Company Relations at ENI, the IT school. This department helps learners find internships or apprenticeships.

Before that, I had a long career in sports, particularly in bobsleigh. I spent 30 years there, both as an athlete and as a team coach. In the end, I participated in the Olympics five times, twice as an athlete and three times as a coach. During my last experience, I was the head coach of the Swiss team, which won the Olympic gold in 2014.

From your experience, to what extent can digital technology impact an athlete's daily life?

More and more technological tools are becoming part of the daily routine for elite athletes. They help improve performance, manage fatigue, injuries, and so on. The question is: what do we carry with us when we are performing? A power meter on a bike, a heart rate monitor when running, etc. We have a whole range of video analysis, time analysis, and so on.

We also have increasing medical analyses. For example, measuring blood composition before and after exertion to see how it reacts. Today, in endurance sports, some athletes train at high altitudes to increase red blood cells. When they return to Paris's sea level, they'll have more red blood cells than if they had stayed in the city. This means they'll perform faster and longer.

In professional teams today, we are hiring positions related to these technologies. At one time, we had just a coach. Then, we had a coach plus a physical trainer. Then, we added nutritionists and mental coaches.

Today, we have data scientists responsible for making all this data usable as quickly as possible for coaches and decision-makers.

Because it's great to collect data, but it needs to be used. If we collect it just for the sake of collecting, it’s pointless. For example, now we have tools like drones that can observe tactical situations in outdoor team sports (rugby, football...). But if it takes a month to process the data to get information, it might be too late.

So, there is now a whole array of human resources around data to improve and personalize the training of elite athletes.

All of this means we have more and more data: we need to know how to filter it. And there’s also a point where we need to trust, because it’s still a matter of men and women on the starting line, trying to be stronger than the others. Sometimes, in some sports, the equipment makes the difference. But even with the best equipment, if you falter on the day, someone with less advanced equipment could beat you.

And what about amateur athletes?

We see this phenomenon too. Nowadays, most people who enjoy running own a connected watch, monitor their heart rate, or use GPS. And when they return, they like to share the distance or route they’ve done on social media.

Today, when we go to exercise, we have our headphones with Spotify, our smartphone, and our connected watch. We might think, "Hey, I ran a minute less than last time!" We check a GPS that guides us, and we don’t even need to plan the route in advance. All of this sometimes helps people get into sports when they previously didn't want to because they thought, "I don't want to look at a map," or "What if I get lost?"

Today, we don’t get lost anymore. So, that’s also a good aspect of technology: allowing people to discover sports. We saw this during COVID with a number of apps that flourished for exercising at home. Many people started working out because they realized they just needed a chair or a stool. And this message was less effective without technology.

Can the focus on data, sensors, and measurements lead to negative effects?

Yes, there can be negative effects. Relying not on one's sensations but on what the technology says. Becoming obsessed with it. For example, if someone tells you, "You need to sleep 7 hours a night to recover," but the next night you sleep 6.5 hours. And the next day, for some reason, you’re less effective in training. The explanation will be: "It’s because I missed half an hour of sleep"...

It can sometimes even stifle potential! An athlete might think: "My tests show I can do this, I feel good, but because the sensor says no, that’s your maximum, I won’t try to exceed my limit." Even though in some contexts, we might push beyond the limit.

A good example is in cycling. Today, cyclists are at the forefront with all these sensors: power, watts, they know exactly how many minutes they can sustain, to the second.

Last year at the Tour de France, during a time trial, Jonas Vingegaard was riding and saw the watts displayed on his sensor. He thought, "My sensor must be broken because I feel great even though I’m exceeding the watts I was supposed to be at." Maybe at some point, he could have thought, "I’ll slow down, otherwise, I’ll be too tired," but that day, he was possibly in exceptional shape, and he exceeded everything technology and science could predict (his sensor was not broken at all).

Technology can help. But at some point, you also need to rely on sensations, that kind of adrenaline, stress that comes during major competitions like the Olympics. We prepare scientifically, and then on the day, we give our best.

What changes have social media brought for athletes over the past 15 years?

A lot! First, some athletes become influencers by sharing their experiences. They reach a larger community.

When I started sports in the late 80s, to be known, you had to be on TV: it was a very limited channel. Today, athletes can reach a large audience through social media platforms like Instagram or TikTok. And if their way of communicating is liked, they gain more fans. This can lead to more sponsors, more resources for training, and so on. It’s a virtuous circle... but it can also bring more pressure on the day.

If only our family watches us perform, it’s not the same as 100,000 followers ready to cheer us on... but also to tell us on social media: "You’re terrible."

This can add extra pressure that might lead the athlete to explore mental preparation they hadn’t considered. Not for their technical or physical performance on the day: they have that covered and feel confident. But perhaps to manage their haters, those online who say: "You look awful running," "Your jump was terrible," "You’ve been saying you’ll win for months, but you finished fourth, why should we follow you?" and so on.

On one hand, it brings fame, but on the other hand, it can cause stress if one isn’t trained for it. Nowadays, many high-level sports training programs include these topics. How to handle media, social networks... media training, in fact.

There is a positive side to social media, but as with every coin, there’s a negative side that can oppress and stress you on the day, preventing you from performing.

I was able to witness this evolution because my first Games were in 1992 in Albertville: the Internet was just beginning. The last ones were in 2014 in Sochi: at that point, social networks were booming, even though Instagram didn’t have the potential it has today and TikTok didn’t exist yet.

During those Games, there was a moment when I thought, "I need to stop looking at my phone." Because we get requests from everywhere! Even from people we don't know who know we're in Sochi, and they ask us, "How is it there? Is the village nice? Is the food good?" And in the end, we’re no longer focused on the competition. Because the interaction is immediate.

In fact, it adds a real mental load for athletes. You have to think about recharging your phone, asking yourself, "Should I post a photo now? Is this good for my concentration? What will my coach say if they see that 20 minutes before my departure, I posted a photo on social media?" But on the other hand, we as spectators demand this.

Specifically, has technology had an impact on spectators?

Technology has changed our view of sports. I remember the first truly immersive experience of living inside a competition. It was "Les Yeux dans les Bleus," during the 1998 World Cup, a documentary that introduced us to the French team.

Today, that’s common! And we keep asking for more. We go to a live match in a stadium or sports hall, and at halftime, what do we do? We pull out our smartphones and check other results, watch replays, and want the latest news. At halftime, we can even sometimes see the locker rooms.

Players on the field hide their mouths because there are spectators (experts at this) who read lips and later post on social media: "Look, they said this about this person."

I’ll give you an example from bobsleigh. When I started, we were prohibited from having electronic devices on board that could take measurements. It was against the rules. Then, at a certain point, to make the sport more attractive and for spectators to understand bobsleigh better, it became mandatory to have a sensor on our bobs. We went from a ban to a requirement, to measure instant speed, angulation in turns... a lot of data that is not very useful for athletes but is used for spectators.

So, that changes the demands from spectators, and inevitably, the organization wants more and more. We saw it with series on Netflix, showing behind-the-scenes of Formula 1, the Tour de France as well. It’s important to realize: athletes now have cameras following them, whereas before they were all alone, relaxed.

A more personal question: what made you transition from sports to tech?

I grew up with tech: in the 80s, I had computers that were a thousand times less powerful than today’s basic smartphones. I’ve always loved tech and quickly made it a tool for performance in sports. I used a portable computer at a time when there was almost no hard drive, and I programmed databases in dBase III to try to calculate which was my best pair of skates depending on the outside temperature, create various diagrams...

I’ve always had that drive; I did a lot of statistics when I was a coach in bobsleigh to see the best trajectories. I worked a lot in that area, and it was a passion. So, once my career was over, I quickly pursued a degree in computer science.

I haven’t always had the means to put into practice what I had in mind because bobsleigh isn’t a sport with a lot of resources. The resources we have are used for buying high-performance equipment, bobs or skates, but not necessarily for the ancillary aspects. I managed to make my place in bobsleigh because I had this skill: I made fairly complex Excel spreadsheets to calculate probabilities, performance indices, etc. And that gave an advantage to the teams I coached.

For a long time, I did these graphical analyses with Excel and then printed them out. Meanwhile, some coaching colleagues used overlays with graph paper and a ruler because they didn’t have that skill. When I started coaching in 98-99, I was 30: I found myself facing coaches of 60, at the end of their careers, who had never known computers. So yes, it worked both ways; it was two different ways of doing things... except it took them an hour and I did it in 10 minutes. So, I had 50 minutes left to do a whole bunch of other things.

What is your view on artificial intelligence?

Artificial intelligence, in my profession or in sports, I see it as something that allows us to be faster with basic tasks.

You type something into ChatGPT, Mistral, Dust... whatever you use. But for basic things, you no longer have time to waste. So, you have time to focus on things that match what you know how to do.

And that’s where we make a difference. Because if we all type the same thing and in three minutes, ChatGPT gives us the answer, it’s after that we really see the quality of people who bring something extra. ChatGPT does 70% of the work for me: now, the difference will be made in the remaining 30 percent. That’s where we need to bring our skills, our knowledge, and make a difference.

Sport and Tech: final thoughts?

Technology, digital tools, change athletes and how we consume sports. But in fact, we must remember that sports have always been a reflection of society.

Today, society is technological... so sports are becoming technological.

It adapts, it lives with the times. And since we now put technology everywhere, sports are also integrating it everywhere.

[Cover photo: Onur Binay]

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