How Technology Could Have Helped to Extend an Athlete’s Career
Injury costs are a leading threat to many sporting organisations and governments worldwide.
In Australia alone, the cost of sporting injuries for 2014 were estimated to be between $1.65billion and $2billion.
Whilst injuries are a common by-product of sport (especially within the elite environment) there has never been a time in sport’s history that the players, coaches and media are more aware of the long-term impacts. For this reason many relatively young and promising athletes have chosen to retire, putting themselves, their families and their futures ahead of sport’s glorification.
In the NBA, All-Star Brandon Roy retired after five years due to knee injuries, Australian NRL player Beau Ryan chose to step-down from a promising career rather then gamble with an ongoing neck-injury and most recently at the beginning of 2015, 49ers linebacker Chris Borland retired from the NFL, with fears for his health and concerns about head injury.
In a recent interview with New Zealand’s National Business Review, ex-international cricket player Shaun Tait (32) discussed the likelihood of being able to extend his career with the assistance of today’s technology.
Tait was once a very promising bowler — in 2010 he bowled the second-fastest ball ever recorded by a bowler 161 km/h (100.1 miles/h) against England at Lords in 2010 — but it wasn’t to be. After a number of ongoing shoulder and elbow injuries Tait was consigned to retire from international competition at a relatively young age, in 2011.
“I’ve had a long history of injuries and pretty consistent injuries,” he says. He believes today’s monitoring and preventative analysis could have extended his ODI and test career.
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The New Zealand All Blacks are powerful proof to the effectiveness of preventative analysis and injury monitoring. After their loss to Australia at the 2003 Rugby World Cup, the New Zealand Rugby Union (NZRU) set a goal — to have 99percent of players available for international selection and therefore have their best athletes available for major competitions. The solution was a technology platform that would record and measure player injuries and associated costs — the same technology which has evolved into what is now the SportsMed Elite platform and for over a decade has continued to underpin the technology of history’s most successful team, the All Blacks.
Unlike other athlete management platforms, SportsMed does not measure performance and health in isolation but integrates all metrics from sleep, mental health, nutrition and injuries to strength and conditioning programs, baseline tests, data from third party devices and GPS monitors. This broad spectrum of st the platform The platform’s speciality lies in predictive analytics.
