Victory margin
In top sports the difference between first and second place can be so close it’s barely visible to the naked eye. In the 100 metres freestyle event at the recent short-course swimming world championships in Manchester, the silver medallist was three hundredths of a second behind the winner. Overcoming such margins is the work of Ross Sanders and his team at the Centre for Aquatics Research and Education (CARE) at the University of Edinburgh.

Changing campuses offered new possibilities for the CARE team. ‘Building a new facility for physical education sport and leisure studies, including a swimming pool, gave us an opportunity,’ explains Sanders, ‘because we were starting from scratch to make the pool into an aquatics research centre. We were able to equip it with underwater cameras and all the latest technology to conduct research.’  

‘Glidecoach’
In collaboration with academics at Sheffield Hallam University and Haccetepe University, the CARE team have developed new software called ‘Glidecoach’ which provides immediate detailed feedback to coaches and swimmers. It’s a real achievement in a challenging environment. As media rights and sponsorship have made sport a huge global industry, so sports science has become increasingly significant.

But swimming has unique factors, ‘It’s a difficult area,’ says Sanders, ‘because it’s in water, all of the usual analysis and techniques are much more difficult. You have swimmers, for example, swimming at the interface of two media, air and water, and if you film them for three dimensional analysis you have to film them with above-water-cameras and below-water-cameras simultaneously.’

When to ‘kick’
The ‘Glidecoach’ technology focuses on the moment when swimmers have just dived into the pool or when they are pushing off the wall. This is when they are gliding faster than they could by swimming.’ If they start to kick before they reach the speed they can sustain by kicking,’ says Sanders, ‘then the kicking will actually slow them down rather than speed them up.’

The software allows them to detect the optimum position to start kicking. ‘We can show them on a graph whether they are kicking too soon or too late,’ explains Sanders.  ‘We teach them to fine tune the commencement of their kick, to fine tune their posture to glide most efficiently, and as a result they shave milliseconds off each turn that can make a difference between bronze and gold.’