Julia Mancuso on a training run, as seen from a camera mounted on her ski tip. (Image: GoPro)
When you’re flying down an icy ski slope at 80 miles per hour, shooting hundreds of feet through the air and covering miles in just minutes, it’s not so easy to determine the angle of your edges as you carve a turn, or measure the exact distance between your hips and your knees. And yet it’s precisely those tiny adjustments that make all the difference at skiing’s highest level, where a few hundredths of a second can separate eternal glory from relative obscurity.
As the 2015 FIS Alpine World Ski Championships continue this week and next in Beaver Creek, Colorado, top athletes are hoping that their training has adequately prepared them for one of the sport’s biggest stages. After all, in a sport where an entire season’s worth of competitive action – about a dozen 1- or 2-minute long races – can elapse in less time than an episode of Modern Family, mastery over the minutiae can have an outsized impact. With this recognition, professional skiing has wholeheartedly embraced advanced metrics, customized nutrition plans, and high-tech training tools.
One of the recent arrivals on the training scene is the small but mighty GoPro, the wearable camera that has turned a generation of recreational athletes into hyper-sharing weekend warriors. Over the last few years, even the world’s best athletes began to generate such footage, largely for their own amusement or for promotional purposes, letting their fans in on the latest shred session. “At first I was just getting cool images and cool shots,” says two-time Olympic gold medalist Ted Ligety, arguably the U.S. men’s ski team’s most consistent star. “But as we played with it and thought about it, it evolved into a training tool.”
Ligety seized the opportunity, experimenting with different camera mounts that would allow him to see different angles of his run. Soon, the cameras were everywhere: on his helmet, strapped to his chest, stuck to his boots. His favorite vantage point came from the “narwhal” mount, a rod that extends two feet from the back of his helmet, faces forward, and provides a bizarre, disconcerting view of a run from a head-stationary perspective. (See video at the bottom of this post.)
Julia Mancuso, who, with four Olympic medals is the most decorated female American alpine skier, has found a lower camera angle that captures her skis to be most enlightening. “You can really see where you pressure the snow as you make a turn,” she explains, “which is harder to get with a static camera.” She likens the flexing of the skis digging into a turn to a rubber band. As you push down, they bend, accumulating potential energy that, when dissipated in the rebound, provides a kinetic boost. “The earlier that happens and the smoother that is,” says Mancuso, “the easier it is to let gravity propel you into the next turn.”
This brand of nuanced analysis runs counter to a more traditional approach to ski training based on “feel” and a more approximate relationship with performance attribution. When a full run was integrated over 90 seconds, it was hard to know precisely which turn, which millisecond, caused the result. But now, by tallying miniscule deviations from the video and linking it to several different split times, it’s possible to isolate variables and figure out how much time a prematurely pressured inside edge will cost you.
At the end of a training run, Ligety will hop on the chairlift and review the GoPro footage on his phone during the ride to the top of the mountain, looking for a cleaner line between gates, or making a mental note to pressure his skis earlier on turn #4. Mancuso typically watches a day’s worth of video in the evening, where a larger screen can show minute differences between skiers. “I mostly analyze the side-by-sides, where you can really see the small differences” between different athletes, cross-referencing with the clock to judge the effectiveness of divergent approaches.
GoPro is also capitalizing on the partnership with the US Ski Team, which subjects the cameras to particularly rigorous “The athletes are working directly with our engineering team in product development,” says Todd Ballard, the company’s senior director of lifestyle marketing. “It’s definitely affected the output of our product, since they’re putting the cameras into the most extreme use cases possible.”
What’s next in video feedback for professional ski racers? Mancuso is anticipating a higher frame rate: “the number of frames per second keeps improving” she notes, “but with more frames we can see how the skis are bending, and how the edges are holding through a turn.” Ligety, meanwhile, is hoping for drones. “A follow cam drone that follows you down the hill – how cool would that be?”
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