A technology partnership for the last ounce of performance
In winter sport, equipment often decides between victory and defeat – along with the question of which ski, which grind and which configuration suits which athlete, which competition and which conditions. Datico® is the official technology partner of Ski Austria, the Austrian Ski Federation, and has been working intensively with its technology department for several years. At the centre is a consistently data-driven approach to making equipment decisions more objective, more transparent and better.
Ski Austria at a glance
Ski Austria is the umbrella organisation for Austrian snow sports and brings together the full range of winter sport – from alpine skiing, ski jumping and Nordic combined to cross-country skiing, biathlon, snowboarding and many other disciplines. With its athletes, the federation ranks among the very best in the world. The technology department, headed by Michael Gufler, is responsible for an area that helps decide medals: the optimal matching of equipment to athlete, competition and conditions.
The challenge: the optimum in the triangle
The technology department’s task can be described as an optimisation problem in a triangle – between the athlete, the respective competition with its environmental conditions and the equipment. For every combination of these three factors there is an optimum: exactly the equipment that enables the individual athlete to perform best under the specific conditions of the competition.
The difficulty lies in the complexity: a large number of skis, grinds and configurations meets changing athletes, snow and weather conditions. Anyone who wants to find the optimum reliably here needs a structured data basis – rather than relying on experience and gut feeling alone.
The solution with Datico®
Ski Austria mainly uses the Datico® Life Hub to manage its equipment systematically – skis, grinds and complete ski configurations – while also recording the physiological data of the testers. Step by step, this creates a database that enables data-driven recommendations and gives the technicians the best possible support in their decisions. The principle: learn from past data in order to make the best possible decision at each competition.
Connect, Understand and Act – on the foundation of “Secure” – in the project:
- Connect – equipment and configuration data (skis, grinds) and physiological test data are brought together at one central point.
- Understand – in a structured database, the factors of the triangle – athlete, competition, equipment – are related to one another and can be analysed.
- Act – the technicians receive a robust basis for making the right equipment decision on competition day.
- Secure – the data remains structured, comparable and under the federation’s control.
Step by step: rollout across the disciplines
The Datico® Life Hub was first introduced in cross-country skiing and biathlon. It was then extended to ski jumping and is now being rolled out step by step to various alpine disciplines. This expansion is deliberately carried out area by area – so the shared data basis grows with every discipline, and data-driven equipment optimisation becomes usable across more and more areas of Ski Austria.
In the customer’s words
“Our goal is to find the optimal equipment for every athlete and every competition. With the Datico® Life Hub we are bringing equipment, grind and test data together in a structured way for the first time – and learning from the data of past competitions. This means our technicians increasingly base their decisions on data rather than on gut feeling alone.”
— Michael Gufler, Head of Technology, Ski Austria
Conclusion
The collaboration between Ski Austria and Datico® shows how a field traditionally driven by experience – equipment tuning in elite winter sport – becomes a data-driven discipline. Datico® provides the foundation: managing equipment and configurations, recording physiological data, relating everything to each other and making it available for the decision on competition day. This brings the optimum in the triangle of athlete, competition and equipment a step closer.
