Sailing: The Next Chapter of Data-Driven Excellence
The Road to Unprecedented Success
The previous year, Portera and the Sailing Innovation Centre (SIC) partnered to revolutionize sailing with data-driven insights for improved performance. Annemiek Bekkering, a former elite sailor now part of the Sailing Innovation Centre (SIC), identified a gap in training and performance potential. To address this gap, the collaboration focused on utilizing data analytics and advanced modeling techniques, enabling sailors to study race dynamics and predict outcomes for more informed decision-making. This led to the launch of Project Neptune, a pioneering initiative dedicated to collecting and analyzing key race data to improve sailor performance and deliver valuable tactical insights.
Project Neptune was refined to support race preparation, strategy building, and tactical analysis. The project pushed the boundaries of competitive sailing by using real-time data analytics leading to major successes for the Dutch national sailors.
From Challenges to Innovation: Bridging the Gaps in Performance Analysis
Following the successful launch of Phase 1 of project Neptune, the sailors immediately felt the benefits of advanced data analytics in driving their performance, but we knew that there was room for improvement. Key areas, including real-time start analysis, mark-passing efficiency, speed trend monitoring, and in-depth post-race reviews, were set for further enhancement. Moreover, data, such as wind strength, race positioning, and competitor comparisons, were often stored in separate systems, making it difficult to get a complete picture of overall performance.
Besides, there was no single integrated platform to provide an integrated view. Without intuitive interfaces and real-time data availability, performance assessments often relied more on subjective judgments, creating opportunities for strategic enhancement. Recognizing these opportunities, Portera aimed at filling these gaps and helping to improve the process of performance analysis.
As a result, Portera created an enhanced, interactive Power BI report of regatta performance, connected with data from SAP Sailing Analytics, providing sailors with more precise, actionable insights. This project aimed to make an accessible, thorough reporting tool that would support sailors in analyzing their performance in-depth and making data-driven decisions during regattas.
Enhancing the Platform: Converting Data into Victory
This project became an exciting journey for the whole team at Portera, allowing them to collaborate with world-renowned professional athletes and driven by the thrill of transforming the understanding of sailing preparation and equipping sailors with the tools to take their performance to the next level. By early 2024, the Portera Neptune team was dedicated to building the most advanced performance analytics platform in sailing. Integrating new data sources from SAP Sailing Analytics, along with real-time IoT feeds, the system’s capabilities were expanded to cover nearly every variable in races, providing sailors with valuable insights to optimize their performance.
The class-specific analytics introduced by the platform aimed to meet the unique needs of each sailing category. ‘Winning Lane Visualization’ and ‘Mark Transition Assessments’ allow sailors to examine and optimize every little detail of each maneuver. Thus, such post-race analysis connects every decision to real-world measurables to modify tactics.
A Data-Driven Approach to Holistic Performance Analytics:
The project also expanded on the following aspects:
- Competitive Performance Analysis: This allowed the sailing team to analyze their start timing and positioning, and their tactic against competitors.
- Accurate and timely data integration: The continuous integration with SAP Sailing Analytics API and web interfaces for correct and timely performance metrics after a regatta.
- Mark Passing Evaluation: Provide tools to the sailors for mark rounding evaluation and optimization using detailed data.
- In-Dept Speed Analysis: Allow sailors to analyze speed trends and techniques for optimizing against historical data.
- Strategic Insights: Allow sailors to make insightful analytics toward strategic post-regatta analysis that will enhance their future competitive performance.
- Performance Review: Aggregated insight into efficiency ratings, route choices, and strategic decisions; post-race evaluation and improvements.
- Intuitive Reporting Interface: Easily accessible, user-friendly interface with Power BI dashboards that let the sailors see their performance metrics clearly for post-analysis and decision-making in view of the regatta.
This multi-layered approach helped ensure that no aspect of sailing performance – physical, tactical, or strategic – was overlooked.
From Data to Insight: Collection, Preparation, and Reporting
At centre of this success, strong data infrastructure put together by the Neptune team: from gathering data via SAP Sailing Analytics API, Web interfaces, and Azure Data Factory pipelines, it was to come in from a raft of sources, including GPS trackers and race metadata. An on-demand Web scraper provided further expansion of the dataset, pulling in additional statistics not available from APIs such as wind conditions and leaderboards.
To make the insights presented reliable, the data has been prepared with much care:
- Data cleaning: which involved removal of duplicates, handling of missing values, and standardization of formats for accuracy
- Data transformation: where the cleaned datasets were then organized into schemas in an Azure SQL Database
- Data modeling: which involved developing reporting views complete with calculated performance metrics, thereby aligning the data to the needs of the sailors and coaches.
After preparation, the information was then visualized using Power BI dashboards for a smooth analysis process.
Introducing the Dashboard: A New Generation in Sailing Analytics
At the core of the solution lay an interactive and user-friendly dashboard, a completely new paradigm for sailors to analyze and use data. Key features included:
- Race Visualization and Replay: Sailors can see detailed maps of race paths and replay key moments to identify strengths and weaknesses.
- Start Analysis: Metrics such as bias used, speed at the start, distance to line, and rank changes for actionable insight on the starting strategy.
- Mark Passing and Winning Lane Evaluations: Comparisons through video visualizations allowed sailors to optimize maneuvers and find the most efficient race paths.
- Speed Analysis: Filters enabled analyses by wind strength, competitor, and average speed to further fine-tune the athletes’ techniques.
- Competitor Comparison: Comparative analyses put light on relative performance, which helped in focused improvements.
The dashboard’s user-friendly design and comprehensive features made it an indispensable tool for sailors, offering a level of strategic depth previously unseen in the sport.
Results That Transformed Dutch Sailing
The platform brought rapid and remarkable improvements, helping the Dutch sailing teams build upon their previous successes, which included three world championships, and partnering with them to an impressive five world championships and an Olympic gold medal in the 2024 Paris Olympics. This remarkable progress has firmly established them as prominent leaders in the competitive sailing world.
Bart Lambriex underlines the impact thus: “Sometimes I believe data is very valuable to develop, to become better as a sailor.”
With these new developments, the Sailing Innovation Centre (SIC) and its collaborator Portera are at the front of innovation in the sailing world.