Olympic sport a numbers game, Canada’s luge team taps into analytics
CALGARY — In a sport timed to a thousandths of a second, finishing fourth can really sting.
Data analysts are working behind the scenes for Canada’s lugers to shave what is less than the blink of an eye off their times not only at the World Cup in Calgary on Friday and Saturday, but in February’s Winter Olympics.
“When we’re looking at a start which is a four-to-five second portion of our luge run and we’re looking for hundredths or even thousands of a second within that start, we’ve relied on a lot of analytics,” three-time Olympian Sam Edney said Wednesday.
Canada has never won an Olympic medal in luge and came agonizingly close in 2014 with a trio of fourth-place finishes in Sochi, Russia.