Technological innovations are providing significant video insights for several podium sports in the training and competition space, and the work, jointly driven by HPSNZ’s Goldmine Innovation and Performance and Technique Analysis (PTA) team and innovation company Cub Digital, is about to be formalised in HPSNZ’s first ever innovation partnership.
The lead up to Tokyo 2020 provided a platform for the Goldmine Innovation and PTA team to join forces with Cub Digital to develop unique video insight technology to support boxer David Nyika’s Olympic campaign.
Cub Digital developed an image recognition boxing strategy that analysed David’s opponents and blind spots and helped David and his coach make better decisions in training and in the competition ring.
The video recognition technology created a new language and new insights to fine tune small but critical margins.
Cub Digital CEO Chris Dunlop says that previously boxers and their coaches talked about an opponent as, say, front footed. The video insights tool didn’t just capture what was happening, but rather strategically critical data such as, at the 90 second mark the opponent drops his guard and stops jabbing.
“Image recognition technology allowed us to use very specific, pinpointed language to provide key insights for David and his team,” says Chris.
And the outcome is history. David went on to secure a bronze medal in the Tokyo 2020 boxing heavyweight division, New Zealand’s first Olympic boxing medal since David Tua in 1992.
Scroll forward to 2025 and the partnership between HPSNZ and Cub Digital is providing image recognition technology to provide critical video insights for high performance Kiwi swimmers and throwers in Athletics.
HPSNZ Head of Innovation, Simon Briscoe, says the work of his team and PTAs with the Cub Digital team is providing more detailed and efficient analysis for a given sport.
“One of the most important analysis tools for sports has been using video as a critical data collection point. Typically, though, this has been a highly manual and time intensive process for our PTAs, involving hours of time looking at 1000s of clips and video frames, then labelling and tagging data to build training data sets,” says Simon.
“The tool Cub Digital has built has the potential to release hours a day back to our analysts to work more effectively and strategically with coaches.”
Currently the partnership is building a system with Swimming and the throw disciples in Athletics and is working towards onboarding other sports into the system.
“Throw sports such as shot put involve very fast movements, movements that are faster than the eye can see,” says Chris. “Accordingly, coaches use general language that is based on only what they can see. The image recognition technology provides athlete and coach with rich information by doing the video watching far more closely and is delivering data more quickly for analysis.”
HPSNZ’s Swimming PTA, Elliot Snedden, is currently using the video insights tool daily with Swimming NZ’s elite squad. “Cub Digital’s tool does the heavy lifting. It has drastically reduced the time I used to take to do manually intensive analysis and allows me to focus on the swimmers, their technique and ultimately how to achieve fine margin performance gains.
“Importantly, the time the tool takes to deliver high quality analysis of video data means we can be providing coaches with the information within hours after a training session rather than a day later,” says Elliot.
“I would sum up the benefits of Cub Digital’s technology in three key areas – it improves the efficiency of collecting reliable training and competition data, allows us to capture more data more regularly and to do so in greater detail and with more scope.”
Elliot also says the Cub Digital relationship and technology has real upsides for him and his fellow PTAs. “It is great being able to spend more time working with coaches to improve the use of data. We can have more in-depth conversations based on more detailed data and I’m really excited by the opportunity to use the technology in different sports, especially those which have a high skills based level.”
