Portera, a technology and business transformation consultancy, has helped four Dutch sailors achieve gold and silver medal success at the 2024 World Championships in Lanzarote following the development of a data platform that can be used to improve performance on the water.
Sailors Annette Duetz and Odile van Aanholt won gold in the 49er FX class, while Bart Lambriex and Floris van de Werken claimed silver in the 49er class. All four athletes have been using the Portera platform, which provides a complete set of post-race performance data in an accessible and intuitive interface. The platform means sailors can observe, evaluate and mine race data.
Odile van Aanholt credited the Portera data platform as part of the reason for her duo’s success at the 2024 World Championships in Lanzarote.
“We can look at the data to get the facts and clarify, ‘Am I overthinking this? Or is this something I can improve on?’” she said. “Going through the data at the end of the day is really useful. It helps us be a bit better tomorrow – thanks Team Portera.”
Meanwhile, Floris van de Werken said the collaboration with Portera helped sailors become more strategic in their approach to races.
“Sometimes you feel fast, and the data confirms you were quick that day. Sometimes you were a little bit slower, and the data actually confirms that you were slower that day,” she said. “It’s good to have a confirmation sometimes on speed, but also on strategy. You can see through the data exactly what happened on the course.”
The Portera platform collects performance data from multiple sources, including on-board instrumentation. By connecting SAP Sailing data via an API, scraping race data from various public data sources using robotic process automation and building advanced data aggregation, manipulation and presentation processes, insight can be presented for use in the form of a handy ‘dashboard’ that is immediately ready after the day’s races. Once off the water, sailors can see what went well and what could have gone better, while also analysing their main competitors’ choices.
Yasemin Orhun, the Lead Developer of the Portera data platform, said the sailors had provided fantastic feedback on the metrics they wanted to see and analyse on the dashboard.
“But there are things we can do to improve it,” she said. “We know there is more data that we can gather, like using IoT in real time to improve our data set and model. We are hugely excited about our ideas for race simulation and outcome prediction. This development will allow us also to track and analyse training camps and how much improvement the top sailors have achieved.”
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