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The 2010 Olympic Winter Games are only a few days away. For the athletes, it’s meant hours and hours of training, often in very cold conditions. But the Swedish cross-country team has also been spending plenty of time indoors, on a high-tech treadmill designed to recreate the course in Canada. Programming that treadmill required some sophisticated GPS measurements (pictured). The World’s Clark Boyd has our story.
- Video: The Swedish high-tech skiing treadmill (via Swedish TV)
- More pictures from the global positioning work in Whistler
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MARCO WERMAN: The 2010 Winter Olympics get underway this Friday in Vancouver. For the athletes the Games will be the culmination of years of training. And for members of Sweden’s cross country ski team, some of that training involved a state of the art skiing treadmill. Here’s more from The World’s technology correspondent, Clark Boyd.
CLARK BOYD: The Swedish Winter Sport Research Center has a simple goal, harness all manner of biomechanical research and technology to help Swedish athletes excel. The center is prepared to go to some lengths to do it. This is from a Swedish TV report, a cross country skier prepares for training. That’s the sound of a giant treadmill starting up. Yes, the skier is indoors. He’s using a pair of roller skis on the treadmill. Meanwhile, a very realistic video of the cross country course in Canada plays on the monitor in front of him. What the Swedes have created isn’t virtual reality, but it is about as close to skiing Whistler as you can get and not be there.
MIKAEL SWAREN: You know where you are, you recognize where you are and you can visualize what it’s going to be like during the Olympics.
BOYD: That’s Mikael Swaren, a biomechanics expert at the Swedish Winter Sports Research Center. He’s part of a team that designed and programmed the special treadmill. One unique feature involves speed. Unlike a runner on a regular treadmill, skiers don’t use up and down buttons to set their pace. Instead, the program adjusts the speed automatically based on the skier’s own movements.
SWAREN: When we started thinking about it, we also realized that it would be even better to be able to ski, if you could adjust the speed yourself, that means that you could easily ski a track.
BOYD: But that meant, first and foremost, getting incredibly accurate measurements of the course in Whistler. Regular GPS wasn’t good enough. So, the researchers decided to use something called a real time Kinematics Global Navigation Satellite System. Matej Supej used the system to take the measurements of the course at Whistler.
MATEJ SUPEJ: This is a very accurate type of global navigation system which actually uses both the Russian and the United States GPS system at the same time.
BOYD: Think of it this way, the GPS system in your car is probably accurate to a few feet. The system Supej used is accurate to for tenths of an inch. The team also had skiers get rigged up with equipment to measure their velocities on various parts of the track. And, says Mikael Swaren, they went one step further.
SWAREN: When we took the GPS measurements we also videoed it from a snowmobile.
BOYD: Then they brought all this data and footage back to Sweden. They wrote some sophisticated software and fed it all into the treadmill.
SWAREN: So now the skiers can come to the research center and they can see the video following them, in front of them on the video screen. And then they can adjust the speed according to how they want. So they can, you can play around and they can go back and ski the same hill a few times over and over again and see what it feels like.
BOYD: At every stride, the skier keeps his or her own pace, and that’s great, the researchers say, for mental preparation. Skiers will have a sense of how tired they’re likely to feel at various points on the real course. One thing the treadmill can’t do, of course, is recreate the snow conditions. The other thing it can’t do, says Mikael Swaren, is turns. Sure you can see the turns on the video, but the treadmill itself is always pointing straight ahead.
SWAREN: So if you see any Swedes skiing straight into the woods, then you know that they’ve been on the treadmill too much.
BOYD: You’ll be able to judge the effectiveness of the Swedish treadmill training for yourself. The Olympic cross country events start next Monday. For The World, this is Clark Boyd.
WERMAN: You can see pictures and a video of that treadmill in action at the world dot org.
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