with goggles (and a toothbrush) to simulate the slopes – Corriere.it

How you can improve your workouts in one ski in turn become hypertechnologicalwith tracks chopped up and analyzed by shots from various angles, simulators for the athletes, quantities of numbers and data for the technicians? The latest devilry it comes directly from Red Bull and from the turn of the Formula 1
, thanks to a physiotherapist who worked with a doctor at the team of world champion Max Verstappen. Clarification: unfortunately there are still not many details on what we are going to tell, let’s just say the novelty is still borderline in and around the white circus there is a sort of circumspection/reservation. Not that it’s something illegal (the United States did something similar thinking about the Pyeongchang Olympics in 2018), it’s more likely the classic thing of which it’s better to talk little. Finally, for the time being, as it turns out, a something confined to the girls of the Canadian national team.

Well, the novelty is training which exploits the concept of augmented realitytaking advantage of those 3D glasses that you may have already seen in other contexts (for example, they are also used by those who use drones at an amateur and/or sports level). It works pretty much like this, from what Giulio Bosca, a former blue and today technical voice of Rai for women’s competitions, has been able to ascertain: The premise that a coach goes to the track and films the race course, with a smartphone and with the Pov (Point of View) technique.

The real perspective that the athlete will find in the facts is therefore acquired. At that point the mobile phone is connected to the goggles so that the skier has the film of the route on the screen. Bosca noted that it is a simplified version of the training, with the athlete wearing glasses sitting down and going over the heat with the help of hand gestures to underline the progression and trend of the curves. Normally skiers do this during the pre-race warm-up, trying, with their eyes closed, to repeat what they have memorized in reconnaissance.

But there is also something more sophisticated: The athlete climbs onto a wooden board equipped with a hemisphere (a trickboard, also known as a proprioceptive board, ed), find the balance point and simulate the race. The management of the body, combined with the video released by the smartphone in the lens of the 3D goggle, ensures that the realism is high. Not everything: even more can be done. S – continues Bosca -, I also happened to see the variant with the electric toothbrush. Toothbrush? Certain. It is placed in the skier’s mouth, and he has to hold it precisely with his teeth. Then an outside hand activates it and so on the vibrations reproduce the undulations of the track.

The skier has truly fallen into a dimension that allows him to anticipate what he will then live in the competition: I saw a top Canadian athlete, Marie-Michle Gagnon, get scared on the tablet: the simulation system was putting her in front of a complicated passage and she felt the instinct to stop and go backwards, at the risk of falling. It is not known whether this method will become widespread among athletes. But guess what it could happen because it offers an advantage, actually two: in any case less tiring than the simulators used in the preparation period and, above all, it allows you to make one more pass – albeit only virtual – on the race track compared to real training and reconnaissance.