Our Athletes Voice series gives athletes a forum to talk about how technology has impacted their careers and their lives away from sports. This week, former Olympic skeleton racer Kyle Tress talks about how he discovered his sport, how he used data to understand his performance, and the future of skeleton.
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In 2002, then-20-year-old Kyle Tress was studying at a community college when he saw the headline that changed his life. A story on Yahoo—“Third Generation Olympian Wins Gold in Skeleton”—detailed the medal Jimmy Shea won at the Salt Lake City Winter Games, and introduced Tress to skeleton.
He took up the sport and would go on to qualify for the 2014 Olympics in Sochi. He retired from competition in 2017 but has coached athletes from Japan and Belgium. He also helped lead a successful effort in persuading the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Association to move the 2017 world championships out of Russia in the fallout from the scandal surrounding Russia’s state-sponsored doping.
Tress is a self-taught computer programmer, a job that helped fund his training and travel. He collaborated with fellow U.S. skeleton competitor Chris Nurre on a software development company called A Tiny Tribe, which made iPad apps, built his own skeleton data analytics platform called Sledsheet, and was a Rails developer at Instaviser (where he worked with Olympic rower Meghan O’Leary).
Now 38, Tress has enrolled at Yale to study applied mathematics and data science. But despite his obvious interest in technology, he practices “monk mode mornings,” in which he doesn’t use any device before noon. Tress also previously appeared as an extra in movies Transformers 2 and When in Rome, and in the TV series CSI:NY after he and his father went on a joint trip to central casting.
On discovering skeleton…
“It was really by accident. In 2002, the Olympics were held in Salt Lake City, and I just happened to come across that story. I didn’t really know about skeleton before that. Something about that just really clicked with me. I did as much research as I could in the one or two weeks remaining in the Olympics. I watched every clip I could find of skeleton. I searched Google and read every article. Eventually I found the Bobsled and Skeleton Federation website. I learned that they were holding a recruitment event that summer. I decided to sign up on a whim and see how it went.
“June or July came around and I headed down to Towson, Maryland, for what was basically an NFL-style combine where they brought in maybe 50 or so people—men and women who were interested in trying skeleton. It was sprints, jumping events, some throwing. I thought I did pretty well, but after the combine, I was walking back to my car and I was so sore. It hurt stepping off the curb onto the street. I thought, ‘Oh man, I’m out of my element here.’ But a couple of months after that I received an email from the U.S. Bobsled and Skeleton Federation saying I was invited to an ice camp—basically a skeleton school—that November.
“That was a weeklong school where the coaches had a chance to evaluate each athlete that they selected: how they performed on the sled, on the ice, if they were calm, if they sort of took to it. Although now in hindsight, looking back, the first week on the sled, there’s not really a whole lot you can do. You’re really just kind of holding on there. You’re a passenger more than actively doing any sort of bobsled or skeleton steering. When I got to Lake Placid and I got to try it for the first time, I was hooked immediately.”
On the sports technology gap…
“It was always hard with skeleton because we were a little bit nervous mounting cameras or something on the sled ‘cause they would always fall off. There was such an incredible vibration on the track that we’d lose these things immediately. We tried a GoPro on the top of the sled, but it wasn’t a consistent thing. You can’t use any sort of technology like that once you get to the World Cup level—it’s prohibited.
“So we started giving the coaches technology. One of the things that the coaches used was the Pocket Radar to measure speed, which was a really interesting tool and we probably never took advantage of it as fully as we could have or should have. We used a lot of iPads and apps like Hudl—it was Ubersense when we used it—which is video analysis. Then I thought there was a gap between all of this technology that we wanted to use and probably had the resources for and the technology that we should have been using and that didn’t exist.”
On using data to improve performance…
“I started collecting data on my own. For probably the last eight years—the second half of my career—I collected thousands and thousands of runs that I was using to analyze and to help my own performance and to inform my own decisions about my equipment.
“With skeleton, it looks like it’s such a simple sport, and in a lot of ways it is. You’re kind of laying on the sled, and you steer this thing down the track and that’s it. But there’s a huge equipment aspect to this where you’re adjusting the runners, the blade that touches the ice, and how much bow they have in them, what the cut on the runner is. Going back through all my notes, I was able to fill in a lot of gaps that I had on this particular day, with these particular weather conditions. What was the equipment that I was on and how did it perform? What equipment did my teammates have and how did they perform? And that was helpful. I think ultimately the biggest piece for me was just the information of where do I stack up this day in this particular part of the track. Where exactly am I having trouble? Can I identify what happened on that run? I would be able to take a run, head back up to the top, put this information right into the website, and I could see the information immediately.
“I could graph my performance, I could graph it against my teammates [and] competitors. I could see, okay, I’m losing time here. Maybe this little piece was off. Maybe the line was a little bit wrong. Maybe the angle entering the curve was a little bit wrong, and then I could make the adjustment on the next run and immediately see if it was effective. That kind of information with the visualizations was priceless. It really turned my career around the last half.”
On learning to program…
“I was always interested in programming. I remember as a kid—I was probably 13 or 14—we got our first computer, and I was just mesmerized by it. The web was pretty early on since this was 1992 or 1993. There weren’t a lot of great tools. I think I learned visual basic or something, and I’d build these stupid little programs just for fun more than anything else. I didn’t have any aspirations to be a software developer or in the tech field at all. I shelved that for a very long time. It wasn’t until I got into skeleton and I met one of my teammates [Chris Nurre] who graduated from R.I.T. He was a software developer and we partnered up to build some iPhone apps, iPad apps, and he mentored me for a year or two and I rediscovered this interest in programming.
“Once that happened, I thought this is a great opportunity for me. I have essentially six months of the year where I’m traveling and I’m competing and that’s my focus. Then during the summer, I have to train all morning into the afternoon, but the rest of the time I have free and I can work on the programming and maybe work in this industry a little bit. That’s what ultimately led me to Instaviser. I loved programming aspects so much and specific types of technology and I was able to find a company that was not only willing to hire Olympians, but using the specific technology that I was familiar with.”
“I started collecting data on my own. For probably the last eight years, I collected thousands and thousands of runs that I was using to analyze and to help my own performance and to inform my own decisions … It looks like it’s a simple sport … but there’s a huge equipment aspect.”
On monk mode mornings…
“I think my feelings on technology have changed a bit over the last three or four years. I think a mindful approach to it is very important. I noticed that my attention span was becoming worse. I was easily distracted. And once I went back to school, I really noticed the difference and how I was performing versus how I thought I would perform. I try very hard to be mindful of technology and my usage. I’ve eliminated social media almost completely and am trying to sort of regain some attention and lessen my dependence on Reddit or Twitter. It’s been a challenge. These are services and apps that are really engineered to addict people.
“Especially for young athletes, making the effort early on in your career to be mindful of how you use technology, how you interact with fans, what the types of things you’re posting—it’s so important.”
On the future of skeleton…
“It’s going to become increasingly more difficult … to justify including sports like bobsled, skeleton and luge in future Olympic Games. As we’ve seen already, the cost of hosting the Olympics is ballooning, right? Sochi, I think, was $52 billion, which was an unheard of amount for a Winter Olympic Games. Now a lot of cities are just saying we won’t do this. On these referendums, the citizens in these cities are saying no.
“And then, on top of that, a changing climate is making it harder to include even those cities. I read a study somewhere that said, within the next 50 years, there will be only seven or eight former Winter Olympic cities that can host again in the future. And then I look at a sport like skeleton, for instance, where you build a $300 million facility and it’s typically used for four weeks. Maybe if we’re lucky, the host nation decides to create a bobsled, skeleton or luge program and that facility is used for a couple of years in the future. That’s an ideal scenario, but it is increasingly likely that they’re going to have to be some changes where those particular sports are hosted somewhere else, even in a separate country and run at the same time as the Olympics, just for cutting costs let alone change in climate. When we competed in Sochi, it was almost 60 degrees on the days that we were training. I can’t imagine the electricity costs alone of running that event.
“I’d love to see tracks that are modular, if that’s possible. I don’t know. You could transport a track and bring it to an Olympic site—basically put it together, run it for a year or two, and then break it down and move it somewhere else in a different configuration. Maybe that’s possible from an engineering standpoint, I don’t know. But that would certainly save a tremendous amount of money. Building this thing, $300 million and then letting it rust or just be used as barricades in Sarajevo.”
On doping in the Olympics…
“The thing that’s difficult for me is—and this might be a little bit controversial—I don’t necessarily put a lot of blame on the Russian athletes. In many ways, they probably didn’t have a lot of choices. A lot of the blame and the anger that I have is directed towards the International Olympic Committee. They talk a big game about the integrity of sport and how important it is to protect that, but when your money is threatened, when their power is threatened, they quickly backed down. Most of the Russians who were involved in that doping, at least in bobsled and skeleton, they have their medals. They’re still shown in the positions that they ended up at in Sochi. And I think from what I’ve heard, the International Olympic Committee considers that case closed.
“And that’s a tragedy. Any athlete who went through that and was a part of that and held out hope that this was going to be that moment when there was a sea change in how the Olympics deals with doping was sorely disappointed. And I think a lot of people were jaded. I know certainly my teammates felt that way. I feel that way, and it made me want to walk away from the Olympic movement forever.”
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