At the X Games in early August, motocross rider Corey Creed launched skyward off a ramp and rocketed three stories up into the air. Creed seemed to soar as high as the second level of the Minnesota Vikings’ U.S. Bank Stadium, then stuck the landing on the down ramp. On-screen graphics showed that his speed hit 36 mph. Moments later, the height of his jump flashed up: 32’ 6”. The Australian rider had won his first X Games gold, beating second-placed Tyler Bereman in the Moto X Quarterpipe by nine inches.
Many action sports are still judged on subjective metrics like style, and leave room for ambiguity. But the ESPN-owned X Games is working to bring hard, analytic data into decisions. During this year’s summer games, X Games VP Tim Reed ran a test of a new athlete tracking system that he hopes will eventually lead to both a broad overhaul and automation of the judging system and more in-depth storytelling capabilities.
“We wanted to lay the foundation to potentially provide real-time data and insights to our judges, helping them long term with how they score, judge events and athlete performance,” says Reed, who oversees the creative development and day-to-day operations of the action sports organization.
“Right now, it’s all a visual interpretation. Being able, down the road, to determine the length of grinds, certain distances that athletes are traveling, heights they’re going, is something we find interesting. We’d be able to provide real-time data to judges for them as a utility.”
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Kinexon devices were placed on bikes for motocross and BMX, and in the pockets of skateboarders. The company’s trackers are also widely used across the NBA. Information collected was used to fuel TV graphics created by RawMotion, the X Games’ official timing and data provider, that showed speed and height.
“This additional data will help to objectify the judge’s decision,” says Rawmotion CEO Alex Doerr. “They already take certain things into account that are quantifiable, but they don’t have any objective data to do this. We’re hoping to do that with the use of sensors.”
According to Reed, the X Games is now determining how the data might be enhanced algorithmically to better serve judges and the TV broadcast in the future. The summer games were considered a beta test. Next January’s Winter X Games could see a bigger rollout.
“We’re trying to develop a baseline for data and information, which we hope to use moving forward to help hone in on which parts we think are going to be most valuable from a storytelling perspective,” Reed says. “It was a good first step in terms of understanding what we could get.”
This isn’t the first time the X Games has attempted to track athletes. At the Consumer Electronics Show in 2016, the organization joined Intel on the keynote stage to announce an athlete tracking partnership that would leverage the chipmaker’s Curie device.
Curie debuted at the Winter X Games in Aspen that year in the Snowboard SlopeStyle and Men’s Snowboard Big Air events. It was delivered as an enhancement to the broadcast via graphical representations of metrics such as spin rotation. The X Games planned to expand the capability to other sports beyond snowboarding, but Intel discontinued Curie a year later in 2017.
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RawMotion ultimately decided to rely on its existing visual camera system at the 2019 X Games for the quarterpipe height and speed, rather than the Kinexon sensors, because of concerns over accuracy. However, Doerr believes that a live height meter might eventually populate X Games broadcasts, once the Kinexon kinks are smoothed out and the sensors have been extensively tested against the visual system.
The two companies showcased a heat map for the street skateboarding events that detailed course exploitation—in the events, skaters grind along rails and do flip tricks on small ramps. RawMotion and Kinexon analyzed the length of grinds and compared attempted versus landed tricks, but only the height and speed data were made public.
“What we were really doing was collecting data so that now, in the aftermath, we can look at the runs and identify what else we can actually make out of the data,” Doerr says. “We want to transfer what we gather now in terms of knowledge and experience to the halfpipe for winter sports, to Big Air and other disciplines. Our vision is to bring this to all of the action sports and disciplines that we’re involved with.”
The X Games tracking initiatives come amid a growing influence of esports on live sports. Fans are increasingly looking for real-time and detailed metrics on the activities taking place in front of them.
“Gamification is what you’re used to from more than a decade of Tony Hawk skateboarding games,” Doerr says. “That’s what we’d like to see on TV: you basically have a live trick count, or you can see in real time how long someone stays on rail, what their time on the rail is and how much distance they covered.”
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