Using Science To Turn A Struggling Pro Skier Into An Olympic Medal Contender

Data and discipline. Applied ruthlessly. JL

Jeffrey Marlow reports in Wired:

Rather than depending on intuition and “feel," he embraced a blend of evidence-based methods that represent the forefront of sports science. From wind tunnels to GPS, he has applied physics, fluid dynamics, psychology, nutrition science, and materials science to optimize his preparation and fitness. Under his data-driven reign, everything is tracked, quantified, and run through statistical regression analyses in the pursuit of an optimized, personalized training regimen.

Steven Nyman is poised at the starting gate, alert, coiled, ready. A signal sounds: three even tones followed by a single, more urgent pitch, sending Nyman kicking onto the Val Gardena downhill ski course. He pushes five times with his poles, accelerating as quickly as possible, stabbing the snow frantically. He skates forward with abbreviated strokes, neon green boots moving up and down, his focus on building as much momentum as possible.
Nyman is feeling good. It was a clean start, and his confidence is rising. He’s conquered this terrain before, winning his first — and only — World Cup ski race on this Italian mountain six years earlier. “Nyman was good in training,” the TV announcer says. He turned in the ninth best practice-run time. But right now, the afternoon of December 15, 2012, he’s only thinking about the next 90 seconds. If he can string together the best pieces of his practice runs, he knows he’s got a shot. One thought cycles through his mind: Don’t mess this up.
In the world of downhill racing, Nyman, 30, is a grizzled journeyman, a fixture on the World Cup circuit who for most of his 11-year professional career has been stuck solidly in the middle of the pack.
Until now.
In the wake of a season-ending Achilles tear in 2011, Nyman embarked on a new training regimen. Rather than depending on intuition and “feel” as he always had, he embraced a blend of evidence-based methods that represent the forefront of sports science. From wind tunnels to GPS, he has applied physics, fluid dynamics, psychology, nutrition science, and materials science to optimize his preparation and fitness. Nyman has embraced this regimen with the fervor of a new convert. “If you ignore a lot of that stuff and just go with your gut, I don’t think you’re doing everything you can to win,” he says.
The early results were promising — stunning, even, considering his mediocre performance throughout the previous decade — and raised an intriguing question: Could science make someone like Steven Nyman a legitimate contender for an Olympic gold medal?

Hours in a Wind Tunnel
Around four seconds into the run, Nyman goes into his tuck—knees bent at 90-degree angles, back parallel to the ground, hands forward, head up. He’s made his move just a bit earlier than most of his competitors. He holds the tuck through the first straightaway as he speeds past orange juice ad banners lining the start area. The fog that hampered earlier racers has lifted, and he can make out some variations in the all-white terrain, his legs pistoning like shock absorbers over bumps and dips, keeping his body as still as possible. He rounds the first corner, untucking just enough to keep his balance over a small drop-off.

The upper section of most downhill runs is a balancing act between self-propulsion and aerodynamic efficiency: To accelerate fastest, you need to skate and pole, but these very actions present a wide profile to the oncoming wind, increasing drag and keeping you from reaching top speed. To minimize drag, you go into a tuck, allowing you to slip through the bombardment of air molecules that is a competitive skier’s worst enemy. But then you have to rely solely on gravitational physics, because breaking form to push forward would jeopardize the aerodynamic gains. The key is knowing precisely when to make the switch.

Nyman’s tuck is his biggest strength, a move he has honed more than any of his competitors, like Beckham’s swerving free kick or Nadal’s blistering forehand. But unlike many other athletic maneuvers, perfected through thousands of attempts against fluid, ever-changing opponents, Nyman developed his tuck with data, the mathematical truths of aerodynamic physics.
It was forged in a wind tunnel. Here, large wall fans and creative architecture funnel air through a small opening; when standing in just the right spot, you feel winds up to 100 miles per hour. A monitor at your feet spits out real-time data, quantifying the aerodynamic drag and localizing its sources on your body. “Steven is a wind tunnel freak,” says Troy Flanagan, director of high performance for the US Ski Team. “You’ve got to be super strong, and he’s a big dude” — 6-foot-4, 212 pounds — “so he gets a lot of force on him, but he holds really still the whole time.” Flanagan, who has a PhD in aerospace engineering, is the primary driver of the team’s adoption of science-based training and assessment. He knows the approach works—he helped turn his native Australia’s underperforming Olympic teams into perennial contenders.
For Nyman, the wind tunnel data has unearthed a new world of hidden milliseconds and given him a sixth sense for shaving time from a ski run. One of the first things he noticed was the remarkable inefficiency of the team’s suits. “We were so far behind back then,” Nyman says, speaking of 2012 as if it were the Stone Age. “We had XXL, XL, L, and M—there’s your suit, good luck. But when the wind hit 80 miles per hour, the suit just started flapping, and the drag skyrocketed.”

With enough strength, body control, and concentration you can learn how to be a statue in a hurricane.

Now, of course, the suits are custom-tailored, mapped to the contours of each skier’s body by a coterie of exclusively requisitioned European tailors, and Flanagan believes they’ve flipped a glaring weakness into a competitive advantage. The team’s primary rivals are Austria, Switzerland, and Norway, European skiing powerhouses that, to hear the Americans talk about it, operate with the cold, well-financed efficiency of a Bond villain’s enterprise. “One way for us to get ahead is to do something they can’t or won’t do,” explains Flanagan, “like using the US aerospace industry to design our suits.” With zero government funding, the US Ski and Snowboard Association has had to get creative, like tapping U.S. companies and universities to lend their expertise and money in exchange for some all-American Olympic exposure. “Austria and Norway just don’t have that expertise. They can’t do it; no matter what, we win,” Flanagan says.
Nyman has visited any wind tunnel that would grant him time, from San Diego to Buffalo to Ogden, Utah. Each facility has its own strengths—one simulates crosswinds best, another has a higher maximum wind speed—helping Nyman to hone his tuck to a state of sculpture-like precision. Most of the other skiers on the team who use the tunnels will tweak their position to get the lowest drag score—the stance with the least wind resistance—treating the experience like a video game. But Nyman knows there’s much more to engineering a winning run. It’s not just speed and reducing drag that matters, but also stability, given the constant jostling and rattling of the varied terrain.
Many of his teammates see the exercise as a chore, but Nyman loves it and has taken it upon himself to understand the underlying physics. He spends more time in the wind tunnels than anyone else. And he’s good at it. It turns out that standing still is a skill that is highly amenable to training. With enough strength, body control, and concentration you can learn how to be a statue in a hurricane. Then there are the subtler lessons. For example, the wind tunnel sessions helped Nyman discover that keeping his hands forward and his elbows together consistently reduces drag. In this position, wind slams into Nyman’s chest and funnels down between his legs; his arms and hands are essentially invisible, generating no additional resistance.

Steven Nyman on the Val Gardena downhill course in 2012. Claudio Onorati/Corbis

Nyman goes into the tuck as early as possible and likes to stay there — it’s his strongest competitive advantage over other, smaller skiers. His larger mass results in more momentum, which helps him overcome the forces of friction and drag better than a lighter skier. When standing up, he’s a self-professed “parachute,” and his hard-won hundredths of seconds evaporate.

Blood Work at 5:30 a.m.
Nyman hits Val Gardena’s most famous obstacle — the notorious Camel Humps—and launches into the air at 80 mph. He’s soaring, and this is a good thing. The trick is to clear a series of three jumps all at once and avoid one of the most dangerous parts of the course. He strains to keep his skis aloft just a little longer. It’s working—he clears 150, 200, 250 feet. He catches a glimpse below as he passes over the landing tracks of previous racers. “All right, it’s on,” he thinks. “I’m flying!”

When he lands, Nyman is 53 seconds through his run and 0.34 seconds ahead of leader Rok Perko of Slovenia. He’s just moved into first place. The race announcers are audibly surprised at the split time: “Nyman is up!” one of them shouts.
The physics of a skier’s wind resistance. The aerodynamic properties of ski suits. Flanagan — the coach from Australia, has boundless belief that science and tech can produce results. He comes by this trust, naturally enough, because of evidence: It worked magnificently for his nation’s Olympic teams, the swim squad in particular. “Most countries had to have a sports disaster before they took the scientific element seriously,” Flanagan says. “In ’76, Australia won one bronze metal in the Summer Olympics. It was an embarrassment.” In response, the government established an Institute of Sport, placed top scientists alongside top coaches, and hoped for the best. The experiment worked, and at the 2000 Sydney games, Australia won 58 medals. “That process kind of developed sports science as we know it today,” he says.
By 2007, Flanagan was ready for a change. When he heard about the US Ski Team job, “my main question was, what time do skiers train in the morning, because swimming starts at 4 am. They said, cappuccino hour is 10 o’clock, and I’m like, ‘I’m interested.’” The transition wasn’t entirely seamless. “I had never seen snow before I got to Park City,” he confesses, “and my first time on skis I had an enormous crash in front of the entire team.” But from his desk overlooking the weight room at the US Ski and Snowboard Association’s Center of Excellence, Flanagan has built an alpine empire. Under his data-driven reign, everything is tracked, quantified, and run through statistical regression analyses in the pursuit of an optimized, personalized training regimen.

“Every single run, you see a scenario that could take you out.”

“Every morning at 5:30, we’d wake up to measure our blood glucose, creatine kinase, and urea,” recalls Nyman of last summer’s training camp in Chile. “So it gets old, you know, and some guys like it—I like it—but some guys hate it, they’re just like, ‘Let me sleep!’” Convincing athletes to buy in to the poking and prodding requires finesse. “It’s like selling a used car,” Flanagan says conspiratorially. “It’s really a sneaky process, where you’ve got to go in with something that’s really useful and totally changes their performance, and once you’ve earned that respect and trust, then you can come in with all the other things you want them to incorporate,” like urine tests and nutrition plans.
The top brass at the USSA believe this science-based program gives them a world-beating competitive edge, and they may be right: American skiers were mired in mediocrity for most of the last few decades, with the occasional flash in the pan. But over the past several years, the stars and stripes have become a fixture on World Cup and Olympic podiums. With the success of skiers like Lindsey Vonn, Ted Ligety, Julia Mancuso, and Mikaela Shiffrin, the US is a legitimate skiing powerhouse.

Winning the Head Game
At 58.6 seconds, Nyman reacts to a small, rolling bump in the course by pulling his knees upward, but the rise ends suddenly, like stepping off an unexpected curb. Now his skis are pushing against nothing but air, unbalanced and flailing. For a fraction of a second, the possibility of a crash pushes into his mind: In a flash he imagines slamming onto the ice, crashing sidelong into the red safety netting, torqueing his limbs into ragdoll disarray, trailing plumes of snow like a downed jet.

Instead, he instinctively throws his arms outward and balances himself mid-air, landing on both feet and carving a right turn just before the clock marks its last split time of the race: Now 65 seconds into the run, he’s 0.38 seconds ahead of the day’s fastest time. He’s thinking he just might be able to pull this thing off; he might actually win. “Look at the advantage now by Nyman over Perko!” the announcer shrieks.
This time, Nyman avoided disaster, but he has experienced his share of debilitating wipeouts during his 11 years as a pro racer. He has been periodically hobbled by back and knee injuries; in a November 2011 crash, he ruptured his left Achilles tendon and was sidelined for the entire season. With races hanging on fractions of a second and a scoring system that disproportionately favors the top finishers, the smart play in World Cup skiing is to go for broke. Doing marginally better in the middle of the pack doesn’t pay off: The scoring difference between the 40th place and 30th place finishers is less than the difference between 10th and first. But it can be difficult, sometimes impossible, to go all out with the memories of past crashes lurking in your mind. You become intensely aware of exactly what could happen if you crash; wanting to avoid those devastating consequences, you slow down just a hair, well-founded fear trumping the craving to win.

Nyman tries to regain balance and avoid a crash. Pierre Teyssot/Demotix/Corbis

“Every single run, you always see a scenario that could take you out,” Nyman says. “It’s always in your head. I’ve become more aware and more fearful of those possibilities the older I’ve become. When I was young, it was just go, go, go, but now it’s definitely something in the back of my head and I’m trying to fight that, to work through that.”
Learning how to tamp down these fears is as crucial to success as perfecting the tuck position. That’s why the US team has added psychological tools into its science-based training methods. Deploying those tools falls primarily to Lester Keller, the team’s performance psychology program coordinator. Relaxed and avuncular, Keller explains that he emphasizes a relatively new approach known as positive psychology. It focuses less on the treating mental problems or weaknesses and more on the study and promotion of what makes us better, more efficient. The profusion of pop psych happiness how-to manuals (The Happiness Project, The Happiness Advantage, The Happiness Trap, to name just a few) underlines this shift in perspective across the field. “We’ve been using that approach this whole time,” Keller says. “We were on the cutting edge without knowing it.”
To help skiers like Nyman reconcile the risks and rewards of hurling themselves down a mountain, Keller stresses “a toolset of mental skills, things like imagery, visualization, relaxation, journaling, concentration, and focus to promote optimal performance.” He’s also found that athletes respond better to the training if it’s offered as “mental skills and mental strength” rather than “psychological help”; “That word psychology has lots of connotations,” he notes with a grimace.
Not everyone is able to come back from a traumatic injury with the same competitive spirit. “For some, time will heal it,” Keller says. “For others, it might not. Some people have massive injuries and just don’t come back, they don’t have that drive in them anymore. It’s over.” Nyman hasn’t lost his drive, but bad memories do pose a mental burden.

If he’s able to incorporate the science, Sochi just might give Nyman the most memorable 120 seconds of his life.

On his own road to recovery, Nyman used visualization techniques, steeling himself against the moments of panic that would come with unexpected developments on the course. Eyes closed, hands gently clutching imaginary poles, torso rotating ever so slightly, he imagines the twists and turns of the course, playing out different scenarios. “You see where the turns are, where the terrain is, and you see yourself going over that terrain,” Nyman says. “You visualize this over and over and over, to convince yourself of what’s possible.”
Restoring a skier’s confidence after a bad crash is part of Keller’s challenge. He stresses incremental progress, prompting the athlete to rebuild trust in his body, his intuition, and his mental construct of risk in a way that mirrors a toddler’s progressive explorations. As Keller explains, “You start out on your little skis,” — Nyman learned to ski at age 2 — “tromping around in the snow, and there’s not much risk. And by the time you get to be 10 or 12, you have eight years of experience that you’ve automated, just like walking, or a bird flying.” A bad fall can shatter that automaticity, but picking up the pieces is possible, because the pieces were there to begin with. After Nyman’s November 2011 crash, he worked on rebuilding confidence by slowly re-automating trust in his body. He used both gym training and “couch sessions” with Keller and other coaches.
Once the fear of injury that was holding a skier back from all-out effort has been addressed, it frees him up to apply tremendous mental focus to the handful of things that will optimize his runs. The practice and application of that focus is the second prong of Nyman’s customized psychological training. “Steven’s a racehorse, and we all know he can be tremendously fast,” explains Sasha Rearick, head coach of the men’s team. “But he’s not a consistent guy; for him to be consistent, he’s got to simplify his approach now.”
In the past, Nyman chased new ideas, grasping for something that would stick: new ski designs, different cardio training approaches, regimented sleep patterns. It was the opposite of a clear, focused approach. With so many moving parts, it was impossible to see what was really working, and the mental burden was overwhelming. A session with his psychologist crystallized the problem for Nyman: “He said, ‘I want you to listen to music, watch TV, and read a book all at the same time and tell me what happened in all three,’ and it really clicked with me, made it all simpler.” It’s all about accepting that he can’t control everything or be the best at every aspect of skiing, and using data to find a few differentiating factors that are most likely to give him a competitive advantage. “He’s tried all kinds of different ideas, at many different times, but this process is working,” Rearick says. “The science has helped him see what’s important.”

Coaching via Satellite
Now 65 seconds into his Val Gardena run, Nyman is holding it together, and he feels a mounting elation. The Ciaslat—a contorted, bumpy segment of the course that bounces skiers into the air at unexpected trajectories—is behind him, now his biggest foe is friction. Crouching into a gentle left turn, he prepares for the last two sharp rights before the straightaway to the finish line. He goes directly at the first turn (72.6 seconds), brushing the gate with his right shoulder and fighting hard against the momentum that directs him toward the left side of the course. The final corner (79.1 seconds) is a carbon copy, as he carves the ice with his right ski edges to maintain an optimal line around the gates.

Nyman after crossing the finish line. Alessandro Trovati

The centimeter-scale precision of Nyman’s position on the course is no accident: High-resolution GPS tracking during the previous day’s training run revealed his ideal line of attack. Some competitors cover more distance but have a higher-speed route; others take a more direct line but at a slightly slower speed. Analysis of the GPS readouts provided crucial insight about the Val Gardena course, and how Nyman should attack it. “When I’m most effective, I actually cover less distance, from what I’ve seen,” Nyman says. Because his large frame creates so much drag, it’s best to get through the turns, which require him to come out of his tuck and stand up, as directly as possible.
GPS technology is one of the most recent additions to the team’s science and tech arsenal, one of Flanagan’s favorite toys. Coaches track the skiers’ training runs throughout the year, building a database that reveals optimal trajectories across a range of courses, weather conditions, and body types. High-hertz transponders studded along the course collect data on a skier’s exact location with millisecond resolution. “We’re able to see velocities and accelerations and decelerations out of turns,” Flanagan says. “Why does Bode [Miller] go through that turn and gain speed, but the others don’t? These are very practical kinds of questions.” The coaching staff can then interrogate the data retrospectively to see what sorts of lines work best for a given athlete on a certain course under particular conditions. Sometimes it turns out that a rounder line is actually faster than a straighter one.
Flanagan, drawing on his engineering background, pioneered the development of smaller, more sensitive devices called inertial tracking sensors. Instead of staying in constant contact with GPS satellites, these little guys use gyroscopes and accelerometers to calculate movement. The next step is to add instant feedback, perhaps even a set-up that would warn a skier of an inefficient line in real time through a wireless earpiece. Flanagan thinks this kind of tracking is the future of sports technology, and one of the keys to the US team’s ability to win.

The Finish Line
Over the last jump at 86 seconds, Nyman nearly loses control again, saving the run by raising his arms as a counterbalance to keep his skis parallel to the ground. Two seconds later, he crosses the finish line, turning to look expectantly at the monitors in the deceleration zone to see where he has placed. “-0.19” flashes in green lights: He is in first place, a position that will hold up for the rest of the competition and give Nyman his second-ever World Cup victory.

Nyman celebrates. Alessandro Trovati

During the medal ceremony a few hours later, Nyman tries not to smile, but not even his hours of psychological training can suppress the grin that breaks out on his face. Beaming on the podium, he holds his skis above his head and lets out a primal scream of joy. Nyman grasps the arms of the second- and third-place finishers, Rok Perko and Eric Guay of Canada, inviting them up to the top step on either side of him. He takes their hands and raises them up in triumph, holding the pose a touch longer than his vanquished competitors might have preferred. He doesn’t want this moment to end.

Nyman’s late-career resurgence makes him a surprising contender for the gold medal in Sochi, where the downhill course, with its lengthy, tuck-ready high-speed segments, plays to some of his core strengths. If he’s able to incorporate everything the science has provided and focus on the process he’s automated through decades of single-minded effort, Sochi just might give Nyman the most memorable 120 seconds of his life.