Can AI help Tadej Pogacar win Tour de France? "Such an analysis can reveal all kinds of things"

Team Visma | Lease a Bike is in recent years investing on coaches from other sports and non-traditional forms of support for it's staff. As cycling becomes more and more technological, teams continue to pursue the maximum gains by whatever means possible, and UAE Team Emirates is testing to see if AI can help increase it's performances.

“There will certainly be a breakthrough through the use of A.I. in the coming years. We are now working with an A.I. partner to sift through vast amounts of training, performance data and other variables that we can input and review," UAE Team Emirates coach Jeroen Swart told Velo. "We look at training protocol, race selections and much more. It may not yield much, but investing in A.I. could show us the next step forward."

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Whilst it is difficult to see where artificial intelligence could provide valuable insight or change in training methods for racing, cycling as a rather technological sport could benefit from it. Very slightly, likely, but when the difference between winning or losing is sometimes only centimeters in a sprint, or seconds in a stage-race, every detail matters at this level of the sport. Having a very quick rise over the past few years, UAE seem to be at the forefront of this new aproach.

“Such an analysis can reveal all kinds of things. Insights may emerge that we have not yet thought about," Swart believes, as he analyses the data that is given to him and decides on what will be implemented and not. "That's the great thing about AI: it has no preconceived ideas. It takes the data, analyzes it and spits out a bunch of answers. Then you test it.”

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Wout van Aert aims for pink jersey on opening Giro d'Italia week: “I'm curious to see how it will all go, especially because there is a rider of the caliber of Tadej Pogacar"

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