Unleashing secrets for skill improvement

The rising cost to compete, in both dollars and time, is not helping the health of the sport. It certainly has helped improve skill, but if it has made the sport harder to participate in, does that make it better?

While high investment is nothing new at the America’s Cup or Olympic level, there is often very little regulation stopping the use of this playbook at the recreational level. In this report by Dave Reed in Sailing World, he unleashes the secrets to improve ability… for a fee:

Kinetix AI, a deceptively simple and powerful analytical software tool, is now being used by sailors of all levels to up their results in a big way in what its creators say is performance improvement—simplified.

It’s “video analytics software for sailors that helps you simplify your debrief and accelerate your improvement,” says creator Omer Brand, a professional sailor from Israel, who—like most innovators—created the application purely out of need.

In the early days of his first Olympic 49er campaign, he didn’t have a coach or much of anything in the way of structured training, so Brand and his teammate relied on two GoPro cameras and a separate GPS tracker to analyze their training sessions.

“Every day after sailing, we would sit down and try to synchronize everything, and then try to make sense of it. Imagine for every two hours of sailing we had four hours of video and two hours of data. It was a process of up to six hours before we’d find something useful.”

His experiences as a professional sailor in the European big-boat scene and his work at a software startup eventually spawned an idea to employ the high-level data capabilities of the America’s Cup and grand-prix scene, but deliver them in a simplified format for the sailing masses. He took the idea to Roni Raviv, an avid racing sailor and tech entrepreneur with nearly 30 patents to his credit, and away they went. – Full report