They play hard they play often and the play to win. Australian team sports win more than their fair share of titles demolishing rivals with seeming ease. How do they do it? A big part of the secret is an extensive and expensive network of sporting academies underpinned by science and medicine at the Australian institute of sport hundreds of youngsters and pros live and train under the eyes of coaches Another body the Australian sports commission finances programmes of excellence in a total of 96 sports for thousand of sportsmen and woman both provide intensive coaching training facilities and nutritional advice.

Inside the academies science take centre stage the AIS employs more than 100 sports scientists and collaborates with scores of other in universities and research centre AIS work across a number of sports applying skills learned in one such as building muscle strength in golfer to other such as swimming and squash they are backed up by technicians who design instruments to collect data from athletes. They all focus on one aim winning we can not waste our time looking at scientific questions that do not help the coach work with an athlete and improve performance.

A lot of their work come down to measurement everything of the exact angle of a swimmer’s dive to the 2^nd by2nd power out put of a cyclist. This date is used to wring improvements out of athletes the focus is an individuals tweaking performance to squeeze an extra hundredth of a second here an extra millimeter there no again is too slight to bother with it’s the tiny gradual improvements that add up to world beating results to demonstrate how the system works a wire frame model of a champion swimmer slices through the water her arms moving in slow motion looking side on mason measures the distance between strokes from above he analyses how her spine swivels when fully developed which system will enable him to build a biomechanical profile for coaches to use to help budding swimmer mason’s to sport also include development of the SWAN system now used in Australian national competitions it collects image from digital camera running at 50 frames a second and breaks down each part of swimmer performances into factors that can be analysed individually stroke length stroke frequency average duration of each stroke velocity start lap and finish and so on at the end of each race. SWAN spits out data on each swimmer.

Take a look says mason pulling out a sheet of data. He points out the data on the swimmer in second and third place which show that the one who finished third actually swam faster so why did he finish 35 hundredths of a second down his turn times were 44 hundredths of a second behind the other guy say mason if can improve his turn he can do much better this is the kind of accuracy that AIS research is to bringing to a range of sports. They are developing unobtrusive sensors that will be embedded in a athletes cloths or running shoes to monitor heart rate sweating heat production or than other factor that might have an impact on a athlete’s ability to run. There is more to it than simply measuring performance the example of athletes who may be down with coughts and colds 11 or 12 times a year. After years of experimentation AIS and the university of Newcastle in New south wales developed a test that measure that how much of the immune system. A present in athletes saliva’s if levels suddenly fall below a certain level training is eased or dropped altogether soon levels start rising again and the danger passes since the tests were introduced AIS athletes in all sports have been remarkably successful at staying healthy.

Using date is a complex business well before a championship sports scientists and coaches start to prepare the athlete by developing a competition model based on that they expect will be the winning times. You design the model to make that time says mason a start of this much each free swimming period has to be this fast with a certain stroke frequency and stroke length with turns done in these times all the training is then geared towards making the athlete his those targets both overall and for each segment of the race. Technique like these have transformed Australia into the words most successful sporting nation.

Of course there are nothing to stop other countries copying and many have tried some years ago the AIS unveiled coolant jackets for athletes at the Atlanta Olympic Game in 1996 these sliced as much as tow per cent off cyclists and rowers times now everyone uses them the same has happened to the altitude tent developed by AIS to replicate the effect of altitude training at sea level but Australia’s success story is about more than easily copied technological fixes, and up to now nation has replicated its all encompassing system.