Only for enjoyable, Xavier McKeever and his cross-country ski teammates as soon as tasked ChatGPT to design a coaching plan for them.
“It was the craziest coaching plan we’ve ever seen,” mentioned the 22-year-old from Canmore, Alta.
“It mainly mentioned it’s best to do depth each single day. You must do three hours of snowboarding after which an hour of depth, and repeat that a number of occasions — after which it’s best to take per week off utterly. We all know you may’t do this.
“It was fairly humorous to see and do, to see Chat GPT can’t write a coaching plan, and that we want our teaching to assist us with that.”
Whereas OpenAI’s chatbot didn’t nail a exercise for the skiers, synthetic intelligence has entered the lives of Canada’s athletes on the Winter Video games in Milan-Cortina, Italy.
The Oxford Dictionary defines AI as “the capability of computer systems or different machines to exhibit or simulate clever behaviour” and “software program used to carry out duties or produce output beforehand thought to require human intelligence, esp. through the use of machine studying to extrapolate from giant collections of knowledge.”
“The phrase ‘synthetic intelligence’ or ‘AI’ is so misunderstood,” mentioned Andy Van Neutegem, vice-president of efficiency sciences, analysis and innovation at Personal the Podium, Canada’s high-performance sport funding and advisory physique.
“We have a tendency to make use of the phrase ‘machine studying.’”
From Apple and Garmin watches and Oura rings that feed sleep and heart-rate information into smartphones to generate restoration scores, to inertial measurement items connected to athletes’ our bodies for three-dimensional positioning evaluation, the AI growth is inescapable.
Associated Movies
A standard theme amongst Canadian athletes is that AI is extra of a device for coaching than competitors. They worth intuition and lived expertise simply as a lot as, if no more than, information.
“In my sport that’s efficiency on demand, it’s essential to have some information, however have an excellent really feel for the snow,” mentioned freestyle skier and triple Olympic moguls medallist Mikael Kingsbury.
Get day by day Nationwide information
Get the day’s high information, political, financial, and present affairs headlines, delivered to your inbox as soon as a day.
“In a sport the place issues change rather a lot as a result of we’re exterior, I don’t need numbers to be my indicator.”
In terms of Olympic and Paralympic Video games, sport science is the sport inside the Video games as nations preserve their know-how secrets and techniques underneath wraps.
Van Neutegem gained’t get into specifics on the Canadian workforce’s preparation for the Milan Cortina Video games, however permits some sports activities to make heavy use of AI.
“You possibly can speak about snowboarding, speak about freestyle,” he mentioned.
“In terms of AI, the place we’re at proper now globally in Olympic and Paralympic sport and professional sport is that we’re utilizing AI to trace biomechanical positioning of the physique. It’s about physique shapes. Are the physique shapes optimum? AI does the work of a human eye. It’s a department of AI that we name laptop imaginative and prescient, and it actually simply mimics the capabilities of the human mind. The pc detects, does object recognition, and it begins understanding whether or not that’s optimum.”
Sliding sports activities used native positioning programs (LPS) and leveraged AI to find out the quickest line down a observe, he added.
“You’re bringing a unprecedented quantity of knowledge into a pc, which is computating it and spitting out an interpretation of whether or not that is optimum or not optimum primarily based upon information that’s been collected over an extended time frame,” Van Neutegem defined.
When the Worldwide Olympic Committee launched its AI Agenda virtually two years in the past, IOC president Thomas Bach mentioned, “AI can revolutionize judging and refereeing.”
The Worldwide Gymnastics Federation carried out an AI judging platform on the Paris 2024 Summer time Video games to assist human judges consider gymnasts’ strikes.
Snowboard judging was a flashpoint in Beijing in 2022, when Canada’s slopestyle champion Max Parrot acknowledged he touched his knee as an alternative of grabbing his board on one run — and the judges missed it.
The X Video games, ESPN’s motion sports activities competitors that helped popularize disciplines later added to the Olympics, has turned an AI judging platform right into a enterprise referred to as “The Owl AI” since first testing it on males’s halfpipe snowboarders on the 2025 occasion in Aspen.
“They have been utilizing AI to see if it might name the methods to be sure that that’s what somebody did,” recalled Canadian freestyle halfpipe skier Rachel Karker.
“I nonetheless assume it’s actually essential to have a human set of eyes to observe as a result of the problem with our sport is that everybody does their methods barely otherwise. It’s not like gymnastics or aerials, the place they’ve a very strict approach of the way you do a trick.
“Everybody kind of spins on a special axis and kind of has a barely totally different variation to it. It’d battle to choose up on nuances like that and perhaps name it a bit totally different, however it’s beginning to get launched in competitors. I’m torn on whether or not it’ll make it higher or make it worse.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first revealed Feb. 13, 2026.
© 2026 The Canadian Press
