Your eyes are lying to you: What data tells us about Olympic swimming

To keep their edge after a fantastic showing at the 2016 Rio Olympics, Swimming Canada got serious about their data-mining mission. They tracked all kinds of metrics to really understand their swimmers’ performance. Data analysis can show you how to shave a fraction of a second off a race time and, in some cases, that can mean the difference between a gold and silver medal.

Grant Robertson, a senior writer for The Globe and Mail, talks about what he learned about Swimming Canada’s data project, how it crafted training strategies for some of our medal hopefuls, like Penny Oleksiak, and why data proves you can’t always trust your eyes when it comes to judging the fastest person in the pool.

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