The struggle to ensure that sports are clean has intensified over the last decade. The anti-doping community has notched major victories, with the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency finally bringing down cycling superstar Lance Armstrong in 2012 and the World Anti-Doping Agency (with the help of Bryan Fogel’s documentary Icarus) breaking open Russia’s state-sponsored doping program just months before the Rio 2016 Olympic Games. (A recent admission of falsifying data by Yuri Ganus, the director general of the Russian anti-doping agency, may well affect his country’s return to competition.) And late last month, the USADA levied a four-year ban on famed Nike Oregon Project coach Alberto Salazar. Less than two weeks later, Nike shuttered the Oregon Project.

But the anti-doping community typically lacks sufficient financial resources to completely get the upperhand in the endless cat-and-mouse game. WADA funding from the Olympic Movement and the world’s governments totalled just $35 million in 2019. The USADA’s annual report for 2018 indicated it had less than $9 million available to cover its expenditures for the following year. Those are tiny amounts when considering that the global sports industry is estimated to be worth some $70 billion. To put a fine point on it: the industry is spending less than 0.1% of its wealth to ensure that competition is clean.

SportTechie recently spoke to USADA CEO Travis Tygart and chief science officer Matt Fedoruk about the state of anti-doping.

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Swimming has long been low tech, the least connected of modern sports. Being fully immersed in water creates significant challenges for collecting even the most basic metric (heart rate) and prevents easy reading of data during a workout. Though products made by major manufacturers such as FitBit, Garmin, and Polar incorporate water resistance, most cannot record heart rate during swimming. And while standalone fitness apps such as Strava and TrainingPeaks include swimming options alongside the other sports such as cycling and running, competitive swimmers rarely use wearable devices.

But that could be changing. Two weeks ago, SportTechie spoke to Dan Eisenhardt, whose company, FORM, is building augmented reality swimming goggles. Yesterday, we caught up with Russell Mark, USA Swimming’s high performance manager, to talk about the future of the sport and the analytics startup, Aspiricx, that he advises.

Now we introduce you to another swim-tech entrepreneur, Hind Hobeika, whose company, Instabeat, has created a small device that clips onto the side of swimming goggles. An optical sensor reads a swimmer’s heart rate from blood flow in the right temple, and displays it via colored lights in the swimmer’s peripheral vision. Green means the heart rate is in the correct training zone, blue means it has dropped too low, and red means it has risen too high.

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While studying for an MBA at the University of British Columbia, Dan Eisenhardt pitched an idea during class to bring augmented reality to swimming. A dozen years later, Eisenhardt is finally bringing that concept to market with the release of FORM swimming googles.

Eisenhardt swum competitively as a child growing up in Denmark, and won NJCAA All-American honors while swimming for Indian River State College in Florida as a freshman in the mid-1990s. Because looking at a stopwatch or a wearable tracker always meant stopping, he wanted to bring real-time metrics to swimming in a non-disruptive way.

His original project was a startup called Recon Instruments, but the concept pivoted to snow sports. Ski goggles were bulkier and didn’t need to be quite so waterproof, so packaging the electronics was easier. Recon’s first heads-up display product, Transcend, launched in 2010, pre-dating Google Glass by more than a year.

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Yesterday at the Granada Theatre in Emporia, Kans. there was a stark contrast between the men’s and women’s podiums for the Dirty Kanza 200 ultra-endurance bike race. The five top women took their places and waved at the audience of locals, other racers, and support crew. The men no-showed.

To give men’s winner Colin Strickland some credit, he was late, and he took his place on the stage towards the end of the awards ceremony. But the damage may have been already done as images of both podiums spread on social media.

All 10 riders are pro racers, which understandably creates complicated travel schedules. Even at the most elite levels of cycling, there often isn’t much time to celebrate a good result before hitting the road in search of the next race. And among the age-group podiums also celebrated on Sunday, there were occasional absences. Dirty Kanza can be a brutal race, and the 2019 edition was no exception. The course ran along gravel roads through the rolling terrain of the Flint Hills north of Emporia. In soaring heat and humidity, 870 out of 1,196 starters finished, the last reaching the line in 20 hours, 43 minutes, and 55 seconds—Strickland’s record-setting time, for contrast, was 9:58:49. Some people were understandably too beaten up to stand on stage.

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When Gotham Chopra launched the Religion of Sports with co-founders Tom Brady and Michael Strahan in 2016, he set out to capture the similarities between sports events and religious ones, and even to understand sports as religion. Last year, he created the Facebook Watch documentary series Tom vs Time, which studied how age is impacting Brady’s NFL career. Now, Chopra is releasing a new series, Stephen vs The Game, focused on Golden State Warriors point guard Steph Curry.

Unanimous Media, a media firm founded by Curry and business partners Jeron Smith and Erick Peyton, was the executive producer of Stephen vs The Game. The company aims to produce content focused on family, faith, and sports.

Chopra recently talked to SportTechie about the new series, the connection between sports and religion, and the experience and process of making documentaries for Facebook Watch.

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In August 2017, Hillary Allen fell off a cliff halfway through the Hamperokken Skyrace ultramarathon in the mountains of Norway. She dropped 150 feet, hitting the rocks on her way down, and blacked out. Allen broke a dozen bones and tore a ligament in her right foot. Though neither leg was broken, a doctor told her the injuries were bad enough she might never run again.

Allen, aka “Hillygoat,” was determined to fight her way back. During her long recovery and rehabilitation, she began using the social exercise platform Strava, and became more active on social media in general. She found encouragement from a supportive online community, some of whom have become real-life pen pals. Last June, less than a year since her accident, Allen raced the Broken Arrow Vertical Kilometer in Squaw Valley, Calif. She finished a close second in her return to competition, completing the steep 3.1-mile course in 46 minutes and 28 seconds.

Besides being sponsored by The North Face as an ultrarunner, Allen is a science instructor at Front Range Community College near Boulder. She is also fascinated by insects.

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Isaiah Kacyvenski was a four-year starter at Harvard University, winning the Ivy League Rookie of the Year Award and being named to the conference’s first team three times. He was drafted No. 119 by the Seattle Seahawks in 2000, making him the highest pick from Harvard in NFL history. Kacyvenski went on to play six seasons with the Seahawks, and one with the St. Louis Rams. After moving to the Oakland Raiders in 2007, he was sidelined with a knee injury, and decided to retire the following year.

Growing up, Kacyvenski saw both sports and school as a way to build a better life. He had a difficult childhood. His family was homeless at times, his father struggled with alcoholism, and his mother was killed by a truck the day of his biggest high school football game.

While in the league, Kacyvenski began learning about both investing in and running companies, and after retiring he returned to Harvard for business school. He became the global head of business development for MC10, a company specializing in wearable healthcare analytics. Then in 2016, he founded the Sports Innovation Lab, a market research firm dedicated to the world of sports technology. Last year, he launched Will Ventures with co-founder Brian Reilly to invest in emerging technologies that while connected to sports, show promise to open up bigger markets.

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Nico Deportago-Cabrera first took up cycling around Chicago in 2004 after losing his driver’s license. Four years later, when the band he played in broke up, Deportago-Cabrera started working as a bike messenger and began racing alleycats against fellow couriers. Riders would speed from checkpoint to checkpoint across the city in unsanctioned races, completing various tasks along the route.

Deportago-Cabrera won the North American Cycle Courier Championships in Boston in 2009, and again in Brooklyn in 2016. He signed on as a Red Bull-sponsored athlete, and has competed in the Cycle Messenger World Championships. His racing seasons each year now pivot from messenger-style races to cyclocross, gravel events, and ultra-endurance. September’s Bay Climb race was a short sprint straight up De Haro Street in San Francisco, with gradients exceeding 23 percent—very different to his flat hometown.

He still lives and works in Chicago as a bike messenger. Over the last decade he has seen the courier industry forced almost out of existence, and then evolve and flourish as the app-driven gig economy has grown.

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Phil Gaimon has built a brand as a cookie-loving, Strava KOM-collecting, former pro cyclist. Gaimon raced for two years on the World Tour with the Garmin-Sharp (2014) and Cannondale (2016) team. He won the Redlands Bicycle Classic in 2012 and 2015, won Stage 1 and finished second overall in his first World Tour event, the 2014 Tour de San Luis, and, after officially retiring in 2016, won the USA Cycling Hill Climb National Championship in August 2017. He had a tattoo of a bar of soap with the word CLEAN inked on his right bicep to underline that he never used performance enhancing drugs.

During his pro career, Gaimon became known for his love of cookies, and for being one of the most open riders on the World Tour. He founded his own race, the Cookie Fondo, in November 2016 and showed up at pro races, including the 2017 Tour of California, with a jar of cookies to promote it. (Along the way scoring a photo of three-time road race world champion Peter Sagan popping a wheelie while reaching for a cookie mid-race.)

Gaimon has written three books—Pro Cycling on $10 a Day: From Fat Kid to Euro Pro, Ask a Pro: Deep Thoughts and Unreliable Advice from America’s Foremost Cycling Sage, and Draft Animals: Living the Pro Cycling Dream (Once in a While)—and stars in a series of Worst Retirement Everand Best Retirement Ever videos on his YouTube channel that offer cycling fans a view into the life of a pro, or ex-pro, cyclist. He is active on the social fitness platform Strava, where he seeks to set fastest times on cycling segments around the world and rack up King of the Mountain crowns.

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Genetic information will soon be a standard part of sports, used to customize training, personalize nutrition, and even to identify talent. Over the last few years, DNA analysis firm Athletigen and elite track and field training facility Altis have been working together to explore and develop that future.

Through collaboration, both Altis and Athletigen have been hoping to gain a head start in this race, learning what genetic information is important and how to convert that into actionable insights. A new product launched by Athletigen on Tuesday, the Altis Sport Performance Report, is hoping to bring some of what the two organizations have learned to consumers, both pro and amateur.

Altis’s athletes have been the lab rats that Athletigen can study, a population of highly fit individuals who closely follow training and nutrition protocols, generating accurate data that give context to the results from genetic testing. John Godina, a three-time Olympian who founded Altis in 2013, describes his organization as something between a training center and an educational and research institute. “[Altis] is a great science lab,” he said. “It gives us a chance to do stuff in a controlled environment that can benefit all kinds of different people.”

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