Henk-Jan Zwolle, an Olympic gold medallist and founder of MyPerfectCoach, reinforced this point. He said the MyPerfectCoach training and recovery planning system “is an assistant” to the coach. “It’s not a threat,” he continued: “It’s a companion.”

Dr Draper noted that while the use of technology certainly can advance rowing as a sport, “we also have to make sure that technology can only assist and not replace the art of coaching.” “This is for me always rule no.1,” she said. “Keep the gut feeling of what’s right or wrong, [and] use the technology as your assistant.”

Speakers also pointed to the importance of feedback in improving athlete performance. Such feedback comes in the form of information both from the technology to the coach and athlete, and from coach to athlete; it relates also both to boat speed and land training performance.

“The main thing is how to get useful feedback,” said Zwolle. “The most important thing about measuring data is to get reliable and useful feedback from the coach, from the system, [and] not just collecting data.”

“The athlete is a main source of information,” Zwolle told Ludum. With the athletes providing personal data, this means the athlete needs to be in charge of the data, he added. “Coaches can only get reliable data from the athlete if they give enough responsibility to the athlete.”

In addition, Zwolle continued, “Training time is only a small part of the day.” “Most of the day, athletes are not training but are recovering from training, [and] that is their responsibility …. Measuring the effects of recovery is equally as important as measuring training performance.

Naughton said that Nielsen-Kellerman’s combining of its EmPower oarlock (designed to measure force and angle on the gate) with its GPS-based SpeedCoach (designed to measure outputs such as stroke rate, boat speed, and time splits, with a ‘Skills Screen’ added to display data to the athlete) was intended to help an athlete make a boat go faster on the next stroke by providing immediate feedback on how a technical change was affecting boat speed.

The importance of effective feedback also raised the question of the ability to rely on technology and the data it generates. Dr Draper said “When you use information it is objective information, but we also have to be aware that equipment can fail, and you need to be very careful how you use information and what you trust.”

Moreover, Dr Draper underscored the need to understand the technology system in use, what it is measuring, and how it is set up. Reinforcing the primary role of the coach, she concluded that today’s coaches are all experienced in reading and understanding objective data, if it is presented in the right way.

The role of data, and the wider use of technology, is continuing to grow and will have increasing impact on developments in the rowing world. Coaches are seeking to maximise the performance outputs they can generate from the data input, and this raises the question of whether there are established methods and models that can help them to do this.