British Athletics today announced it has started a ground-breaking new partnership with industry experts PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) to improve how the Olympic and Paralympic World Class Programmes work with performance data and analytics.

One of the world’s largest professional services firms, PwC will work with British Athletics’ Olympic and Paralympic World Class Programmes, as the Official Data Intelligence Partner, to improve the support and value delivered to coaches and athletes through the provision of enhanced information and insights.

PwC will provide a range of services from data acquisition and modelling to reporting, visualisation and advanced analytics, generating insights not previously possible from the full range of data sources available to the programmes.

The British Athletics World Class Programme is UK Sport’s National Lottery-funded initiative to support the delivery of success at the Olympic and Paralympic Games. The partnership with PwC aligns and supports the strategic aim to win more medals in more events in Tokyo 2020 and beyond.

British Athletics Performance Director Neil Black said: “This is an absolutely ground-breaking partnership for British Athletics to work with PwC and I am thrilled to welcome them into the sport. The sport of athletics is statistically and data rich, but there are limitations as to how successful it is if it is not recorded and interpreted correctly, and then provided to coaches and athletes in a way that they can make use of it – whether it is in planning their year, or altering the focus of their day to day training.

“We truly believe that, by more effectively and efficiently using data and analytics, British athletes across the Olympic and Paralympic World Class Programmes can be the best prepared in the world. With the help and support of PwC and their services, our athletes and coaches will have fast and effective access to data and analytics, all in one place, which is something we have up until now not  been able to provide.

“The Improvements will be gradual but continuous as new capabilities are developed and there is learning of what can actually be valuable to ultimately help athletes achieve their goals. It’s a very exciting time for our sport to have this input.”

Alex Cooke, Data Intelligence Partner at PwC, said: “Our Data Analytics team support many organisations to get more value from their data and gain competitive advantage or disrupt their industries by optimising their insights operating models. Over the years athletics has brought the country many memorable moments and we are delighted to be partnering with British Athletics to ensure, through the use of data insights, we bring more success in the future.”

Jon Andrews, Head of Technology and Investments at PwC, said: “We’re really excited to partner with British Athletics in this initiative.  Working with them, we hope to collectively combine the power of technology with human insight to help them and their athletes achieve superior performance.  Speed is of the essence to stay ahead and we aim to bring our experience of mining data to give athletes and coaches more objective information to help them make better decisions.”