How innovation is powering high-flying performances

A creative approach is helping GB Snowsport get the most from its innovation spend.

GB Snowsport has set an ambitious target: for the UK to become a top five snow sport nation by 2030. Achieving this entails competing with countries like Switzerland, Austria and the US, which have much deeper pockets. That means GB Snowsport teams need to squeeze every drop of value out of their innovation spend to ensure their skiers and snowboarders can find that vital edge on the slopes.

Kearnan Myall, Performance Director at GB Snowsport, says: “We have relatively sparse resources, so we have to be smart about where and how we innovate. Spending millions of pounds developing a slightly better ski is probably not in our interest, whereas we can work on other areas, and spend a relatively small amount, to get quite a large improvement in performance.”

Myall, who retired as a professional Rugby Union player in 2019, explains that, because the UK lacks significant snowfall and high mountains, athletes learn to be adaptable from the start, using dry slopes and snow domes, for example. “As they progress through the ranks, that willingness to adapt and innovate just increases exponentially. And what we do at GB Snowsport is put teams of experts around our athletes, to push that innovation even further.”

He points to the opportunities presented by the UK’s community of world-leading researchers, universities and companies. “Where we might have a disadvantage in terms of immediate access to facilities, the science and innovation we have here can swing things back in our favour.”

Kearnan Myall played rugby for Leeds, Sale Sharks and Wasps

World-beating collaboration

No surprise, then, that the GB Snowsport team has forged a range of creative partnerships that help them punch above their weight by adapting technology and expertise originally developed for quite different arenas. For instance, they have leveraged knowledge from the world of rugby, which has done extensive research into improving head injury protocols – a particular priority for GB Snowsport because many snowboarders are as young as 14 to 16, and thus potentially more vulnerable.

Working with Podium Analytics, a spin-off from Oxford University, Myall and his team adopted mouthguards with built-in microchips to measure the force that goes through the brain during activity. “On a mountain, you don’t always have eyes on the athletes,” he says. “They may fall and not necessarily even know that something has happened to them, and they'll just carry on. If we see hits that are over a certain threshold, we assess the athlete, regardless of the symptoms they’re showing, because repeated mild traumatic brain injuries are dangerous. From a performance perspective, such injuries can significantly raise the risk of musculoskeletal problems during the following 12 months, because the nervous system is still recovering.”

Partnering with motor racing has been equally fruitful. Prior to the Beijing Games, GB Snowsport collaborated with Williams Advanced Engineering on a sit-ski project for Paralympic cross-country skiers. Drawing on the F1 team’s expertise in engineering, aerodynamics and materials science, they were able to develop an ultra-light seat that helped propel cross-country skier Scott Meenagh to a silver medal at the 2023 World Championships. A teammate needed a type of snowboard binding that didn’t exist; this was then manufactured with the help of another F1 company, McLaren.

Snow sport athletes even ‘borrow’ F1 wind tunnels to test the performance of their suits, boots, skis and snowboards under different conditions. “The science used in F1 is on another level,” says Myall. “There is a strong culture within British sport of people wanting to help each other. Our connections enable us to access facilities that would otherwise be far beyond our reach, and the outcomes are fantastic.”

Mind games

Myall is currently completing a PhD in psychiatry at the University of Oxford, researching interventions that support the psychological aspects of performance. This has become another key area for innovation by GB Snowsport, as solutions (such as meditation and mindfulness) are often highly cost effective.

Working alongside a specialist psychologist, Myall set out to tailor a mindfulness-based programme to the specific needs of elite snow sport athletes. “If you have an individual who gets very nervous or anxious before a competition, then that's something that we can work on. We call it metacognition: being able to reflect on your own thought processes and take a step back. Essentially it allows athletes to enter the optimal frame of mind to perform to their best ability.”

All four of the athletes who participated in the research continued working with the psychologist beyond the end of the programme. Myall says: “I got a message from the coach the other day, saying how much one of our young athletes had developed thanks to the programme. He's now progressing really quickly, and we’re excited about his prospects going into the Milan Games.”

Another key plank of the team’s psychological approach is identifying potential problems before they snowball. “We proactively screen our athletes at various points during the season. What we're looking for are little physiological signals that the athlete might be trending towards a period of anxiety, depression or stress. So, in the same way that we might measure someone’s hamstring flexibility, we will measure their cognitive strain in a particular area, which enables us to offer support before it becomes an issue. Better performance inevitably comes off the back of that.”

Interestingly, some innovations deliver a performance edge in both the physical and mental spheres. For example, UK Sport recently provided £50,000 to develop race suits for the snowboard cross team. “What has been fascinating is the confidence that it is giving to the athletes,” says Myall. “They are getting cutting-edge equipment and bespoke engineered race suits, but also a psychological boost. Having the best equipment is really important, but knowing you've got the best equipment is almost equally important.”

Kearnan Myall presenting mental health talk – University of Oxford

Myall is currently doing a PhD in Psychiatry at Oxford University

Scanning the horizon

Myall is excited about the rapid progress being made in fields such as AI, data analytics and quantum computing, which could enable simulations that model thousands of different variables simultaneously. He points to the emerging use of quantum sensors in brain-scanning devices. “This type of technology could be integrated into helmets, for example. So rather than an athlete having to wear a microchipped mouthguard that approximates what's going on, we could have access to what is effectively a continuous MRI scan of the brain. Realistically, I don't think that's going to be in snow sports before 2030, but technology is advancing extremely quickly.”

With all these advances, one ingredient is key: patience. Says Myall: “You have to be brave enough and bold enough to look ahead and think, okay, maybe this is going to set us back in years one and two, but by years three and four it’s going to put us really far ahead. Working within a four-year Olympic cycle, provided you get your timing right, you can quite successfully implement these strategies.”

Kearnan Myall Performance Director, GB Snowsport