SBJ Tech: Winter Games doubling down on AI

Hey, do you remember how my kids were out of daycare last week? My kids finally went back on Tuesday, only for a pipe to burst and shut down our childcare again. *shakes my Southern fists at ice and snow*

This newsletter has been curated while also overseeing a meal of chicken nuggets and mac and cheese.

Speaking of fine dining, my colleague Rachel Axon is over in Italy and surely won’t encounter anything as good as I’m making in my air fryer. She takes over the first part of this newsletter.

MILAN -- Welcome to the AI Olympics.

The Milan Cortina Games kick off Friday with a host of tech innovations, and while the use of AI in the Olympics and Paralympics is not new, it is more expansive than it’s ever been.

Olympic Broadcasting Services will implement most of the changes, doing so in its broadcast feeds as well as on Olympics.com. Yiannis Exarchos, CEO of Olympic Broadcasting Services, said his team is looking to use tech innovations to increase engagement and make the Games more exciting and more efficient.

“This is about telling the stories of the most important athletes in the world and telling the stories about the values and the emotions that are being generated by them,” Exarchos said. “Technology, and especially emergent technologies, are a huge enabler for that.”

It will be woven throughout the coverage, with OBS expected to produce around 6,500 hours of content on 900 hours of competition.

Here’s a look at the changes coming for Milan Cortina:

Olympics AI Assistant: Have an Olympics question? AI can help.

Alibaba, which has been a TOP sponsor since 2017, paired its Qwen models with more than eight petabytes of historical Olympic media to create Olympic AI assistants.

Working in 12 languages that cover around 85% of the global population, the assistant can answer questions about real-time event information and other data and clips around the Games.

“What is so special about it is that the source of all this information is not random sourcing from the internet that may contain a lot of mistakes, a lot of inaccuracies and so on. This is really framed to provide very accurate, unbiased checked information around anything Olympic,” Exarchos said.

“It’s the biggest repository of correct, quality-controlled data around the Olympics,” he added. “It’s a first effort. We’ll see how it goes, but we feel it’s a very good offering.”

Broadcast-visible innovations: Milan Cortina will expand recent innovations or offer new ones that will enhance the viewing experience. A few of them include:

• 360-degree replays. Using fluid camera movement and stroboscopic visual effects, Alibaba’s AI algorithm can separate athletes from their backgrounds on ice and snow and generate a replay in as little as 20 seconds. That turnaround is quick enough that broadcasts can use it. I’ve seen the sample video, and this is very cool. Having covered freeskiing and snowboarding for years, I can tell you this will go a long way in helping viewers understand how or why something is difficult or was scored in certain ways. OBS plans to use these replays in 17 sports or disciplines, such as ice hockey, freeskiing and figure skating.
• First-person drones. While it has relied on drones since 2014, OBS is using newer generations of technology to be closer to the competition than in the past. “In many of the sports you will be seeing images that we have not seen before in how these sports are covered,” Exarchos said.
• Curling tracking. AI will help in a new stone-tracking system in curling that will follow its path, speed and rotation in real time, displaying trajectory graphics and live data that give insights into the strategy. Let’s be honest — that’s the Winter Olympics sport that everyone on their couch thinks they can do, and the tech should enable viewers to understand a little bit more about the strategy and skill involved.

Operational efficiency: OBS will once again use AI to generate highlights, following up on its first effort in Paris, where it generated more than 100,000 short clips.

It will also expand the use of the Live Cloud platform, which it introduced in Tokyo in 2021 and has expanded from an optional service to its primary means of delivering the broadcasts remotely. In Milan Cortina, the platform will deliver 428 live video feeds, including 26 ultra-high-definition streams, to 39 broadcasters.

Perry Kamel says what his athlete wearables firm, DNA Vibe, creates doesn’t compare to others on the market. “Our tech is literally whispering to the DNA molecules at an extraordinarily low level of energy,” Kamel told me earlier this week.

The company’s Jazz Bands (they’re small, pad-shaped products) produce red and near-infrared light. DNA Vibe’s tech taps into the body’s regenerative healing capabilities. Kamel claims that he’s seen clinically confirmed ankle sprains in athletes take only a few days to recover, as opposed to the typical window of four-to-six weeks. As a person who has rolled ankles a few times in my basketball playing days (and has a right ankle that remains larger than his left), I found that pitch incredibly compelling.

The big differentiator is the combination the company uses — a four-pillared approach of red light, near-infrared light, magnetic pulses and micro-vibrations — to heal and promote recovery for the thousands of athletes that use its products. The company announced earlier Wednesday an expanded relationship with Parity (made on National Girls & Women in Sports Day) as it continues an international effort to grow access to its product.

I love asking tech founders about the innovations that came along the path of development. Kamel is a particularly intriguing subject — he has a background in quantum physics (this factors into the development and capabilities of DNA Vibe’s devices).

A major point was the scaled-down energy approach, which enables the wearable’s light to go deeper through the body and stimulate regeneration via light therapy. It’s happening at such a granular level that it enables the light to break through at a molecular level.

Secondly, the addition of randomized vibration in the product that enhances the healing effect by tricking the brain, dulling the pain of the injury. (I would very much get over my skis if I try to break this down in more detail.) It’s like when we hit our elbow and immediately rub it to try to generate relief.

DNA Vibe was founded 11 years ago, quietly working in the background to spread throughout the clinical and consumer verticals while developing a sustainable model that produces only in the United States. Kamel said that DNA Vibe hopes to give out one million Jazz Bands, an effort supported by philanthropic contributors to help with the outreach.

The company is based in Centennial, Colo., and has roughly 30 full-time employees. The larger-scale connection with Parity will become a major boost to DNA Vibe’s Shine initiative to better serve female athletes when it comes to health and recovery data.

“Right now, all the research and all the training tools have been developed for men,” said Maria Del Rio, the company’s CMO. “So, we are also helping on that side. We’re going to do some research to support recovery for women, especially athletes. Because their bodies react differently to exercise and to strenuous movements. So that’s also a very important thing.”

Lastly, I wanted to highlight our newest class of 10 Most Innovative Sports Tech Companies.

We announced our fourth group on Friday, and it’s a worthy lot:

• Bolt6
• Mashgin
• OneCourt
• Orreco
• Owl AI
• Recentive Analytics
• SailGP
• Sportable
• TMRW Sports
• WolfCycle

I’ve been with SBJ for three of our four classes now (though I made my debut on the SBJ Live announcement stream last week!), and I speak for our entire tech crew when I say how much we enjoy the process and the opportunity to recognize the companies and the people connected to them. We work in this industry every day, and we get to build really thoughtful relationships.

Here’s one more congrats for this crew until we recognize them all in person at the Sports Business Awards: Tech on May 18 in New York City. See you all at Tech Week, hopefully.

• My SBJ Tech teammate Joe Lemire rounds up the roughly one dozen tech vendors that will help NBC Sports capture, produce and distribute the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics and its more than 3,200 hours of live coverage.
• Lemire also has a fascinating profile in this week’s magazine on the NBA’s lead technology lawyer, Franciscus Diaba, whose role feels like an ideal fit in the modern landscape of tech-forward thinking.
• A report from investment bank Drake Star found that 2025 was a record year for dealmaking in the sports technology, continuing the trends of high activity and growing institutionalization around sports as an asset class, SBJ’s Rob Schaefer reports.
• Nielsen and the NFL are launching a pilot program around Super Bowl LX aimed at a new methodology that could enhance accounting for co-viewing, which is an area the NFL (and other leagues) have looked at improving, SBJ’s Austin Karp reports.
• NASCAR and USA Luge are beginning a collaboration in which the motorsports operator will provide technical assistance in exchange for marketing and brand opportunities, Lemire also writes.
• Anthropic, one of the trendiest AI research companies, is set to sponsor Atlassian Williams F1 Team and deploy its popular Claude assistant tool to help the team get back to winning races, SBJ’s Adam Stern reports.