ICYMI, we named the finalists for SBA: Tech, which takes place in May as the launching-off point of SBJ Tech Week. You can see the full list here. — Ethan Joyce
In today’s edition of Power Up:
- How the USOPC Performance Innovation Fund boosts speedskaters to gold
- Orreco acquires Jennis, the women’s athlete app founded by Olympic heptathlon champ
- MLS signs Polymarket as prediction market sponsor
American Push: How USOPC Performance Innovation Fund boosts speedskaters to gold
Speedskating team pursuit debuted at the 2006 Olympics, with three-skater teams racing in sync, taking turns leading the pack to absorb the wind.
At times while looping the course, because the skates don’t have brakes, one athlete might incidentally bump a teammate from behind. Back in 2018, Shane Domer, US Speedskating chief of sport performance, wondered if those pushes were beneficial and how to optimize the number of exchanges at the front of the line.
Domer contacted the chair of the governing body’s Sports Science Commission, aerodynamics expert Ingmar Jungnickel, to build a projection around these ideas. Jungnickel concocted what he called a “napkin math kind of model” that immediately showed a savings of about a second and a half, Domer recalled.
A week later, however, Jungnickel called back and told Domer, “Shane, I think we’re doing this thing all wrong. What if we don’t exchange at all?”
Jungnickel proposed that the two trailing skaters, who benefit from the energy savings of drafting, use that to push the leader forward rather than take the time to sprint out in front, likening the concept to bump drafting in NASCAR.
“The model showed that pushing was so clearly advantageous that you shouldn’t sometimes push,” Jungnickel said. “You just should abandon taking turns at the front altogether, and this should replace the old strategy.”
After years of testing — both through advanced computational fluid dynamics models and on-ice training — that revolutionary technique has propelled the American men from also-rans to both the podium and the record books. The U.S., which finished eighth at the 2018 Olympics, won a bronze at the 2022 Games and gold at the 2025 world championships while setting the world record in the event.
Internally, it’s called Project Slippery Fish, but to the world, the technique has come to be called the American Push.
Jungnickel had worked with Olympic cyclists in his native Germany, as well as with Tour de France teams, but at the time of this discovery, he was leading an innovation team at Specialized bicycles. Given the success he had in speedskating, Mike Levine, USOPC senior director of performance pathways and innovation, suggested he apply for a grant from the donor-backed Performance Innovation Fund.
That funding enabled Jungnickel to start a sports tech R&D consulting firm, Inspire Gold, which then built an AI-powered aerodynamics spinoff — Airo — that replicates a wind tunnel by creating digital twins of athletes that can be manipulated in 3D to determine the best posture and formations. US Speedskating was the first client, but Jungnickel said he has also worked with national teams in ski and snowboard, cycling, luge and triathlon.
Without the grant, Jungnickel said he likely would not have started the company. Now, the core IP remains proprietary to U.S. Olympians, but related use cases are helping support Inspire Gold. Levine emphasized that many Olympic sports don’t have technological support because they lack a large enough commercial market.
“Airo is selling the technology to bike fitters and bike shops, but there’s a speedskating version and the ski version that we will never sell to anybody but the U.S. Olympic Committee,” Jungnickel said. “That’s our core business model: Essentially develop technologies that help Team USA win, and then commercialize them and long-term fund these businesses.”
The 26-member Performance Innovation Advisory Committee is chaired by Apple’s Eddy Cue and includes members from disparate backgrounds, such as team executive (the Spurs’ RC Buford), athlete (NFL lineman Kelvin Beachum), investor (Goldman Sachs’ David Solomon), business analytics (KAGR’s Jessica Gelman) and medicine (Texas Children’s Dr. Jeff Shilt). The fund has raised about $50 million to date.
“It’s really a talented and generous group who provides us this risk capital, strategic guidance and network connections to invest in and execute bold ideas that can create competitive advantages for Team USA and elevate the performance, health and well-being of Team USA athletes,” Levine said, adding that the scope is “agnostic. We’re not defining what lanes we’re playing in.”
Founding committee member Geoff Yang, the managing director of Redpoint Ventures, explained the goal in 2015 was to combine “data, applied technology and ingenuity” to support and identify talented Olympians and Paralympians.
“The United States is home to the most innovative technologies in the world,” Yang said, “and Team USA should be a leader in applying those technologies.”
There are four main allocations:
- An international competitive analysis that uses machine learning to develop medal expectancies, helping drive high-performance planning;
- Athlete 360, a custom management system available to NGBs for free;
- Monthly online forums and an annual performance innovation summit “to create the collisions and spark a shared learning and cultivation of ideas,” Levine said; and
- Grants, such as the one utilized by US Speedskating and VAMA, a motion capture technology used to great effect by USA Track and Field.
“Without the funding to get these projects going, we lose steam on the innovation side,” Domer said. “Some of them fail, and these guys are OK with that. And that’s awesome because that helps us create the lack of fear of failure that we’ve had in the past.”
The speedskating team happens to be full of engineers who understand the underlying concepts. One skater, Emery Lehman, even spent time as an intern with Airo’s athlete engineering project. The willingness to experiment from the athletes and coach Ryan Shimabukuro has been critical.
“I give him and our athletes a lot of credit because they didn’t know what the payoff would be,” Domer said, “and to commit to doing this thing — well, as a speedskater, you’re not taught to skate pushing someone. So it took a lot of work to get them to adopt the technique.”
Joe Lemire can be reached at jlemire@sportsbusinessjournal.com.
Orreco acquires Jennis, the women’s athlete app founded by Olympic heptathlon champion Jessica Ennis-Hill
Performance science firm Orreco has acquired Jennis, a women’s health and fitness app co-founded by Olympic heptathlon champion Jessica Ennis-Hill and her manager, Jane Cowmeadow. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Orreco, an alumn of the Comcast NBCUniversal SportsTech accelerator, recently raised a $4M Series A extension with investment from Mark Cuban and Enterprise Ireland. Last month it acquired DDSA, a computer vision startup specializing in tennis, and it will participate in the next MLS Innovation Lab.
The rich educational and training content produced by Jennis will be integrated into Orreco AI through its @thlete and Te@m dashboards and its FitrWoman app, which helps women athletes track performance within the context of their monthly cycles. It’s used by the national women’s soccer teams in the US and England as well as by USA Swimming and teams in the WNBA and NWSL.
“Dame Jess, Jane and the Jennis team built a phenomenal library of multimedia content to help support athlete and coach education,” Orreco CEO and co-founder Brian Moore told SBJ. “Orreco AI helps surface the right insights for the right athlete at the right time, and Jennis content can be delivered to @thletes to further enhance understanding and personalization.”
Ennis-Hill and Cowmeadow will remain involved and have been attending meetings for Orreco’s women’s performance team as well as its broader executive strategy sessions. Jennis content is intended to benefit all women athletes, but there is a particular depth to its support for track and field athletes.
Ennis-Hill won heptathlon gold in the 2012 London Games and added Olympic silver in 2016 after taking the 2014 season off to have her first child. That experience of returning to competition was a key inspiration in creating Jennis.
“Jessica also has the experience of returning to Olympic competition after the arrival of her son, Reggie,” Moore said. “There are also pregnancy and post-partum resources that was part of Jess’s inspiration behind creating Jennis as that information wasn’t available for her when she was returning to compete in the Rio Olympics.”
Moore also highlighted the future prospect of the integrated platform helping Orreco reach farther downstream than its elite sport specialty. Among its other offerings are blood biomarkers to assess recovery and Motion Signal, an AI tool that tracks movement patterns through real-time data to identify warning flags before an injury.“We are keenly aware how our work in elite sport can eventually help consumers,” Moore said, “and Jennis content also includes helpful information for prosumers and across a woman’s lifetime is part of our long-term roadmap.”
MLS signs Polymarket as prediction market sponsor
MLS has signed Polymarket as its official prediction market sponsor and will create an authorized operator designation in the emerging category, clearing the way for other prediction apps to use club and league marks if they agree to similar integrity provisions as legal U.S. sportsbooks.
The exclusive deal, signed though MLS commercial arm Soccer United Marketing, requires Polymarket to use official league data and third-party integrity monitoring and to refrain from offering markets that the league sees as easily manipulated, such as yellow cards, or prone to the use of inside information, such as manager firings and player movement.
Its authorized operator designation, open to other operators licensed by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, also will require those integrity provisions.
“These guys all have markets on MLS,” MLS SVP/Emerging Ventures Chris Schlosser said. “So we need to figure out a way to get the best possible integrity protections, no different than our activities in sports betting.”
Relaunched in the U.S. last month, Polymarket bills itself as the world’s largest operator of prediction markets, commodities derivatives that look similar to sportsbook wagers, with fluctuating odds that include point spreads, over-unders and prop bets on individual player stats. Unlike legal sports betting, prediction markets are available in all states.
The NFL, NBA and MLB have not expanded their sports betting authorizations to include prediction markets, which are the subject of a spate of legal action taken by regulators and operators across the U.S. The NHL became the first of the leading leagues to sign sponsorship deals with Polymarket and exchange operator Kalshi in October.
“We could stick our head in the sand, or we could lean in and work with them as best we can,” Schlosser said. “So, in the space, we think it’s really important that we’re building a framework that we can use to at least regulate the markets in and around MLS.”
The league hopes to integrate Polymarket odds into content on its app and website, Schlosser said, though it hasn’t determined which to use or how to present them.
MLS has not opened prediction markets as a sponsor category for clubs, Schlosser said, but is in “rule-writing mode,” crafting a framework of which marketing assets could be used and what operators could be approved. Prediction market sponsorships could be especially appealing to clubs in states that have not legalized, including California and Texas, which are home to seven MLS clubs.
Schlosser pointed to the league’s success working directly with sportsbooks to eliminate wagering on yellow cards as an example of a benefit of an authorized operator designation. When the league sent letters asking regulators and tribal operators in 41 states to take down that market, eight opted not to.
“We’re not always successful with sports betting getting everything we want on the integrity side either,” Schlosser said. “But we think it’s really important that we create a real integrity framework for these new prediction markets.”
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