Chapter 1: alpine skiing!
https://youtu.be/FdOFrtxhSPQ
To kick off the series, let’s start with the blue-riband discipline: downhill skiing! Today we’re looking at the two so-called technical events: the giant slalom and the slalom. The giant slalom is a speed race (everyone’s still with me so far, I think) down a vertical drop of 250m to 450m for men, 200 to 400m for women (not feeling so clever now, are we!).
The goal is to clear between 46 and 70 gates (46 to 58 for women, 56 to 70 for men). These are spaced 25m apart on average. The average top speed reached is 80km/h. So suffice it to say that at that speed you don’t really have time to stop and smell the roses.
Skis and an eye tracker
Last winter, we had the chance to look into the topic by fitting a future champion with an eye tracker, as well as her coach, during a real giant slalom run on the slopes (our job isn’t easy every day!)! We’ll spare you the tinkering with the goggles to fit all that underneath. But we managed it, and it produced the video in the introduction!
We can see that while the coach goes a little slower, the way he takes in information leans heavily towards anticipation. After clearing a gate, he immediately and logically looks for the position of the next one, and the one after that as well. The young skier doesn’t: she focuses only on the gate ahead, paying it a lot of attention so she can fine-tune the positioning of her skis.
Visual attention, anticipation and Savoyard fondue
This result is interesting because it goes against a study published last year (Decroix, 2017). In that work, a group of expert slalom skiers was pitted against a group of non-experts. The expert group was, of course, significantly faster. Eye tracking showed that it anticipated more, looking ahead to the next gate and the one after.
The non-experts, on the other hand, kept their eyes on the snow just in front of their skis. The experts’ higher speed very likely explains why they needed to anticipate more: at that pace, a mistake in your line is that much harder to correct.
It goes without saying that our small finding on a single skier would need to be checked on a far larger sample. Our hunch is that the results might well confirm the trend. Professional skiers, after all, first inspect the course several times, then picture it in their heads dozens of times. That’s what Lindsey Vonn (opens in new window), a champion of the discipline, says, for example:
“I always visualize the run before I do it. By the time I get to the start gate, I’ve run that race 100 times already in my head, picturing how I’ll take the turns.”
Lindsey Vonn
This lets them map out the sequence of gates perfectly and get their line as tight as it can be. No more hunting for where the next gate is: they can stay focused on nailing the exact movement that takes them through it. This is much like the experimental protocols we use in our user studies.
Conclusion on alpine skiing
The moral of the story: if you want to get back at that rude holidaymaker who made you drop your bread into the fondue while the whole Pierre et Vacances village had a good laugh, tonight you dig out the piste map and swot up on all of this! To learn more about the experimental approach and the analysis of user behaviour, discover our training in neuroergonomics and our user tests.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBpkQwhA0Dg&feature=emb_imp_woyt
References
Decroix, M., Wazir, M. R. W. N., Zeuwts, L., Deconinck, F. F. J. A., Lenoir, M., & Vansteenkiste, P. (2017). Expert – Non-expert differences in visual behaviour during alpine slalom skiing. Human Movement Science, 55, 229–239. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.humov.2017.08.012
