Olympic analytics: Data scientists crunching numbers for Canada’s athletes
CALGARY — A group of credit risk assessors predicted Canadian swimmer Penny Oleksiak would win an Olympic medal in the women’s 100-metre butterfly in Rio.
They said Sweden’s Sarah Sjostrom would win gold in world-record time and she did.
They were slightly off on the colour of Oleksiak’s medal. She won silver instead of the projected bronze.
When Mark Merritt isn’t doing credit risk assessment for Canadian Tire, he and the half-dozen people on his team are analyzing data and building projection models for Canadian athletes.