Democratised or Stratified?

Artificial intelligence will democratise and stratify coaching at the same time. It puts something close to expert planning support in a volunteer's pocket, and it hands the best-resourced programmes a compounding advantage through proprietary longitudinal data, the ability to commission models against it, specialist staff who can reject a bad output, and equipment that generates the next dataset. Both forces operate at once, and the gap can widen while everyone improves. This paper defines both terms in what reaches the athlete rather than what is purchased, locates the question within the established treatment of system strength in sporting fairness, and takes the availability provision of the athletics shoe rules as the transferable precedent, since a rule about open availability is enforceable where a rule about conferred advantage is not. Six forms of fairness are set out, of which the epistemic question of whose coaching knowledge gets encoded receives least attention and may matter most. Five institutional choices follow for governing bodies. The author records that he found no evidence AI improves coaching outcomes at grassroots level, and nobody claiming to have it.