The Intelligent Track

Elite athletics has acquired an impressive quantity of measurement and comparatively little shared understanding of what to do with it. Force plates, timing systems, markerless video, wearables and athlete management platforms have all improved. The decision they are meant to inform, which is whether this athlete should do this work today and why, is still made largely from memory, relationship and the coach's own record-keeping, and it is still very rarely written down in a form that survives a change of staff. This paper argues that the opportunity in track and field is an explainable decision layer that is aware of the event, honest about uncertainty and designed to leave a named human being accountable. It argues against three things the market currently offers the sport, which are single-score readiness indices, individual injury prediction, and general-purpose training generators that have learned the shape of coaching advice without the substance of any particular event.