Performance analysis of sport is a relatively recent discipline of sports science and its history is composed of the history of biomechanics and the history of notational analysis, with these two disciplines coming together within performance analysis in 2001. However, the developments that have led to performance analysis of sport, as it exists today, include the development of sport itself and the history of human movement analysis, which has been infl uenced by discoveries in anatomy, physiology, mechanics and engineer- ing (Nigg, 2007a). Sport has existed since the ancient Olympics and grew in the 20th century, with the most popular sports being played by professional athletes with increasing media coverage creating sports celebrities even before the Second World War. The changes in sport over the 20th century included increasing importance and increasing reward for success, which has led to greater efforts in preparation. Scientifi c support for sports prepa- ration is well documented; for example the training manual of the East German athletics federation (Schmolinsky, 1983) pre-dates the establish- ment of talent development programmes and sports institutes in many coun- tries. The increasing importance and recognition of sport has made it a valuable means of media exposure for commercial sponsors. This has brought money to many sports, which has been used for sports science support as elite performers and teams use any legal means of enhancing performance.
The early history of biomechanics of sport has been well documented elsewhere (Nigg, 2007a, Wilkerson, 1997). In 2007 at the Xth International Symposium of Computer Science in Sport, Gideon Ariel described the progress in biomechanical analysis of sport since 1968. Ariel’s analysis of Bob Beamon’s world record long jump in the Mexico City Olympic Games of 1968 was the fi rst time that data were gathered from competitive sport for the purpose of biomechanical analysis. The process required to analyse the data was labour- and time-intensive, as Ariel described it in his keynote address to the 6th International Symposium of the International Association of Computer Science in Sport in Calgary in June 2007 (Ariel, 2007). The 16 mm fi lm took three days to be developed before it was manually trimmed to maintain only the frames of interest. Each of these frames was rear-projected onto a matt glass screen so as Ariel could manually measure the lengths and angles of each segment using rulers and protractors. This information was then recorded onto computer keypunch cards for computerised analysis by a mainframe computer allowing kinematic information to be determined.
By the time of the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, Ariel had obtained a sonic digitiser, which speeded up the process of determining joint coordi- nates and joint angles. Ariel (2007) identifi ed the key developments between 1972 and 1996 as NASA’s (National Aeronautical and Space Agency) research to determine the mass of body segments given the height and mass
of an athlete, the development of high speed movie cameras with shutter speeds of 200 frames per second, the development of sensitive force plat- forms, developments in computer software and hardware, portable comput- ers and wireless communication.
At the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, video and other data were uploaded onto the internet for use by coaches, researchers and other inter- ested users (Ariel, 2007). During the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, further advances in multimedia and communications technology were uti- lised in the analysis of the discus heats. These advances were:
miniature cameras that could transmit digital video data to a central
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computer;
using the internet to send data to process centres throughout the
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world;
wireless control of tripods and cameras from any location in the
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world;
automatic digitisation of joint centres;
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automatic report generation suitable for coaches and athletes.
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The history of notational analysis of sport has been described by Mike Hughes during keynote addresses of World Congresses of Science and Football (Hughes, 1993) and Science and Racket Sports (Hughes, 1998). Shorthand notations have been used for centuries to record data in many areas of busi- ness and science, as well as music. Analysis of movement was done in ancient times using hieroglyphs. The notation of dance has been carried out for cen- turies in general and rudimentary forms (Hughes and Franks, 1997: 38–9).
However, the fi rst recognised system for analysing and recording human movement was Labanotation, founded by Rudolph Laban in 1948.
Labanotation enables the recording of many kinds of human motion and is not connected to a singular specifi c style of dance. In Labanotation, every change made in natural human motion has to be specifi cally written down (Barbacci, 2002). Due to the need to notate events in real-time and to decrease the complexity of notation, Motif writing was developed (Preston-Dunlop, 1967a, b, c, d) as an alternative to Labanotation, which depicts the key elements of a given movement sequence (Warburton, 2000).
Analysis of behaviour in competitive sport has also been done since the beginning of the 20th century, pre-dating the use of notational analysis. In March 1907, a statistical analysis of the French rugby championship fi nal was published in a newspaper article (Martin, 1907). Hughes and Franks (1997: 40–69) reviewed notational analysis work in different sports occur- ring as early as the 1970s (tennis, squash and wrestling) and 1980s (volley- ball, fi eld hockey, rugby union and Australian Rules football). The key studies undertaken using manual methods were done by Reep and Benjamin (1968) and Reilly and Thomas (1976). Reep and Benjamin (1968) com- pleted a 25-year investigation of the chance of scoring from possessions of
different numbers of passes, using data from English league soccer matches played between 1953 and 1968. Reilly and Thomas (1976) used manual methods to estimate distance covered and work-rate during top level soccer performance.
Technological advances were taken advantage of by performance ana- lysts working in academic and practical settings. Video (Lyons, 1988), audio visual aids (Winkler, 1988) and computers (Hughes et al., 1989) were exploited by those studying sports performance. The systems used in com- puterised notational analysis of sport followed advances in computer storage technology, developments in input and output peripheral devices and greater portability of computer systems (Hughes and Franks, 1995). Early systems that integrated a database of timed match events with the match video used a computer to control video cassette forward-winding and rewinding to display the video sequences of interest (Patrick and McKenna, 1988).
Developments in multimedia technology included the storage of video on random access disk. This was exploited by the MAVIS (Match Analysis Video Integrated System) to avoid video tape forward winding and rewind- ing when accessing the video sequences that satisfi ed the operator’s criteria (O’Donoghue et al., 1995, 1996a, b). Today, commercial systems that inte- grate video and performance databases are used in competitive sports prep- aration and by students of university sports science programmes.
In 1992, the First World Congress of Notational Analysis of Sport took place in Burton Manor in England, followed by subsequent World Congresses in Liverpool, England (1994), Antalya, Turkey (1996) and Porto, Portugal (1998). The International Society of Notational Analysis of Sport (ISNA) was founded in 1992 and was responsible for the scientifi c programmes of these World Congress meetings. It was during his keynote address at the 1998 World Congress, that Keith Lyons proposed the term ‘performance analyst’ due to the fact that sports performance was by that time being ana- lysed using a broad spectrum of methods not limited to notational analysis.
Therefore, in 1999, ISNA was renamed as ISPAS (International Society of Performance Analysis of Sport). In 2001, the importance of computer tech- nology in performance analysis was recognised as the 3rd International Symposium of the International Association of Computer Science and Sport and the 5th World Congress of Performance Analysis of sport were com- bined within a joint conference in Cardiff, Wales called PASS.COM (Performance Analysis, Sports Science and Computers). The increased volumes of research and development in both areas allowed these two series of conferences to proceed individually from 2004 with the 6th, 7th and 8th World Congresses of Performance Analysis of Sport taking place in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 2004, Szombathely, Hungary in 2006 and Magdeburg, Germany in 2008.
The volume of research being undertaken has increased so much that the two-year interval between World Congresses is considered by the ISPAS to be too long to keep pace with research and developments in the area.
Therefore, a series of International Workshops in Performance Analysis of Sport commenced in 2007 providing an annual forum for the communica- tion of ideas in addition to the bi-annual World Congresses of Performance Analysis of Sport. The fi rst International Workshop was held in Cardiff, Wales in 2007 and emphasised developments in commercial performance analysis systems. The second International Workshop was hosted by Leeds Carnegie University in 2008 and emphasised performance analysis in coach- ing, particularly in Olympic sports. The University of Lincoln hosted the 3rd International Workshop in 2009, which was a forum for academic