Thanks to GPS data, the Indian men's hockey team had a date with history

Captain Manpreet Singh’s team at the Tokyo Olympics was on par with the top teams in terms of speed and endurance. Training with GPS, which tracked the players' output and speed, helped to achieve this. (Image: Twitter)

In the tech era, behind every successful man, there is a cool gadget. For the Indian men’s hockey team, that gadget was the GPS Tracking System.

One of the things that stood out in the Indian team’s Tokyo mission was its fitness. Manpreet Singh’s side matched top international teams in speed and endurance, even in the enervating heat and humidity of the Japanese capital. GPS was one of the factors responsible for this. It tracked the players’ output, speed and other necessary details. In stark detail, it laid out where players stood fitness-wise.

GPS is not new. Indian hockey first tried it in 2010. But its importance has not diminished. In October 2019, during India’s tour of Belgium, the Indian coach Graham Reid planned a stop in Arnhem, The Netherlands. The objective was to have a joint training session with the Dutch team, and compare the GPS numbers of both sides.

Last year, when the players were training under lockdown, Reid spoke about GPS in an interview.

“Every time the players do their running, they have to wear a GPS system and a heart rate monitor,” he told Firstpost. “We can monitor the work rate. We track through the GPS system and the heart rate monitor, and ensure that they are training at the appropriate level. The GPS system tracks distance, speed, acceleration, among other data. We track how much high-speed running is done, how much mid-level running is done, and so on. Depending on the data, we devise different fitness schedules for different players.”

Robin Arkell, the Indian team’s scientific adviser, and the man being credited for the team’s improved fitness, has been using GPS since the day he took up the job in 2017.

"Since I have joined, I have been using it on a daily basis. It drives a lot of what we do on a daily and weekly basis. It determines what we do session by session," Arkell once told The Times of India. "We look at total distance covered and the intensity at which we are covering that distance. The number of sprints we are performing, the number of decelerations, the number of high intensity efforts and the amount of sprint distance.”

Captain Manpreet Singh once wrote on redbull.com, “Each player in the team has a GPS tracker fitted to them; the tracker indicates the fitness level of each player and lets the trainers know if any player is low on energy. According to that, the trainer will instruct us if a player is in need of a massage or anything else.”

When the system was first tried by the Indian hockey team in 2010, Harendra Singh was the national coach. At the time, Singh had said that GPS was a “reality check” for players, and something that could not be lied to.

“It is a reality check for them,” Singh said. “They are keen to know what the data says about each one of them. This will also help them improve or work on their fitness. Now everybody realises they cannot deceive a machine.”

The wearable technology, used by elite athletes in various sports, was initially owned by GPSports, an Australian company. In 2014, another Australian firm, Catapult, acquired GPSports, and also attracted investment from Mark Cuban, the billionaire tycoon and Shark Tank host.