The Equestrian sports is struggling now and trying extremely hard to stay relevant. The Equestrian sports has been participating in the Olympics for more than a century but now it is slowly dying and its place in the next Olympian games is in jeopardy. So now they are trying to get into the mainstream viewership by taking the aid of technology.
The German technology company, SAP is now investing in the sport. In a show held at Central Park, NYC, sponsored by the same company, it advertised a bunch of apps and technologies, it is implementing and applying for CHIO Aachen, the horse race operator. This is an effort to make the sport more interesting and interactive for both the fans and the riders.
It is also an effort to engage and attract new fans and young people whose abutment will be of great importance in keeping the game alive and securing a position in the next summer Olympics.
The SAP Spectator Judging App is for the fans that allows them to judge the stadium-jumping movements through a live camera feed on their dashboards.This is especially helpful when the horses and the riders are away from the field of the eye.
This app also lets the fans to score riders based on their quantitative and qualitative performances and metrics albeit unofficially, however, it will be unlike the traditional way, in which the crowd and the fans are just a bunch of passive spectators.
In the long term, SAP technology and data analyzing capabilities and visualizing tools will change the perspective of the game for the better.
The SAP technology actively captures the live data from the field course via the sensors and beacons on riders and at markers respectively. This helps the SAP Equestrian Analytics to calculate information about the movement, time, speed, acceleration and position of the obstacle. These are similar to the trackers SAP used in Extreme Sailing Series to help the fans on land to visualize the race.
The data collected through SAP technology from the equestrian events will be compiled by CHIO Aachen will put it up for the post event social media content.
This whole experience will alter everything a fan sees about the sport. It will be interactive and will allow fans for some live action experience and calculate how the player is performing according to their expectation and his performance on field.
“We want to visualize things for the audience that aren’t visual right now,” said Henrike Paetz, SAP’s Global Head of Equestrian Sports.
This technology will also help the riders along with fans. As they will know the lines they have traveled, which will be helpful for them in improving themselves as they will know the causes of why the other riders got ahead of them in races.
Professional riders like Ingrid Klimke, who is an equestrian rider in the Olympics, and an ambassador of SAP, is using the technology to analyze the data from the course to improve her training and address her weaknesses etc. It has “fundamentally transformed” her training, Klimke said.
