Case Study – Swedish Olympic Committee

The Swedish Olympic Committee (SOC) was founded in 1913 and is the authority for the Olympic movement within Sweden. The committee consists of the national sports federations for all Olympic sports and 18 recognized federations for sports that aren’t yet part of the Olympics. The mission for the SOC is to prepare for and operate the country´s participation at the Olympic Games and contribute to competitive Olympic teams.

One of the most dynamic and exciting things about the SOC is the variety of the disciplines it oversees. Sweden is always a powerhouse at the Winter Olympics and won 11 medals – its best total since Sydney 2000 – at the Paris Games in 2024. Such performances are the result of at least four years of training, and this varies greatly between sports. Yet the need to prioritize athlete wellbeing is just as urgent for every athlete, and this is one of the reasons the SOC brought in Linköping University professor Martin Hägglund as a medical research advisor in 2021.

“When I started at SOC, some of the biggest sports had their own surveillance systems and others had nothing, so it was really difficult to keep track of everything going on,” Martin said.

“The first task I had was to arrange some kind of structured health surveillance among all the athletes. The problem was keeping track of everyone and having an umbrella overview of all the health problems and statuses across the whole Olympic organization.”

With this mandate in mind, Martin began evaluating athlete management systems (AMS). When asked why he selected AthleteMonitoring, he said: “AthleteMonitoring uses internationally accepted methods for health surveillance. Confidentiality is a big thing when you work with elite athletes, and with AthleteMonitoring, we have the same sort of data security as a hospital or clinic. We also wanted something that had health surveillance and medical records within the same system, so we have everything in one place.”

Consolidating Standardized Data for 40 Sports

When thinking back to the challenges he recognized when joining the SOC, Martin revealed that one of the biggest issues was the sheer scale of trying to manage data for every Olympic discipline. “There are 40 different sports and 40 organizations, and athletes are spread out all over the world,” he said. “So it was difficult to keep track of everyone because you can’t see them physically for a clinical consultation and there was no unified system in place.”

AthleteMonitoring helps overcome this issue. It enables remote data capture for athletes in any sport, no matter where they live or train. This information is then immediately available to authorized performance and medical staff, so they can better coordinate athlete care and preparation.

“AthleteMonitoring has provided us with a uniform health surveillance system among all the athletes and the organizations within the 40 different sports involved in the Swedish Olympic Committee,” Martin said. “Now we can keep track of what’s going on with each athlete. It’s a more complete system where we capture everything from minor complaints up to more severe conditions.”

Each summer and winter sport within the SOC is focused on its own athletes. But for Martin and his colleagues who oversee all 40 sports, it’s helpful to have standardized and universal information across the board, while offering the ability to tailor certain monitoring functionality to individual disciplines.

“Training diaries can be very detailed and look different depending on what sport you do, but we try to collect a more generic set of information from everyone, whether you’re a cross-country or alpine skier, a pole vaulter, or a climber,” Martin said. “We can compare athletes and sports, and federations are able to customize more details for each specific sport depending on their needs and how AthleteMonitoring suits them.”

Resolving Athlete Health Issues Sooner

In addition to capturing objective data in AthleteMonitoring, the SOC also utilizes it to capture, collate, and act upon subjective information that each athlete self-reports every Sunday.

“We use basic health surveillance based on the international standards with the Oslo Sports Trauma Research Center questionnaires that are embedded in AthleteMonitoring,” Martin said. “These are based on weekly reporting from the athletes that we’ve added some questions to.”

Previously, it was difficult for the SOC to detect athlete health issues unless they reported a serious incident or were treated by a team doctor. Now, the SOC uses AthleteMonitoring as an early warning system, which features color-coded flagging to alert staff if someone moves outside their normal ranges.

“When an athlete reports health issues, illness, or lesser wellbeing in a weekly surveillance survey, the health staff gets a notification immediately, so they can take adequate action early on,” Martin said. “We have a better picture if someone has a minor health problem and act on that very quickly to prevent this from becoming a bigger problem.”

Martin feels that capturing subjective data in AthleteMonitoring can also play into load management and making more informed decisions about each individual’s preparation. “Using athlete reporting of perceived load, rate of perceived exertion, stress, and sleep can reflect that they’re not doing so well,” he said. “It helps pick up on things if everything isn’t going as planned, and that might lead to action like changing your training if you’re not getting the results you want or aren’t feeling as well as you should.”

It’s not only Swedish Olympic athletes who are geographically dispersed, but also the staff members who serve them. Martin believes that using one platform as a single source of truth is bringing physiotherapists, doctors, and practitioners together to provide more informed and timely care. In addition to utilizing data that athletes report, staff can upload interactions using diagnosis coding recommended by the IOC and add supporting documentation to medical records.

“As they share the same medical records, everyone on the health staff knows what each other is doing,” Martin said. “They have the same view of treatment, examinations, and rehab, so they can communicate and share information with coaches and other people who are working with the athletes. Everyone wants them to be 100 percent healthy and perform their best, and the more information they have, the better. I hear from the medical team that AthleteMonitoring is also creating better connections with athletes as it’s breaking down the barriers to reporting health issues.”

No matter what sport they compete in, elite Swedish athletes can only participate in the Olympics every four years. Martin believes that while it’s important to peak at the right time, competitors also benefit from the ongoing surveillance AthleteMonitoring provides.

“Just prior to and during the Olympics, there’s a lot of attention on athletes’ performance level, health, and wellbeing,” he said. “Having that same level of detail for every other part of the Olympic cycle helps their development because it’s what they do during those four years that puts them on the podium during the Olympics.”

Spotting Trends and Interpreting Data

While it is too early for Martin to draw definitive, long-term conclusions from the SOC’s health surveillance information, it is already providing clues about how certain factors impact athlete preparation and wellbeing.

“Now that we are collecting this kind of data, we can also look at trends,” he said. “If we change the training routine, what happens? Does it have an impact on injury incidence? For instance, if a team goes to a high-altitude training camp for four weeks or does a lot of traveling, do we have more or less illnesses after that?”

One of the main things coaches need to know each day is which athletes can train with no restrictions or are unavailable. AthleteMonitoring provides such information and can also be used to modify training for those with minor issues.

“If I only measured absence or availability, that’s one filter,” Martin said. “But if you measure all health problems that the athletes have, that’s a much finer filter. You’re aware of more things that should impact your planning. AthleteMonitoring is helping coaches to see how training and competition influences health and having quantifiable data allows them to also evaluate their own performance.”

Collecting standardized athlete data and consolidating it is beneficial to some degree, but the greatest benefits are achieved when this information is presented in a way that it can be understood and acted upon. The versatile reporting features in AthleteMonitoring make this easier for the SOC.

“We provide regular reports from this data set back to the Olympic committee,” Martin said. “We’re also very active in giving information and feedback to athletes, coaches, and health staff so they feel it’s useful for them to provide data to the system. Using graphs and color-coding is a simple way to get the message across, and if coaches have questions about how certain training impacts the health status of their athletes, we can do specific analyses.”

Such information sharing is providing the SOC’s medical staff and coaches with a more complete understanding of their athletes’ wellness. It is also empowering individual competitors to discover more about how their training and health are linked.

“Most athletes have a good sense of how they train and the intended load but maybe not so much on the output of their training and competition,” Martin said. “If they have a system where they can monitor their wellbeing, sleep, injuries, and illnesses, they have their own stats that they can benchmark against. It’s a learning experience for athletes to be active in monitoring their health.”

It is undoubtedly useful for the SOC’s performance and medical staff to see a daily snapshot of each athlete’s health status. Researchers like Martin also find the longitudinal information and ability to track athlete progress over time useful.

“It’s very helpful to get standardized structured data collection from everyone,” Martin said. “I have confidence I can trust the data that is being produced by the athletes, which is validated by the health staff working with them. I can compare information between different sports and organizations and with international colleagues who have the same system in place.”

Extending Health Surveillance to Paralympic Athletes

The SOC’s continued success with AthleteMonitoring has led to them expanding the system. “We’ve helped the Swedish Paralympic Committee to come in and get involved with AthleteMonitoring as well,” Martin said. “We have piloted with them within our program, and now they’re taking off on their own. This is also helpful for us because we can compare data between the Olympic and Paralympic groups of athletes.”

Looking ahead, Martin has identified other ways that the SOC can enhance its athlete management and surveillance initiative. “Another development for us would be to have the coaches more involved with AthleteMonitoring,” he said. “We could take advantage of the system’s full functionality to report training loads and schedules so that it becomes a platform for everyone around the athlete to work in.”

From the initial deployment with health surveillance to finding new ways to track athletes’ wellbeing, the SOC has created a productive and collaborative partnership with AthleteMonitoring.

“The AthleteMonitoring team is quick to communicate and helpful with troubleshooting,” Martin said. “When you deal with this kind of sensitive information, it’s important to work with someone you trust. They’re also keen to continually develop the system based on experiences we’ve had and the needs of the SOC and their other customers.”

Quick Facts

Number of Sports: 40
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
Departments using solution: Performance, medical, coaching
Main product uses: Injury and illness tracking and athlete health monitoring