Meet the Team USA sports science guru transforming Everton FC – Telegraph.co.uk

For head-to-head sports, including football, Vint is an advocate of the research of Hungarian physicist Arpad Elo.

“We used a method originally developed to assess skill among international chess players (a USOC-modified version of the Elo method),” he explained.

“The Elo method took into account both how you did in the tournament, but also who you competed against. All things considered, it did terrifically well at identifying the most internationally competitive athletes and teams.  

“Some sports were relatively easy to understand from a performance standpoint. We could describe pretty clearly how far you needed to throw the shot put to compete for a gold medal, for example. We documented the historic progressions of each athlete in each event in each of the Summer and Winter Olympic sports.

“We could show what was needed to win and we could track an athlete’s or team’s progression against that. It became clear which athletes were most likely to compete for Olympic medals. 

“For the first time ever in the USA it gave us a clear picture of who was competitive enough to win a medal. We were able to answer two important questions: ‘were we competitive enough to win a medal?’ and ‘were we getting any better?’ We later extended this to the point where we could associate a given performance level with the statistical likelihood of winning a medal.  

“With the likes of Michael Phelps or Katie Ledecky it was easy. Their performance trajectories made it clear that they had progressed to deliver world-leading marks. 

“Where it gets tough is when high performing athletes suddenly take a right turn and their trajectories plateau. It was in discussions with coaches and athletes who may have believed they are performing well when, in reality, they’re not doing so well relative to the ‘medal band’, where we brought real change. We were tracking every single athlete in each of the 300 plus Summer Olympic disciplines and nearly 100 Winter Olympic disciplines.

“With such depth of research, we could explain to governing bodies and athletes why we could or could not endorse their funding recommendations. Some administrators were quite open to it and some were less so but the data and our analysis enabled a more honest conversation.”