Today, every major professional sports team either has an analytics department or an analytics expert on staff.
Karate is way behind almost every olympic sport in that department because its not in our tradition, we are still struggling to find a clear identity between tradition and sport!
Analytics are the present and future of sports not only team sports but individual sports as well.
In MMA the UFC have embarked on the trend!
I know (by word of mouth) that the Japanese who are going to be hosting the next olympics in karate are studying the best fighters in the world and also analyzing themselves to get an edge
Any National team that applies them to the fullest is at a clear competitive edge.
Using a sophisticated system for crunching numbers, a site could assess past results, win-loss records and opponent history or tendencies to determine the outcome of a future matches in K 1 s , world championships events or the Olympics, to detect talent,to determind and analyze performance gaps, to establish gold metal profiles, you need statistics and evidence.
The downside is that it is very expensive and many karate federations unlike France and Japan,have budget issues !!!
Even developed countries like the US and
Brasil struggle with funding issues, imagine undeveloped countries in Africa for instance …karate has become an expensive sport!
While technologies like “Hexoskin ” or huddul for video analysis seem like the wave of the future, there is a level of difficulty in determining how to utilize the surplus of information that it provides to help fighters and coaches gain an advantage.
So for now thank God for sport data and YouTube ! But the future of the sport is definitely having an analytics expert on staff, that is going to be more and more required to get an edge in my opinion!