Among TV viewers, figure skating is consistently one of the most anticipated events at the Winter Olympics. But for Lindsay Slater Hannigan, who is director of the human and sport performance laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago, it’s more than a spectator sport.
She is the sports sciences manager for U.S. Figure Skating — the national governing body for figure skating — and she is currently in Stamford, Connecticut, helping NBC produce its coverage of the 2026 Winter Olympics.
“At any of these Olympic organizations, there are never as many people working for them (full-time) as needed; it’s not like the NFL or NBA,” she says. “That’s wild to think about when you’re talking about one of the most popular sports of the Winter Olympics. So around four of us are contract workers, which includes a sports psychologist, a dietitian, and then I manage the sports science aspects, which means I use data to help the employees, coaches and athletes make performance decisions and injury-prevention decisions and rehabilitation decisions over the course of the season.”
What is the science behind the sport? Hannigan took a break from her work with NBC to discuss her area of expertise. The following has been edited for clarity and length.
Q: What kind of work do you do with U.S. Figure Skating?
A: My expertise tends to be jumping athletes, so the pairs skaters and then men’s and women’s singles. A lot of what I’ve done in the past, which has gotten more traction, is workload management, which is newer to figure skating: How do we identify and measure and quantify workload?
Q: What do you mean by workload when talking about a figure skater?
A: It’s super simple for every other sport, it’s usually the number of steps that you take if you’re a runner.
Q: Or pitch count for a baseball player?
A: You got it. And it’s very common in those sports to quantify it that way. In figure skating, it’s been really hard to quantify, especially in training, because there wasn’t a wearable that could measure, for example, how many jumps a skater has done. So we partnered with a company called 4D Motion Sports to create a wearable system that athletes could wear on their hips to identify jumps based on a very specific algorithm. We use rotational velocity — how fast they’re rotating in the air — to identify whether or not they are actually jumping and in the air, and then quantify how many jumps they are doing a day. Until recently, basically four years ago — because we were doing a lot of that work in the lead-up to the Beijing games — we had no idea.
Q: Is it really that complicated? Can’t someone just count the number of jumps a skater is doing during practice?
A: You could. The paper-and-pen method is an option. But most of our athletes were not doing it. And if they’re not doing it, then it requires personnel to do it. So if we want the athlete to do it, then we’re not always going to get accurate data. If we tell them, “We want you to do 80 jumps today,” and they did 120, they just wouldn’t log the other jumps — which is super normal. You could say the same about pitchers or runners; every athlete thinks working harder means working better. So we try to use wearables to help them identify how many they’re doing.
But on top of that, a lot of these metrics we were using in the past were really arbitrary. It’s an arbitrary number when they say all pitchers shouldn’t exceed “X” number of pitches per week, or per month or per season. Because it’s so specific to the athlete. So using wearables not only helped us identify how many jumps they are doing, we’re using the data to identify where they’ve hit their maximum amount of jumps and we start to see a decline in performance — and all athletes had different numbers!
Q: To clarify, you’re saying it’s useful for coaches and skaters to know how many jumps they’re doing because you hit a point where there are diminishing returns. I wonder if that’s also helpful in figuring out when an athlete is increasing the likelihood of a repetitive stress injury? That you’re actually hurting yourself when you go past a certain number, so we need to figure out your sweet spot?
A: Exactly. There are other skills we track. In ice dance, we’re trying to figure out how to define and quantify workload because there are no jumps. Ice dancers are kind of the endurance athletes of the sport. What an ice dancer experiences on training days is the equivalent of running 11 miles. So if you are doing that every day, at some point, the body will break down.
Q: It sounds like there’s all this stuff happening on the backend that most spectators may not be aware of that’s pretty technical and goes beyond just having talent and training hard.
A: Every little thing has been thought about, including when they skate. So if Alysa Liu or Amber Glenn have a really good short program going into the free program, which means they will skate last in the free program, then between the warmup and when they’re actually going to skate, it could be an hour. And we train for that. … The best example is Nathan Chen. At Beijing, if he skated after (Japanese skater) Yuzuru Hanyu, the number of Winnie-the-Pooh bears that would be thrown on the ice would add about 20 to 30 minutes to sweep them off the ice. So not only did Nathan have to train for that usual hour, but also an additional 20 to 30 minutes because he needed to be prepared for that. So everything we can control and train for, we do
Q: Can you pinpoint when the science aspect became more prevalent in figure skating?
A: We’ve been doing this for decades — taking video and using that to analyze biomechanics — but we didn’t necessarily have the technology to do it at the level we’re doing it now. We can do it more effectively now that technology has advanced. Wearables have been huge. But even the video technology with iPhones mimics some of the highest performing cameras that I have in my lab. So I can use iPhone technology to measure variables that I couldn’t measure four years ago.
Q: And that’s important because maybe you want to look at something frame by frame?
A: Yep. But it also gives us opportunities to do workload measurements without having to use wearables. Right now, we’re working on a system where, if we just set up one camera, we can potentially measure workload without the athlete having to put something on their body every time they skate, because that’s always an issue.
And using camera systems means we’re on the forefront of using it for judging. I think that’s one of the pieces the public is struggling with a lot, and honestly internally we still struggle with it, because there’s still a lot of subjectivity in figure skating judging. So if we can automate some of that and help the judges do their job in a better way, that’s where we’re focusing.
Judges currently have one camera that is pretty archaic. It’s operating from one angle at a very low frame rate, and that’s what they use to go back and identify, in jumping, for example, did the skater underrotate? We’re operating under the assumption that this camera captured this very fast movement in order to make that decision. And that’s the difference of a lot of points.
So using all these sports science aspects we’ve been developing, we’ve identified a case-use that could potentially be used for the judging system. If we’re not relying on personal error to make decisions on whether or not that was a fully-rotated jump, we can use AI to tell them things like: This was the time of takeoff, this was the time of landing, this was a fully rotated jump. It could be a much more objective measure and I think it will even out a little bit more on what some of the viewers are seeing in terms of the subjectivity of the sports.
Q: I caught my breath when you said AI. You’re describing a type of camera that can give a more precise image, but AI is notorious for its accuracy problems. Why shouldn’t we be concerned?
A: With a lot of data, AI can be really useful. And we have a lot of data in figure skating about what jump takeoffs should look like and what the landing looks like.
This would not be eliminating officials. This would be using AI to our advantage to help people figure out if this was a fully rotated jump or not.
Q: I assumed it was as straightforward as: The skater did enough rotations and landed cleanly on the correct edge, therefore they did the jump correctly.
A: Yeah, that’s where we get into the nuances of the sport. There’s something called pre-rotation, so we have to account for how they’re taking off from that edge and, when they get in the air, how many rotations they’re actually doing in the air, and then of course there’s where that blade lands. So there are so many factors here. And the problem with the current judging system is that so often they’re relying on a camera that is only collecting at 30 frames per second to identify some of these elements, which is problematic when we’re talking about a jump that lasts .8 seconds. The cameras we’re using are collecting 50 frames per second.
So the idea is to use AI — we’ve now collected thousands and thousands and thousands of jumps — to identify what is reasonable in terms of pre-rotation on this jump.
There are officials who pinpoint certain athletes that they feel often underrotate, so they’ll go back and review all their jumps, while there are other athletes who may have underrotated but because they’re not known for it, the judges don’t review those jumps. If you leave it to subjectivity and you’re not using any kind of computerized system, now you have a subjective sport where, because a skater has this history, I’m going to review every jump.
We want to make it a fair and objective sport where everybody is subject to the same rules, as opposed to the circumstance right now.
Q: Might this be adopted by the next Winter Games?
A: Our goal is to have it tested for the next Winter Games and then potentially in use for Salt Lake City in 2034, which is serendipitous because that’s where the judging scandal started (in 2002, where there were allegations of vote swapping and at least one judge being bought off for the pairs event, which resulted in two teams ultimately being awarded the gold medal).
We probably are not in a place in four years to utilize it, but I’m hopeful. There are a lot of different companies that are trying to do the same thing, so we’re not alone in this. But I hope in four years, we’ll be testing the system. Gymnastics is doing this too; at the Paris Games they were testing a system.
Q: Are you a figure skater?
A: Yes, in a past life. I trained in figure skating when I was very young and then ended up being on a synchronized skating team in college at Miami of Ohio. After that, I took a break because figure skating is very expensive and I was feeling a little burned out.
Q. When you were training as a skater, did you think about the science aspect of it?
A: No. I was like every other skater, right? Thinking the more you do, the better. It was also a different time. Skaters didn’t really lift weights. It was a lot of plyometrics (a form of explosive movements) but you didn’t want to get bulky. Now we’re in a much better position where our athletes are recognizing that lifting means that they’re stronger, they’re healthier, they’re able to withstand a lot of the forces unloading in our sport. I credit Nathan Chen with a lot of that; I couldn’t talk our athletes into lifting until Nathan Chen started lifting and people saw the results he was getting and that his body wasn’t bulking, he was lean and strong.
Q: I know physical appearance of a skater’s body can be a contentious issue, especially for women.
A: It’s always going to be a hard conversation, especially when it comes to the official aspect. Our perspective on it is this: We are in it for the longevity of the athlete. That means appreciating that the body changes in puberty.
So many athletes, you see it a lot on the Russian side, they don’t make it past puberty because they’re really fast rotators and really strong athletes before puberty, and then their body changes and they can’t withstand those changes, so they either have an injury or their mechanics shift. What I think U.S. Figure Skating has done really well over the last decade is to focus on the strength of our athletes, keeping them the strongest version of themselves, as opposed to trying to make everybody look the same.
Q: How is your expertise being used to help with NBC’s coverage?
A: This is newer. I’ve been with NBC for the past year and a half, helping them with the scientific aspect of skating. Anytime you’re watching the skating broadcast on NBC and you’re seeing heights or distances — or right now we’re working on a twizzle piece for dance, on the synchronization — it’s basically us in the back room compiling those numbers and then trying to help the audience understand what makes the best athletes in the world so much better than either the third or fourth best, but also why the sport is so hard.
Ilia Malinin is a good example. He’s doing a quad axel that’s talked about a lot, but not only is he doing a quad axel and rotating four-and-a-half revolutions in the air, he’s doing it in less than a second and he gets jump height that would put him in the top 15 of an NBA combine. So he’s jumping so high — while rotating that fast, while trying to maintain this small moment of inertia — and he has to make it look so easy.
