Formula 1 drivers experience eight times the force of gravity when taking tight corners, which is roughly what astronauts feel when making an uncontrolled reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. During a catch-and-throw exercise for Cirque du Soleil’s production of Messi, a new circus inspired by soccer great Lionel Messi, one of the performers experienced 15 g—a revelation made possible by a pilot program that has Cirque performers wearing Wimu inertial sensors during training.
“Apollo and Mercury astronauts in the first days of the space program, they were hitting 8 g,” says Steve Gera, CEO of the sports innovation consultancy Gains Group. “Now we know that a Cirque performer is potentially doubling the g-force of an astronaut who is re-entering Earth. That is [expletive] cool, right?”
Wimu is the flagship product of RealTrack Systems, a graduate company of the Barça Innovation Hub—and the same wearable worn by Messi himself and his FC Barcelona teammates. (Gera is the U.S. representative for the Barça Innovation Hub and a columnist at SportTechie.)
Circus acts may lack the competition of sports, but Cirque’s shows are no less physically demanding. At times, they can require even more specialized athleticism. Objective data generated from wearable technology can help recalibrate our understanding of human performance. Some of the other metrics that Wimu discovered during production of Messi were a vertical speed of 6.41 meters per second (14.3 miles per hour), angular speeds of 1,036 degrees per second (nearly three revolutions) and g-forces of nearly 7 on rotations around the high bar.
“Can you imagine that? I was surprised when I saw all that,” says Evert Verhagen, a Cirque consultant who is an associate professor at the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam and chair of an International Olympic Committee research center. “I had to recount the outcomes twice, but they are true. And they do that every day.”
Verhagen, whose expertise is in injury prevention, began consulting with Cirque six years ago in hopes of applying his knowledge of sports to the circus. That initial plan didn’t last long. “I said, ‘Yes, let’s do it. If we can do this in sports, we can certainly do that for you guys as well,’” he says. “Then I went to a show and was like, ‘This is not going to work.’ I knew immediately that the environment, the context, the demands are so different from sports.
“It’s the plethora of artists, the plethora of tasks, the individual roles within each show,” says Verhagen, who still helped drive a 30% reduction in injuries through more general changes related to systems management, leadership and culture. “If you have a football team, you’ve got X number of players on the field. Yes, they have different roles, but in essence, they’re all doing the same thing. They’re all exposed to similar risks, so it’s relatively easy to record what these risks are, what the etiology of problems are so you can develop solutions that, to a very far extent, apply to everyone.”
Bryan Burnstein, who until recently was Cirque’s head of performance science for 12 years, says the company has more than 110 unique disciplines, many of which are so challenging that only a handful of people in the world are capable of filling them. That complicates traditional workout planning; precedent is often scarce or nonexistent. “We have unpredictable movement patterns,” Burnstein says. “We have totally different scopes and ranges and thresholds than what you’re used to seeing in other sports. We also have a high level of complexity and diversity that you don’t see.”
Cirque also has a long performance season, exceeding even the marathon schedule of big league baseball. Resident shows are staged 380 to 470 times a year, and touring shows perform around 300 times—with training of about 12 hours per week. And while ball clubs have the luxury of deep farm systems, Cirque’s specialization means there’s little by way of a minor leagues outside of maybe one or two understudies. That intensifies the need for better physical monitoring to ensure readiness. “As a performer, you literally have to show up every single night,” Gera says. “There are no off-days, there’s no injury report, there’s none of that. It’s you and typically one other person who’s backing you up in your specific event.”
“These were metrics and values that really made us—as practitioners, as scientists, as researchers—really factor in the intensity of the training that these artists endure to meet the training demands of their coaches on a daily basis,” says RealTrack Systems sport scientist Peter Demopoulos. “The sheer preparation is mind-boggling what these athletes, what these artists, do to prepare for the end result of these shows.”
The parallels to baseball abound. Both Cirque and MLB have long schedules, extensive travel and remote work environments—Cirque’s home base is in Montreal, and it functions in the same way that every baseball franchise has a home venue and a training complex in either Florida or Arizona. Shows and games, however, happen everywhere. Pitchers rely on the same repeatable motion to master their craft, as do many circus performers.
These similarities led Clive Brewer, who until recently was the assistant director of high performance with the Toronto Blue Jays, to visit Cirque du Soleil and open a dialogue with its staff. “The reason we started our relationship with Cirque is because their athletes probably perform more than ours do,” says Brewer, who in November became the high performance director of the MLS’ Columbus Crew. “We think we have a lot with 162 games in the regular season. They’re doing 400 shows a year. The volume that they go through and the repetition of the actions that they go through is a constant challenge for them.”
That Cirque would be using the same wearable device that Messi wears to produce the show Messi is more coincidental than intentional. Plans for the show were first revealed in Oct. 2018 and, a month later, Burnstein first spoke with Gera at the Barça Sports Technology Symposium about applying Wimu to the circus. “There was this natural thread of a new creation, and there was a common thread throughout with the Barça family,” Burnstein says.
All of this will help performance staff better understand the physical toll of training and help convey to the audience just how remarkable the Cirque artists are. Understanding these data points and comparing them to other sporting disciplines—gymnastics is a close relative—can punctuate that.
“In talking to the coaches, they knew what their performers were doing was amazing, but to see the numbers behind different landings and different spin rates, all of a sudden that contextualized it in a way that they hadn’t before. That definitely caught their attention,” Gera says. “It’s not your endemic sports environment. Sports are all about winning and losing and trying to get an edge. Cirque is something slightly different. It’s like going to the Juilliard. There’s competition, but it’s all internal competition. And once people are selected for the specific roles, then it’s all about working together to give the best performance that you can possibly give.”
{ SOURCE: Joe Lemire, SportTechie }
