Chitra Ragavan

Ep. 15 — This sports startup is transforming the world of track and field data analytics for athletes, coaches, and fans / Chris Williams, Founder, and CEO, Zelos.

For decades, like in many other sports, track and field athletes and coaches have been stymied by their inability to easily use analytics to help athletes reach their highest potential, with their performance data trapped largely in paper silos.

In the lead-up to the Tokyo Summer Olympics, Seattle-based startup Zelos has integrated roughly 20 million track and field records dating back 50 years, into its data analytics platform to generate powerful, predictive insights into the world’s oldest and most popular sport.

COVID-19 has changed all aspects of life, work, and careers, especially for athletes who haven’t been able to travel, train, and perform at their peak. The impact of the crisis will be acutely felt at the Olympics this week (rescheduled from last Summer because of COVID) as these athletes learn whether their can-do attitudes and flexible, often improvised training over the past year due to the pandemic, will affect their performance as they take their places among their peers to compete for those hard-fought medals.

The pandemic also has forced sports startups to adapt along with these athletes and to become nimble in challenging times as the pandemic shut down sporting events around the globe.

I’m joined by Chris Williams, founder, and CEO of Zelos to talk about his journey building Zelos through the pandemic and how it’s made him and his startup more resilient and adaptive.

Williams is a former pole vaulter and hurdler at the University of Washington. And he frequently writes and speaks about his experience as a former NCAA athlete and a data engineer. I should add by of disclosure that I’m on Zelos’s advisory board.

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Chitra Ragavan:

COVID-19 has changed all aspects of life, work, and careers, especially for athletes who haven’t been able to travel, train and perform at their peak. The impact of the crisis will be acutely felt at the Tokyo Summer Olympics this week, rescheduled from last summer because of COVID. As these athletes learn what their can-do attitudes and flexible, often improvised training over the past year due to the pandemic will affect their performance as they take their places among their peers to compete for those hard-fought medals. Hello, everyone. I’m Chitra Ragavan and this is Techtopia. The pandemic also has forced sports startups to adapt along with these athletes to become nimble in challenging times as the pandemic shut down sporting events around the globe. I’m joined now by Chris Williams, founder and CEO of the Seattle-based sports data analytics startup, Zelos, which is taking track and field analytics to a whole new level for athletes, coaches, and fans.

Chitra Ragavan:

Williams is a formal pole vaulter and hurdler at the University of Washington. And he frequently writes and speaks about his experience as a former NCAA athlete and a data engineer. And I should add by way of disclosure that I’m on Zelos’ advisory board. Chris, welcome to Techtopia.

Chris Williams:

Thank you Chitra. It’s great to be here.

Chitra Ragavan:

So tell us a little bit about yourself and how you became a pole vaulter and hurdler, and what drew you to the sport.

Chris Williams:

Yeah, so to know me is, you’re relative to know my family and I come from a track and field family. So my sister ran track and field. My father was a hurdler as well. Both of my cousins, plenty of aunts and uncles competed in the sport. I would go to their meets, they would come to my own, and growing up, my biggest sports idol was my sister. And so I would go to all of her track meets and I’d follow not just her, but all of her competitors too. And from the hours I spent at these track meets, I grew an affinity to it. And one day my dad said, okay son, know you played a few sports, but now’s the time to really think of something to stick with and you want to do throughout your high school career.

Chris Williams:

So for me, that was a pole vault. Something about the pole vault just captured my imagination and my dad, a little surprised to hear that that was the sport I chose was all aboard. And we clearly remember driving to Home Depot to get my first pole vaulting poles. And my first pole vaulting pole was actually a wooden dowel. We wrapped it with red tape and I used that for a couple of years while learning the sport. And since then, the sports afforded me a scholarship at the University of Washington. I’ve been able to travel and compete around the world. And looking back at my career, the sport in general, the opportunities it provides, and the skills you learn within it, really every day is what keeps me going and excited to build applications for the track community and then other athletes.

Chitra Ragavan:

So, and I have to add just hearing some of your stories that your entire family is still crazy competitive even today with the exercise and fitness and it’s pretty crazy, isn’t it?

Chris Williams:

Yeah. So I come from an incredibly competitive family and my sister just gave birth a few weeks ago actually, just over two weeks ago and, but several months ago she was seven, eight months pregnant every day, looking at our apple watch, trying to compete with me, my dad on, on the Peloton bike two or three times a day. My dad, as well is extremely competitive, loves to hike, track his performance and his apple watch. And that undoubtedly has rubbed off on me and is also a huge driver of the value I see in pretty transparency and accessible ways to find competitors and open up avenues for your own goal setting.

Chitra Ragavan:

So how did you pivot from athletics to data analytics? What happened?

Chris Williams:

There’s few moments in one’s life where they can look back and future is totally dependent on that one moment. And for me, one of those moments was when I visited, just sat in on a lecture my freshman year in college, I was recruited by the University of Washington to compete as a pole vaulter. And it was just a kind of walking around campus, exploring some of the buildings and knew that there was this lecture coming up. And to my surprise, the lecture was about collective intelligence. I had no clue what that really meant and not really an idea of the lecture but the professor Batia Friedman totally, in an hour and a half captured my imagination and describes something so profound that I still look back at all of her own research and where the fields could go, but collective intelligence is essentially how humans or any sort of organism can make decisions better together than alone.

Chris Williams:

And that, as someone that was passionate about teamwork and progress, that was really exciting for me. And I thought that that information itself, she described in a way there was a physicality to it. You think about our genome, something that’s been around for millennia, it all comes, it’s a program, it’s all information. And those same traits and characteristics of information still apply to us as an organism, as a unit in sociobiology. And so the way that she described it at that time had me thinking extremely large and maybe want to pursue a career somewhere in the field of information science.

Chitra Ragavan:

And then what happened next?

Chris Williams:

I started taking classes and computer science and informatics, and took also a few business courses and was lucky enough to get an internship at a venture capital firm that really focused on early stage startups and enterprise software. And so that was an incredibly new experience for me as well, and tasks to scan through thousands and thousands of companies on the bleeding edge who were thinking 10, 15 years down the road and really kind of got my feet wet in entrepreneurship and startups from the investing side of the table and learning about all of these companies, I started to see these higher level patterns that really came down to breaking down data silos and leveraging your data to make better decisions, to be more compliant, to be more connected with your team.

Chris Williams:

And I thought, wow, what if track and field, how much stronger of a sport would track and field be if we had a single source of truth for our competitions or a way for athletes to accurately track their training and in how that correlates with game day or meet day. And that was kind of another defining moment, which was the kind of genesis of Zelos.

Chitra Ragavan:

That’s amazing. So before we kind of dive into the power of Zelos and platforms like that and how it’s transforming the world of sports, give our listeners a sense, this is something that blew me away when we first started talking the size and scale and passion around track and field around the world. It’s pretty extraordinary. The numbers of runners, both casual runners and really amazing, incredibly accomplished athletes.

Chris Williams:

Definitely. Whereas as many successful business opportunities start, it’s an overlooked or an undervalued market that the product or the service serves. And the track and field is very, very, in my opinion, a very overlooked sport. It’s the largest participatory sport in American high schools. There’s over a million athletes running. That’s more than football, basketball, baseball, soccer, and it’s also the fastest growing sport out of those. So that was actually something that years ago, when I learned that it’s still largest and fastest growing, I thought that was totally was contrary to what people believe and what people think of a sport and in terms of the numbers. It’s also not just in the states, it’s the marathon itself is the largest sport in China. There’s millions of athletes running 30 million athletes around the world will cross the finish line in a road race every year. And it’s extremely big. And you see companies like Strava and other very runner, endurance, focused applications or sports that have really exploded over the past five years and at post COVID are growing even faster.

Chitra Ragavan:

What do you think are the reasons that drive this global passion for running?

Chris Williams:

Yeah. And so with track and field in particular, I mean, there’s great gender parody. And so you have just as many women participating as men. And so compared to other sports where there’s a difference in participation rates, that’s a huge reason why it’s a larger market. Also, it has such low barriers to entry. Barefoot running, it was a really a successful popular theory for years where you didn’t need shoes. Running is so ingrained in us as humans. It doesn’t take any additional courts. So it’s extremely inclusive. It’s extremely diverse. And I think those are the two key reasons why it’s larger and has more potential than other team sports or big air quotes, revenue generating sports that you typically see on ESPN.

Chitra Ragavan:

And globally, what are the numbers like?

Chris Williams:

In China, there’s just sport. So tens of millions of athletes that are competing in China and track and field. Japan also, has a huge affinity for marathon racing and in the states, there’s a 20 million athletes that will compete. And that deals with from the 100 meter dash to the marathon and different field events in between, whether that’s the steeple chase or the race walk or the shot-put.

Chitra Ragavan:

Track and field athletes. I mean, all athletes of course are consumed by data, right. That their performance data. But I was fascinated by the stories you were telling me about track and field athletes. When you ever since from the time you were little and you’re getting more and more advanced in the sport, how the data actually drives you, the kind of note-taking athletes do. Talk a little bit about that.

Chris Williams:

At Zelos, we talk to professional athletes every day, learning more about their stories, what drives them, their habits. As an athlete myself, I know that I relied on note taking. This was before apple watch and Fitbit. And I had a notebook and a pen and every day, I would track how many push-ups I did, how many sit-ups I did, what bungee I cleared, how many miles I might’ve run. And then try to see it. It was rough, but look back on the journal and try to figure out how that aligns and how to set myself up for success in a race. Today there’s no excuse why an athlete shouldn’t be tracking themselves for their own health and to just improve their performance. And that’s something that’s been consistent across all of the athletes we’ve talked to, whether it’s taking notes themselves or wearing a garment or all sorts of different devices. Personal tracking is critical for success these days.

Chris Williams:

And in a data-rich sport, like track and field, where in the one hundred meter dash, a 100th of a second, it’s not that small. I mean, it’s close, but races are determined by a hundredth of a second weekly. It’s common.

Chitra Ragavan:

And yet, until recently technology hasn’t really kept up with it. And even coaches and athletes, and of course fans are very, very paper-driven, right. I mean, there’s large volumes of paper, and it’s just very hard to collate across the board and be able to find patterns of performance and patterns that they can use to get better. It’s just extraordinary how paper-driven the sport is.

Chris Williams:

Yeah. Agreed. And you mentioned that in, I think back of a conversation that I had a few months ago with a coach of mine where a coach that works with, and I asked him if he could send us anything that any materials that would help us as a software company to understand the decisions that he needs to make and how we can leverage software and in our data to empower their team. And so the coach told me, oh man, you should have asked us a few weeks ago. I just threw away a hundred pounds of paper results. And that just, yeah, I just think about all the time. So when an athlete says, Hey, coach, do you remember what I ran three weeks ago at this meet, he will point them to that stack in his office and they’ll have to go through that.

Chitra Ragavan:

How do you even figure it out?

Chris Williams:

How do you figure it out? I mean, every meet, there’s thousands of athletes and it’s data rich, but with that, the sport is very antiquated and there’s a huge opportunity cost to not being able to generate insights quickly. And you have to sifting through papers, whether it’s meet results or training plans, nutrition plans.

Chitra Ragavan:

So tell us a little bit then about Zelos. So we’ve kind of talked about how this paper-driven culture because we didn’t have technology like we do today has forced athletes to rely on scraps of paper, to try to figure out what their patterns of performance are. So you created Zelos. Tell us how Zelos works and what the difference is in terms of the analytic and predictive power of platforms like yours.

Chris Williams:

Yep. What we’re doing really is we’re building the first consumer analytics platform, the sport of track and field. Data on performance results have never really been centralized on a global basis, which makes it, as we discussed, really tough to track progress, evaluate potential, identify competitive advantages. And so what we do is we build out, we have a dashboard in which it gives you powerful search, analytics and data visualizations to see career histories and to compare your performance in different environments. So far we’ve integrated about 20 million performances. And from that we’ve generated about 300 environmental factors and descriptive statistics. And this all goes back 50 years. So it’s a very old sport and there’s a lot of data and that’s really what we’ve focused on. More and more, we see the opportunity for creative media, opportunities to create data-driven media that gives more insights to users wherever they’re at, whatever they consume, whether it’s a blog or social media and that’s another way to create more interest engagement and insight in the community.

Chitra Ragavan:

So you’ve been able to integrate 50 years of track and field data into the platform?

Chris Williams:

Yes. And a lot of that was paper.

Chitra Ragavan:

How did you go about doing that?

Chris Williams:

You have to understand the sport in a schematic, how can all of these different sorts of results actually come together? So whether that’s, and that’s for any sort of initiative, integrating data with, if it’s what you’re eating and know how much you’re sleeping, how much Apple watch is tracking, but then also understand the sport and the rules of the sport. You have to kind of build a universe that supports that and can align different types of information. So that’s where we started. And then from there, you figure out today with tools like machine learning and artificial intelligence, we use that to be able to bring in disparate sources together.

Chitra Ragavan:

That’s crazy. So in terms of the volume of data, how much is in the Zelos platform?

Chris Williams:

Yep. So we have about 20 million performances for over 4 million athletes and that ranges from different skill levels and ability levels.

Chitra Ragavan:

So you were going to launch Zelos last summer during the summer Olympics, right? It was a campaign planned and then COVID hit and everything shut down. So what was that like to, I’m sure other sport startups felt the same sense of gloom and doom and panic almost because the world of sports was shutting down and people weren’t really performing and the Olympics was shutting down. What was that like to have a sport startup and have the world of sports shut down?

Chris Williams:

Yeah, man. Wow. What a year 2020 was, and still 2021. And looking back, at that time, getting a sense that sports might be canceled and then learning that the Olympics were going to be postponed after spending a lot of time and effort planning for what that would look like as well as building tools that were to help coaches plan their seasons and get the most out of the resources and help their athletes live up to their potential. And so that at the time devastating, I have to say. There was a lot of uncertainty, but at the end of the day, when I look back on it, I feel incredibly fortunate for the team we have on board and the resilience of the sport track and field and people still being interested in following or whether that was historical results when meets weren’t happening or whether it was speculative about what’s going to happen in the next seasons.

Chris Williams:

So COVID really became a forcing function for us to build, to leverage our data in new creative ways and to learn how to get by with less. And today, I’m almost thankful for that experience. It’s pushed our product forward. Now we have a tool more relevant in a platform that’s more usable by more types of individuals. And we’re much stronger as a company. What else could you throw at us? We’re also in a totally new world and with change there’s opportunity. So today, I feel fortunate that we’ve survived, that we have teammates that believed in what we were doing, that we had some luck and we had a couple of good ideas that really kept us top of mind for some people.

Chitra Ragavan:

So you had been planning to do a whole bunch of analytics around the Olympics last year, and you decided to go ahead anyway, and to do more of a simulation pretending as if the Olympics were going to happen. And then you also attached a fundraising campaign to help track and field athletes who traditionally, I didn’t know this until we started talking that track and field athletes don’t have the kind of sponsorship and fancy shoe companies and garment companies and all these things like a lot of other sports do. And tell me how you pivoted to deal with it and the kinds of analytics you did during the simulation and what were the results of that for, in terms of your predictive abilities and how true they were?

Chris Williams:

Yep. So a little bit of background, but our tool now I would call it a platform, it’s so much more rich in features and functionality, but we started as a way for coaches to streamline their processes and make better decisions faster rather than spending 20 hours planning a schedule for a lineup, essentially for your team, we could help them do that in less than an hour. And so that is what we had been building. But we did have data and that we felt maybe it could be relevant to some other people. And so we sat down kind of with that in mind, saying, how else can we leverage what we built? And with COVID primarily, we felt for the athletes, as many of us were former athletes, people training a decade to get to where they are, and many were totally capable of making the Olympics.

Chris Williams:

And that’s just something that’s off the table for another year. That was really tough. And on top of that, knowing that athletes many track and field professional track and field athletes are barely getting by. The average track and field athlete makes $20,000 a year. To actually go to the games it takes $40,000. The travel and training and coaching and healthcare. And so we kind of started with how can we help the sport in this tough time? Because without track and field as our bread and butter, it’s how we started. And so we thought how can we help? And then while we were brainstorming, another idea came up. That was, well, what if the Olympics did happen? So from there, we ended up actually building out a simulation using historical performances from the 1700 athletes that were most likely to qualify.

Chris Williams:

And in that simulation, we generated the results down to every place for every race, prelims, semi-finals, finals and published according to the 10 day schedule. So through that programming or our hypothetical results, we ended up being able to partner with USATF that really helped us get, build more funds and grow our reach so that we could get more money to athletes.

Chitra Ragavan:

And USATF is for people who don’t know.

Chris Williams:

Yep. Yep. So that’s USA track and field. So that’s the governing body, the FIFA essentially of, or I should say that the U.S. Soccer of track and field. And so that was especially as American athletes, unfortunately are often, we struggle the most, having them on board, bring attention to the issue was really valuable. And then when it comes to the data that there was a lot of interesting results as well.

Chris Williams:

One, as a pole vaulter myself, I love and is excited that we were able to have this level of specificity is that we predicted Mondo Duplantis winning the Olympics with a jump of six meters and seven centimeters. So we use the performance histories of these athletes and other contextual information up to that moment. And 10 days later, Mondo jumped 6’07” so down to the centimeter in Switzerland to break the diamond league world record. So that was just kind of a cherry on top of being able to provide for more athletes is generating some fun and inaccurate insights for the sport.

Chitra Ragavan:

And so some of the scholarships you handed out to athletes resulted in some really good news, right? So last year, summer Olympics actually are this year’s summer Olympics that we’re in the middle of, and what was the good news you found out recently?

Chris Williams:

Yes, man, I am so excited. We chose six athletes that were Olympic hopefuls, but unsponsored and valued by the community that were deserving of a grant that we fundraised for the games and that was to help them make it to the next Olympics and follow their goals or follow their dreams. And out of those six athletes, all of them were able to have a healthy season, an outdoor season this past year, all of them have made it to an Olympic trials final, which is incredible. Many were not actually projected to make it that far. And we just found out that another, so this is our third, but Curtis Thompson, a javelin thrower for Team USA actually won the trials when the U.S. trials unsponsored, unattached, and he’s going to the Olympics. He has a shot at doing really well on the world stage. And so being a part of his story and his journey is so exciting and it gets us excited for other athletes we can identify, with potential, as well as support

Chitra Ragavan:

Given the popularity of the sport, we’ve talked about that. Why is it that these athletes aren’t as appreciated in the sense of sponsorships and scholarships and what is the cause of that given that these millions and millions of athletes that are winning these incredible medals and breaking unbelievable records?

Chris Williams:

Yes. So there’s a quite a bit behind that. And I have my own theories, but I feel a lot of the difference of you have baseball players, NBA players, making millions who are at the top of their sport, but the best athlete in the world might not be making even a million, might barely be making a hundred thousand, that would be really great. And in my opinion, it’s a lag. I think we’re trailing behind a lot of other sports and we’re held back by this idea, which in theory, I think it’s productive and constructive, but in practice, it’s devastating and that’s amateurism. And so, the Olympic spirit and as many people that are familiar with Olympics and the philosophy of the Corinthian spirit is the passion of doing something, not for money, but just for the love of it.

Chris Williams:

And the love of the action of exercise, which I think does it sends a great message and definitely applies to so many athletes who are not in it for the money, but they just love what they do and they love and prove themselves. But the one thing that’s kind of lost in that is that track and field is actually a very, very lucrative sport. It’s incredibly lucrative and the money’s just not going to the athletes. And that’s because athletes don’t have any ownership of the franchise that is, USA track and field or world athletics and companies but also leagues and in franchises like the NBA very early on or earlier on, decades ago and franchised the athletes to be a part of the system. And that in itself blew up the sport that blew up these sports such as basketball, and also the amount of money that the athletes can make.

Chris Williams:

And so track and field just recently, our international governing body just changed its name from the International Amateur Athletics Federation to just World Athletics. And so there is a shift in the professionalism of track and field, but for so long, I think it’s been held back by this idea that athletes shouldn’t be paid because it detracts from the sport and that money should just be going to the organizers. I definitely think that’s changing. And especially as people are looking at the numbers of participants in the sport and the social media and streaming platforms, that opportunity content in the sport comes a lot more valuable. And whereas for a long time, people have thought of sports in terms of TV time, hours, getting a spot on Monday night football.

Chitra Ragavan:

It must be so aggravating and confounding to see athletes in every other walk of life, walk away with these lucrative scholarships and sponsorships and all kinds of things. I mean, athletes are incredibly rich, but to not have a similar level of wealth associated with track and field, I’m sure that you experienced that as an athlete yourself. And then you see it for all these other athletes who are working so hard and training so hard, but they just don’t get that kind of compensation that other athletes do.

Chris Williams:

Definitely. And so part of it’s amateurism, and then another part is just politics in this sport.

Chitra Ragavan:

So looking back at this year and a half and the incredible impact of COVID on sports around the world, what do you think the long-term effects of the pandemic will be on track and field and sports in general? What are the trends that you see emerging, or you believe will emerge?

Chris Williams:

Yeah, so trends that are emerging and we’ve seen that people don’t actually need to be in a stadium for an exciting game to happen. And I think viewership in different events will certainly more digital and people will be more, I think eventually stadiums will be packed once again. And that would take some time. And in the meantime, streaming is a huge platform and an opportunity to distribute media, the games, results, sport shows. So that’s an emerging trend. In terms of personal health and fitness, we’ve seen that explode in COVID. People have found running to be a great way to be outside. It’s safe. You’re not in a gym where there’s a lot of equipment that’s being used by who knows who, and I think that passion and the growth of distance running and personal fitness is going to continue. People are going to continue to value that Peloton you see that they’ve had massive acquisitions and massive growth, Apple watch, fitbit, things like that.

Chitra Ragavan:

Definitely.

Chitra Ragavan:

Well, Chris, thank you so much for joining me today on Techtopia and for the insightful conversation.

Chris Williams:

Thank you so much, Chitra, for having me on it was so much fun talking with you. Appreciate the questions.

Chitra Ragavan:

Chris Williams is the founder and CEO of the Seattle based sports data analytics startup Zelos, we’re just taking track and field data analytics to a whole new level for athletes, coaches, and fans. Williams is a formal pole vaulter and hurdler at the University of Washington. And he frequently writes and speaks about his experience as a former NCAA athlete and a data engineer. This is Techtopia, I’m Chitra Ragavan.