![](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/GettyImages-2260567170-e1781186315951.jpg?w=2048\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Olympic snowboarder Shaun White said he came from \u201cpretty humble beginnings\u201d without the same advantages as his rivals. The San Diego native didn\u2019t live in the snowy mountains, and it was expensive to afford lift tickets, lodging, and food for a family of five growing up.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re seeing athletes there with full-time coaches,\u201d White told Fortune<\/em>\u2019s Andrew Nusca at Brainstorm Tech in Aspen this week. \u201cI didn\u2019t have that kind of access.\u201d<\/p>\n But the emergence of new technologies, especially AI, has helped make it easier for athletes to have similar access to important resources to improve performance, even if some don\u2019t have a full-time coaching team.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt is leveling the playing field in a way,\u201d White said. \u201cThis is really going to be accessible for everyone\u2026It\u2019ll give a lot of information to athletes that wouldn\u2019t have had this type of access before, and that\u2019s really the hope.\u201d<\/p>\n AI has already made it into the world of sports analytics. MLB debuted its Automatic Ball-Strike (ABS) system that allows players to challenge and overturn an umpire\u2019s call at home plate. Similar automated line and boundary calls and Semi-Automated Offside Technology (SAOT) have been implemented in tennis and soccer, respectively. For athletes, AI can pair with wearable biosensors to record movements and suggest improvements to form.<\/p>\n The International Olympics Committee has outlined an AI agenda with the intention of integrating the technology into judging. During the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, ski jumpers used high-speed video and motion analysis to dissect their takeoff timing, aerodynamics, and in-run speed.\u00a0<\/p>\n While snowboarders, skiers, and skaters of older generations previously enlisted friends or parents to take videos of their runs, AI can now provide nearly real-time feedback with specific metrics to improve performance, according to Granville Valentine, managing director of AI Sales and GTM for Google Cloud in North America, who also spoke at Brainstorm Tech. He said Google\u2019s Gemini can generate world models down to the hundredth of a millimeter and can identify where an athlete\u2019s skeletal structure is, as well as their center of gravity.<\/p>\n \u201cNot only can we collect tremendous amounts of data\u2014all that velocity, speed, rotation, all that useful data for our athletes\u2014but [we\u2019re] making sense of it, collating it, and giving it back as really easy human-level coach ups in between runs in real time,\u201d Valentine said.<\/p>\n White has seen the technology rapidly change over the course of his own career, and it\u2019s helped inform how he sees AI being used for the next generation of athletes. When the 39-year-old began his snowboarding career, the halfpipe in the facilities he used were hand-dug with shovels. Now a large pipe-cutter essentially carves a wall of ice for athletes to use, allowing halfpipes to be larger.<\/p>\n The Olympian has adopted a similar philosophy for how AI can bolster not just performance, but potentially the longevity of one\u2019s career by preventing injuries. While White was coming of age, young athletes attempting a new trick would hope for the best. Today, AI can provide key projections on how a trick could strain someone\u2019s body.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were basically rock, paper, scissors, who was going to go first for a big trick?\u201d White said. \u201cThis is a potentially\u2014hopefully not career ending\u2014but maybe season-ending trick you\u2019re about to go for. You didn\u2019t really have any information, you just kind of like, saw something that inspired you, you got with your friends, you\u2019re just gonna go try it.\u201d<\/p>\n To be sure, White said, the risk, spontaneity, and human skill are still what makes sports unique. He argued AI had the power to democratize athlete\u2019s access to data on their performance, and can be used by judges to more objectively assess the technical prowess of a competitive run. But at the end of the day, it\u2019s all still about the love of the game.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re not trying to replace the human experience,\u201d he said. \u201cWe don\u2019t obviously want to create this sort of analysis paralysis situation where you\u2019re so bogged down in the details that you don\u2019t actually get out there and do the sport.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Olympic #champion #Shaun #White #leveling #playing #field #generation #athletes<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Olympic snowboarder Shaun White said he came from \u201cpretty humble beginnings\u201d without the same advantages as his rivals. The San Diego native didn\u2019t live in the snowy mountains, and it… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7065,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5139,328,3849,8366,1791,2165,744,9430,8072,8099,2404,9429,2100,1337,929],"class_list":["post-7064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-athletes","tag-automation","tag-brainstorm-tech","tag-champion","tag-field","tag-generation","tag-google","tag-leveling","tag-olympic","tag-olympics","tag-playing","tag-shaun","tag-sports","tag-white","tag-winter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7064"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7064\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Where Shaun White sees the future and limits of AI in sports<\/h2>\n