New digital environment to make it easier for young athletes to manage their time and training

The DC4Biathletes project will create a digital environment to serve young athletes and clubs in a way never before seen in the world of skiing. In the pilot phase, the app is aimed at biathletes, but the intention is to later expand the range of sports so that any young athlete can use it to bring all their important schedules and things together in one place. The aim is to make the everyday lives of athletes easier so that they can fully focus on their sporting performance. 

The needs of young athletes as the basis for development

The idea for the project probably came from the International Ski and Snowboard Federation (FIS), which had contacts at the Institute of Sport in Warsaw. FIS wanted to make it easier for young people interested in biathlon to pursue a career in the sport. The technical implementer chosen for the project is the Finnish digital agency Re:vise Hub, whose founder Jouni Oksanen was involved in the redesign of the digital platforms used by the International Biathlon Union. The DC4Biathletes project is already well underway. 

-    The project is currently at the stage of defining in more detail the problem that the digital tool under development will solve, Oksanen says. 

To aid in this definition, the project has carried out interviews with young biathletes and collected their insights and views. The interviews are being conducted by the University of Ljubljana. Young people are already very much part of the digital world, but the essential question in the development of the app is what kind of tool would most effectively help young athletes to manage the puzzle of their daily lives and schedules.  

-    While collecting data from young people, we have already started building the first phase of the app. In digital development, the way we work is to create initial prototypes and then evaluate, test and iterate on them. Creating a digital environment is an ongoing process.

Managing an athlete's entire everyday life with one app

The app must be able to facilitate the cooperation and interaction that young athletes engage in with their various stakeholders – school, teachers, parents, coaches, mentors, etc. 

-    The environment that we are building can also be used to create different learning platforms, for example for learning the rules of biathlon.

The app also includes a training diary, through which coaches can monitor training progress. The app must also allow users to restrict access to this type of content to certain people, as athletes may not want to share their own training with everyone. 

It is also important for the app to provide solutions to various travel-related problems; after all, young athletes travel a lot to training camps and competitions. Furthermore, young people have a strong need for community, and the app should cater to this too; regardless of language barriers. 

-    Young athletes from different countries do not necessarily speak the same language – even if English is widely spoken, not everyone speaks it.

Gamification helps motivate young people

The topic of gamification has also come up frequently in the interviews carried out with young people.

-    For example, you get a diamond when you've completed ten exercises, and then you can compete with other users for the number of diamonds.

Young people also prefer to use Instagram and TikTok rather than dedicated sports apps. This will be taken into account in the development of the app so that young athletes will be inspired to use it in due course. Another thing that needs to be taken into consideration is that the new environment will most likely be used primarily on mobile devices. 

-    It will be fully ready by the end of 2027. The digital platform will go live at the end of 2026, at which point we will see in practice what works and what doesn't.

In this project, the application is tailored to the needs of biathletes, but the aim is to expand it in the future so that it can be applied to any sport. 

For those planning an Erasmus+ project related to digitalisation, Oksanen has at least one piece of practical advice.

-    The project plan should be drawn up with great care and include plenty of details about your project.

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