The 2026 Winter Olympics will be a showcase for sensor technology, including lightweight sensors attached to ski jumpers and their skis to measure speed, acceleration and positioning in their high jumps.
More down-to-ice, the curling event at 2026 Milan-Cortina Games will even include sensors embedded into the playing ice to detect infractions. The stones used in curling also have heat sensors inside: if a player holds the handle too long, the stone flashes red, while a green light signals a proper release.
Ski jumping sensors
Swiss teams unveiled a new wireless sensor system to provide instant feedback on jumps, as described in on the ETH Zurich Youtube channel.
As with seemingly everything in tech today, the system being tested by Swiss ski jumping coaches relies on AI to give instant feedback. The approach uses three sensors on a jumping skier to assess a jumper’s position during their 10-15 second time aloft. Their focus will be on keeping athletes airborne longer. The tests developed by ETH Zurick are being conducted with the Swiss Junior Ski Team and were unveiled in time with the Olympics.
Project Leader Christoph Leitner said critical information will be gathered during 300 milliseconds when a skier arrives at the jumping table. “Getting a shot and details into the center of mass…will definitely bring more information not only for us engineers, but also for coaches and eventually the athlete,” he said. “We want to accelerate the learning speed in ski jumping.”
The sensors are positioned on the skier’s boots, googles and legs and measure take-off force and center of gravity while in flight. Machine learning is used to give immediate feedback to the athlete through a vibration motor in their boot. Improving take-off efficiency is considered a central factor in winning.
Leitner said the sensors need to be so tiny that the athlete doesn’t feel them, while the total compute system needs “huge processing power to cope with all the heterogeneous sensors and frequencies of data that comes along.”
The research could be expanded to many other alpine sports, even summer sports—running, swimming included, he added. “For the future I see a hyper-connected athlete, an athlete that has basically sensors everywhere, tiny nodes that are super-efficient and capture the complexity of movement.”
Alain Zobrist, CEO of Swiss Timing, a sister company of Omega, told IEEE Spectrum that lightweight sensors will also be attached to ski jumper’s skis at Milan-Cortina. They will broadcast data on a skier’s speed, acceleration and position in the air. That data is correlated with wind conditions to track the wind’s impact.
In addition, high-speed cameras will track each ski jumper, part of a system to reveal how athletes position their bodies during every moment of a takeoff. Over-rotation and under-rotation are more readily exposed with the tech.
Snow sense
The Winter Games depend heavily on weather and the right amount of snow. As Weather.com noted, sensors are used to constantly track snow depth across the slopes: If coverage drops, snow guns switch on to make snow. If there’s too much snow, they shut off.
Omega's big sensor tech
Omega is debuting advanced computer vision motion sensors to enhance snowboarding and freestyle skiing big air competitions. They will track in-run speed, airtime, height above ground and number of rotations in hopes of providing a better view of scoring.
For figure skating, Omeda is introducing the ability to analyze an athlete’s skeletal movement throughout a routine.
Technology will measure the height of skating jumps, speed and rotation counts and then generate heat maps to show movement patterns on the ice. New high-speed cameras will also advance the photo finish for events like bobsled, where there will be a virtual photo finish to show the difference in time and location of the sleds, all in a single picture. Omega’s cameras will capture up to 40,000 frames per second.
Sensor tech from earlier Winter Olympics
For high-speed alpine skiers, airbag vests contain sensors that detect when a skier is losing control, then inflate in milliseconds before a crash. Such tech was introduced as far back as 2018.
Also in 2018, a sensor-filled suit designed by Samsung was used by two Dutch short track speed skater to shave milliseconds off their time. Their training suite had five integrated sensors that transmitted data to a coach’s smartphone. The tailor-make suits knew the upper and lower leg lengths of the athletes, which indicated the distance from their hips to the ice and whether they were bending enough on turns and straightaways. If they didn’t bend enough, the coach triggered a vibration on their wrists that signaled them to get lower to the ice.