Watching the Winter Olympics through an athletes' eyes

With the Winter Olympics in full swing, viewers have had the chance to marvel at the artistic beauty of ice dance, watch in awe at the speed and control of luge and skeleton athletes, and cheer on the precision and accuracy on display in curling. The range of sports on show is broad and, for many, far less familiar than those typically seen at the Summer Games.

Beyond the obvious physical and technical demands, each of these sports places very specific demands on the athlete's visual system. And at the highest level of performance, how effectively an athlete uses their vision can be the difference between delivering under pressure and falling short at a critical moment.

Training the eyes of an Olympian

As someone who has worked with Winter Olympians from a range of disciplines, these visual demands differ markedly between sports — and they can be trained. Much like strength, speed, or endurance, the visual system has the capacity to adapt and become more efficient with targeted practice. Athletes at the elite level are constantly looking for marginal gains, and vision training is an area where meaningful improvements can still be achieved.

The physical demands of these sports are well understood and extensively documented. The visual demands are far less obvious. This is where eye tracking technology can provide valuable insight into how athletes use their vision during performance.

Visual demands are far less obvious. This is where eye tracking technology can provide valuable insight into how athletes use their vision during performance.

Eye tracking in elite sport

Wearable eye trackers like Tobii Pro Glasses 3 give athletes the unique ability to understand their visual strategies directly within the flow of their sport, capturing how they read the environment, react under pressure, and make moment-to-moment decisions in real-world conditions. Meanwhile, screen-based systems such as Tobii Pro Spectrum complement this by offering a controlled space to hone specific visual skills. With a wide range of test paradigms and targeted training mechanisms, athletes can refine essential capabilities like focus, gaze stability, and precision decision-making.

Together, these tools create a powerful ecosystem for understanding and developing the visual performance of elite athletes — from the slopes of the alpine circuit to the ice of the speed skating oval. For Winter Olympians, this kind of insight could be the edge that makes all the difference when it matters most.

Peripheral vision and situational awareness

Many winter sports require athletes to maintain effective peripheral awareness while executing highly technical movements at speed. Peripheral vision is particularly important in sports such as biathlon, cross-country skiing, and ice hockey, where multiple events may be occurring simultaneously. Eye tracking data allows coaches and sports scientists to assess whether athletes are correctly distributing their attention and to design training protocols that reinforce these visual habits under competitive conditions.