The Winter Olympics is less than a month away now, and Olympic Games always bring a big show with them.
This year, lots of the focus won’t just be on the sport, however. Some of the most interesting parts of the Games will be on the tech.

As this is Discovery’s first Olympic Games as official broadcaster – though the coverage will also be live on the BBC in the UK, too – there will be lots of interest around how the sports are broadcast and what we can expect in terms of innovation.

And then there’s the teams themselves.

As technology advances, so too does sport. It’s only natural that the more we gain knowledge of biology, the more strength and conditioning advances and the better sporting performance gets. And so the same will obviously be the case for technology, too, as the latest improvements will find their way into the training regimes of athletes and teams.

This week, it has emerged that Samsung has given two Dutch speed skaters access to their Samsung SmartSuit in order to help them win Olympic gold.

In the SmartSuit, the Samsung video says, there are five sensors which can measure body position and measure the position of, say, the thighs relative to the feet or the torso. The result is, theoretically, a better understanding of the optimal posture needed for a speed skater to produce the most power on the track, and therefore the most speed.

The skaters’ data is sent to an app controlled by the coach, who can analyse it in real time, as well as send a signal to the athlete to adjust their posture, which the skater feels as a buzz on their wrist.

The Olympic Games is always a time for innovation on some level, whether that’s broadcasters, brands on social media or the teams and athletes themselves.

It will be interesting to see if the two Dutch speed skaters, Sjinkie Knegt and Suzanne Schulting, find that this new piece of gear helps them to boost their times. And if it does, it’s possible we’ll see this sort of technology used in training for different sports which place just as much emphasis on technique.