Inside Team USA's Olympic Data Collaboration | Snowflake

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At the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, USA Bobsled/Skeleton used Snowflake CoWork to determine the optimal number of push-start steps before an athlete loads into the sled. One extra step creates a braking force that compounds the entire run — and data analysis helped the team eliminate that guesswork. Elana Meyers Taylor, five-time Olympian and the most decorated U.S. bobsledder in history, credits data analysis for shifting her curve strategy: the data identified key curves that differed from what visual inspection suggested. She adjusted, and won her first Olympic gold at age 41 by 4/100ths of a second across nearly four miles of ice. Written by Snowflake CEO Denise Persson and timed to Snowflake Summit 26 in San Francisco, this is explicitly marketing content for Snowflake CoWork. 'AI' is referenced generically alongside data, with no technical specifics. No independent validation of performance attribution is provided. For AI practitioners, this offers limited technical signal — it is a sports analytics data engineering story, not a model or algorithm breakthrough. Its value is as a real-world example of data collaboration applied at elite sporting margins.