Olympic champion Shaun White says AI is ‘leveling the playing field’ for professional athletes

Olympic snowboarder Shaun White said he came from “pretty humble beginnings” without the same advantages as his rivals. The San Diego native didn’t live in the snowy mountains, and it was expensive to afford lift tickets, lodging, and food for a family of five growing up. “You’re seeing athletes there with full-time coaches,” White told Fortune’s Andrew Nusca at Brainstorm Tech in Aspen this week. “I didn’t have that kind of access.” But the emergence of new technologies, especially AI, has helped make it easier for athletes to have similar access to important resources to improve performance, even if some don’t have a full-time coaching team. “It is leveling the playing field in a way,” White said. “This is really going to be accessible for everyone…It’ll give a lot of information to athletes that wouldn’t have had this type of access before, and that’s really the hope.” AI has already made it into the world of sports analytics. MLB debuted its Automatic Ball-Strike (ABS) system that allows players to challenge and overturn an umpire’s call at home plate. Similar automated line and boundary calls and Semi-Automated Offside Technology (SAOT) have been implemented in tennis and soccer, respectively. For athletes, AI can pair with wearable biosensors to record movements and suggest improvements to form. The International Olympics Committee has outlined an AI agenda with the intention of integrating the technology into judging. During the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, ski jumpers used high-speed video and motion analysis to dissect their takeoff timing, aerodynamics, and in-run speed. While snowboarders, skiers, and skaters of older generations previously enlisted friends or parents to take videos of their runs, AI can now provide nearly real-time feedback with specific metrics to improve performance, according to Granville Valentine, vice president of growth and demand for Google Cloud, who also spoke at Brainstorm Tech. He said Go