International Skating Union President weighs in on integrating AI, US as a key market and vision for the organisation
July 19, 2024
Recently, during the 59th ISU Congress of the International Skating Union (ISU) iSportConnect’s Taruka Srivastav spoke with ISU President Jae Youl Kim to find out about events formats, branding and promotion, broadcast presentations, fan engagement as well as athletes’ safeguarding and sustainability.
What is your decision to pay athletes who win medals at future Olympic Games, and also, if you are considering paying price breaks to skaters who win medals at Milan?
I’m aware of the policy that was announced, and I am also aware the statement of the IOC. IOC made a clear distinction between the role of NOC and role international federation towards the athletes that are participating in the Games. In the Olympic Games, athletes compete for their countries. They are competing with their flags, and NOCs are the responsible party for those athletes. And it is common that NOCs make remuneration and the price of giving the price money to the high-performance athletes, and I believe that’s the way to do it, because, again, fully support the IOC position on it, because there’s a clear difference involved between the two organization. However, I really appreciate all the athletes who give hours and hours and sacrifice so many things in their lives to compete at the top level of our competition, and we would love to be able to generate more revenue so we could reward our deserving scales better through increased price money in our competition. And that’s one of the goals of the vision.
How do you plan to integrate AI in skating?
AI is a very interesting topic. Many people are talking about embracing cutting edge technologies, including AI and the computer vision to assist judging especially for figure skating. And we are looking at it. There’s a huge potential with AI and we’ve been talking to multiple tech companies, how we can work with them to bring the technology to assist our judges to be more accurate, quicker and more agile. It is a long-term project and that technology is ready at the moment, at the recent price, but we will continue to work on it. What we want to emphasize it is that we are looking at AI and the future, overlooking technologies, but we are also taking advantage of existing technology that’s readily available. So this season, we are launching the new video referee system with the upgrade camera, upgrade hardware and upgraded software, which will provide our judges officials much clearer future, much better, much user-friendly solution and much quicker data to transfer rate.
Is the US market, one that you’re going to be emphasizing over the coming decade. And also, if you could give us a little more information on the Short Track World Tour, and some developments within that?
We believe the Short Track has such potential to develop it further beyond what it is now. It is indeed a very exciting race. We have six World Cups, but we believe there’s a much stronger story to tell by really binding those six World Cups into a global tour. Starting with six, some of the members are already requesting that we expand that further in the future, looking at other formats, maybe a nation’s cup style event. So creating the Short Track World Tour provides us the opportunity to create that solid base and then expand from it. We’ve also had some new cities reach out to us, already requesting us to come and make the tour stop in their city. This is how we go from creating independent World Cup races to a consolidated World Tour.
So we’re very excited about the opportunities that that can bring, and again, getting traction and revenues back into short track to support the skaters. Regarding the US, it is one of the key market for ISU in terms of producing, but also hosting. So we are very happy to collaborate with the US. I’m pretty excited about the World Championships because I was there in 2016 and basically, I’m sure we have greater atmosphere this coming championship. And we are very grateful that US is keen on hosting between 34 Olympics.