The performance of Shanti Pereira, a Singaporean sprinter, stagnated for about seven years — from June 2015 to May 2022 — before she started lowering her times over the past two years.

Our project aimed to use a mix of video interviews, slow-motion videos, and video animation to analyse how and why she managed to do so.

These videos were then laid out on the page to tell a story of Pereira’s transformation and to showcase the science and art behind sprinting.

A collaborative effort

This project was a collaboration between The Straits Times’s sports desk, digital graphics team, and video team.

The three teams sat down with Shanti Pereira and her coach, Luis Cunha, to analyse the biomechanics behind sprinting and discover how they improved her form and technique and, by extension, her 100-metre and 200-metre timings.

This was then translated on the page through a combination of video interviews of Pereira detailing what she has done to improve, slow-motion videos of her sprinting, and animations to highlight the change in her techniques.

In doing so, we aimed to demonstrate a few things: the precision of the sport, how dedicated an athlete has to be to achieve great results, and the accessibility of biomechanics in sport for the general public.

Diving into the data

Cunha was also very data-driven, which we reflected through the incorporation of various charts in the project — of not just Pereira’s sprint timings over seven years but even her flight time for each foot when she runs. 

Overall, the use of these different visual elements allowed the project to effectively tell a cohesive story of Pereira’s stagnation, growth, and now, achievement.

This piece was published in the week before the 2023 Asian Games. It received 92,000 pageviews from 82,000 users, and the average time spent on the page was close to three minutes.

The pageviews went up after Pereira won the gold medal in the 200 metres at the 2023 Asian Games, showing public interest in her story and the biomechanics behind the sport. 

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