 Okay, we're back here live in Silicon Valley, the heart of Silicon Valley. We're at the San Jose Convention Center. I'm John Furrier, and we're here at the very special segment here at Hadoop Summit. You know, we bring theCUBE, our flagship program that extracts a signal from the noise. We call it the ESPN of tech and highlighting the athletes, the tech athletes, the CEOs, the entrepreneurs, the ones that are making the industry grow and happen, creating wealth and solutions, and obviously we consider those guys athletes and stars in our world. But it's rare that we actually get real athletes on theCUBE, and that's what we're going to talk about here today, athletes and their mission and how that's all blending together and what that relates to to tech. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined by my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante, a wannabe professional athlete. And we're here with Skye Kristofferson, who is a real athlete and an entrepreneur. Skye, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It was a real pleasure to have you. Thanks for having me, guys, appreciate it. So tell us a little bit about yourself and your athletic accomplishments. Why was the cyclist in the late 90s and the early 2000s? This is velodrome cycling. So it's an indoor track, you know, it's banked. It's the fastest flatland sport in the Olympics and did this until 2000 and then retired. So you were serious adrenaline junkie then, is that right? That's right, yeah, yeah. What's it like going around the banked track? I mean, how fast are you guys going in velodrome? Close to 45 miles an hour. So it is a crazy sensation, you know, you're on this, you have two Gs, two times the level of gravity pushing you and whipping you around these turns. So it's kind of like a wooden roller coaster. How did you get into velodrome cycling? Well, I grew up in Tucson, Arizona and I came up on the road, road racing, and, excuse me, I was always good at the short distance crits and I made the junior Olympic team, went to St. Louis and met these guys from LA and they said, you can do just the one minute sprint without having to ride the other 90 miles. Come try out the track. You'd be really good at that, isn't it? I did that and it was a dream because it was fast and short and it was much more suited for that being 200 pounds. So what are you most proud of in terms of your accomplishments on the velodrome cycling circle? Well, so more recently, I tried to make a comeback for London in 2012 and when I was preparing for that a couple years ago, I used this digital health program led by Dr. Eric Topol down in San Diego who was an advisor through the project and I actually broke a world record during that run and the previous holder of that record got a lifetime ban for performance enhancing drugs. So that I think was the most proud achievement of anything that I've done. So you beat the guy that was doping and obviously you weren't doping. So okay, so that sent the light bulb off in your head and I mean, give us your commentary on this doping in the industry. I mean, we're all just disappointed with the whole situation, but what's your take on the whole thing? Right, well doping has been a huge problem in sports. We're seeing the depth of it now in cycling and a lot of other sports and baseball. Yeah, so we are looking for ways now to move forward you know, with reforming without drugs but still getting the breakthrough performances because that's human nature. We love pushing the envelope. Crowds want to see amazing things happen. So how do you keep that going without you know, depending on the substances that are very effective short-term but what we're seeing long-term is that they're not and we think there's natural alternatives using big data to optimize, you know, lifestyle factors, they call it the summation of marginal gains in British cycling and it's, you know, how do you find all of these these fine-tuned, you know, optimizers and so I think there are possibilities there for a natural way. Skye, I got to talk to you about the trend obviously that we were just talking about with our previous guests, OmniChannels and the social media world has changed the dynamic around, you know, direct to the consumer. Twitter, you're seeing athletes commenting on when the NBA finals was won. Athletes, congratulations to these guys and, you know, James and everything and the playoffs but now there's a whole, opens up a whole other dimension and recently we were in Vegas with HP, HP Discover and Kevin Bacon was up on stage talking about big data and, you know, the whole six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon became this viral sensation and he ended up parlaying that into a really good social cause. So I want to ask you, as you transformed from a world class athlete, your opportunities could have been in the old world limited to using that celebrityism to get, you know, maybe a job somewhere but now with big data you have a direct platform. How has that changed you personally as an entrepreneur and what have you done with that? Well, the project last summer was, it was quite reactionary. You know, we had this situation where the women's cycling team was five seconds away from even being considered in the medals and we had three months to try to make up that time. So the program that Dr. Topol had led and we formulated, I had a dead end because the US didn't send a men's team. So I turned to my teammate and said, you know, let's apply this to try to help you guys and each problem that came up would come up quickly. You know, the data we got overwhelmed with and we had to find a solution, data mirrors. You had me here today talking about some of these tools using Hadoop as a technology and, you know, we just, we quickly solved them as they came. So I think moving forward, what we want to do is build a much better platform for this and everything's evolving very quickly and the key is just getting all of this stuff, you know, in a much more efficient way to manage, you know, as we bring this to larger and larger groups. So how did that data and the way in which you process and analyze it affect the outcome? Can you explain that in a little bit more detail? Yeah, so the, you know, in Olympic training, the goal is really to clamp down as many variables as you can, you know, in lifestyle and the routine. So you need to know which decisions or which things to recommend and you can do different things to control the environment. I gave the example of circadian rhythms. Another example would be the temperature that you sleep every night and so when you look at individuals' data and you see when are they getting more deep sleep because that's when human growth hormones released and you recover better. What temperatures producing that? We use water-cooled mattress toppers to actually set the exact temperature for each athlete and some for it was 64 degrees, some it would be 68 degrees and you know, those are examples of, you know, direct, controllable variables. And in a few short months, you were able to shave those, what was it, five seconds of? And meet those goals, those objectives. Yeah. That's awesome. Okay, now, so now you've transitioned into this new career as an entrepreneur. Talk a little bit about that. You're forming a company, you've got this documentary going, you give us some detail there. Right, so as this project unfolded quickly last summer, we were filming some of the behind the scenes, you know, action and that's being made into the documentary Personal Gold, which is due out next year and that'll show kind of the trials and tribulations of, you know, doing an ad hoc, big data experiment like this and now the goal where we've started a company called Optimized Athlete and my wife and I also had a company called Vikasso up in Seattle. It runs on a platform, so we're looking now just for the right partners, you know, to really develop a platform to make this a lot more manageable in the future. You know. I really congratulations that I think, you know, one of the things Dave and I are most proud of when we do theCUBE here is really looking at how the new technology is enabling people to have more opportunities and certainly with social media, people are connecting and sharing. But while we have you here, obviously, cycling has turned into, in Silicon Valley, we call it the new golf, right? So, you know, people are cycling. I've heard about that actually, yeah. And meetings and things. Yeah, I mean, it has really become a really cool galvanizing way and you guys were on a run this morning I heard here at the conference. So cycling is cool. So what's your advice to the folks out there, the cycling fans out there, the weekend dads like me who have four kids who are just trying to get on a bike, to guys who are actually in groups and it's not only a physical endurance and exercise, but it's also fun and collaborative. So what's your advice to the cycling fans out there? Well, we, it's interesting, you noted the health element. There's a guy in our documentary, a co-founder of Seagate Computers, Bob Beninger. He's 76 years old and he's a spin instructor. He is, you know, advocating cycling because it's low impact. It's so good cardiovascularly. And I would say, get some of these devices. You walk in the Apple store, you can get a Bluetooth heart rate monitor, you know, you can get a sleep tracker and you can use these same tools that we did for the Olympic project, you know, to track your progress, even if it's getting out once a week or twice a week on the weekends. And cycling is just an awesome sport to stay fed and low impact and yeah. Any technical advice? Taking the corner, I was at the Skyline Boulevard and where I live is dangerous. You know, there's, you know, it's dangerous. I mean, it's not something that's easy. Any advice to the folks out there to keep it going? Right, that is, well, my advice would be, find your nearest velodrome. There are no cars. It's a very safe, controlled environment as we've been talking about and give it a shot on the track. It's guy, thanks for coming on theCUBE. True athlete, very inspirational story. Thanks for coming to Hadoop Summit and props to Datamere for highlighting this because I think this is one of those societal benefits where it's not so much the big flashy business solution, but it really is adding value to people's lives and personal victories involved as you're documenting. More importantly, you're changing lives and that collaborative aspect of technology is really key and that speaks volumes to the community here and in the open source community. This is the new normal. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest to the short break. I'm John Furrier of SiliconANGLE. John with Dave Vellante, we'll be right back.