In today's email:

🥈 Paralympian credits ChatGPT for helping him win a silver medal at the 2026 Winter Games

📱 MyFitnessPal acquires Cal AI as fitness app consolidation accelerates

🤖 Kelsey Plum becomes the first professional female athlete to launch a verified AI digital twin

🏥 Microsoft and Amazon launch competing AI-powered personal health assistants

🚴 Cycling's top teams are pouring money into AI as the data arms race heats up in the peloton

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AI in Sports and Fitness

Cycling's AI Arms Race Heats Up. Visma–Lease a Bike announced a new partnership with French AI firm Mistral AI to enhance performance and decision-making. The team already operates a real-time race data center tracking speed, weather, and race dynamics, and the Mistral deal aims to squeeze even more competitive advantage from that infrastructure.

Paralympian Credits ChatGPT for Silver Medal. Ukrainian biathlete Maksym Murashkovskyi says ChatGPT shaped roughly half of his training plan in the six months leading up to his silver medal at the 2026 Winter Games, using it as a coach, psychologist, and tactical advisor.

MyFitnessPal Acquires Cal AI. MyFitnessPal acquired Cal AI, a photo-based nutrition tracking app that generated more than $40 million in sales last year, adding AI-powered food recognition and body composition analysis to its platform. The deal reflects accelerating consolidation in the fitness app space, following similar moves by Strava, TrainingPeaks, and others.

Oura Acquires Gesture-Recognition Startup. Oura acquired Doublepoint, a Helsinki-based AI gesture-recognition company, as the smart ring maker accelerates toward a reported IPO at an $11 billion valuation. The deal enables the ring to act as an input device, not just a health sensor, adding a new dimension to Oura's growing platform.

Whoop Upgrades Its Strength Trainer AI. Whoop overhauled its Strength Trainer, allowing users to build complete workout routines from a text prompt or photo of any training plan. The AI now factors in recent lifting history and recovery score, dynamically scaling down high-volume sessions when the body isn't ready.

Eight Sleep Hits $1.5B Valuation. Eight Sleep reached a $1.5 billion valuation following a new Tether-led investment round, with plans to expand into predictive AI health technology. After hitting positive free cash flow in 2025 and expanding its Pod platform to 34 countries, the company will use the funding for AI research, FDA approvals, and clinical trials.

Kelsey Plum Launches AI Digital Twin. WNBA star Kelsey Plum became the first professional female athlete to launch a verified AI digital twin, allowing fans to have real-time voice conversations with a digital version of herself. Built with AI communications company Talk2Me, it's a model sports business professionals are watching closely as a new category of athlete-fan engagement.

Microsoft Launches Copilot Health. Microsoft launched Copilot Health, pulling data from more than 50 wearables — including Oura, Apple Watch, and Fitbit — alongside medical records from 50,000+ providers into a single AI-powered health picture. The tool competes directly with similar offerings now launching from Amazon and OpenAI.

Amazon Expands Health AI to All Users. Amazon expanded its Health AI assistant beyond its One Medical app, making it available to any user regardless of Prime membership. The tool answers health questions, explains lab results, manages prescription renewals, and connects users with providers.

U.S. Soccer Renews AI Content Deal. U.S. Soccer renewed its multi-year deal with Veritone to license and monetize its full archive of national team footage using AI-powered search, tagging, and digital asset management. The partnership also helps identify and monetize unauthorized uses of its content across social media.

🧰 Tools and Tips

• Create fully editable designs by chatting with AI with Kodo.

• Rename PDFs, Photos & Documents Instantly with AI with Renamer.ai.

• Freepik is a comprehensive, AI-powered creative platform and stock content provider that serves as a one-stop shop for digital design assets.

• Andreessen Horowitz released the 6th edition of the Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps with insights.

Claude can now generate custom diagrams, charts, and interactive visuals directly in your conversation.

In this example, I used the prompt: Create a visual of the Boston marathon to help me understand what it looks like and how to best prepare to run this race based on the course.

It not only showed me a chart with elevations, it broke out sections of the course I could click on that explained what to expect, tips and how to train. In the below result I clicked on the Newton Hills section of the race that includes the infamous Heartbreak Hill.

Beyond Sports: AI News Bytes

A federal judge issued a temporary order blocking Perplexity's Comet browser from accessing Amazon's website after the e-commerce giant argued the AI shopping agent scraped its platform and posed risks to customer data without authorization.

OpenAI's flagship chatbot may be free to use, but running it costs the company roughly $17 billion a year in compute and energy expenses, a gap that's now pushing the company to introduce ads for free and low-tier users.

Anthropic's Claude climbed to the number one spot in the U.S. App Store, surpassing ChatGPT following public backlash over OpenAI's decision to work with the Department of Defense on classified AI deployments.

Perplexity launched Perplexity Computer, a $200/month agentic platform that bundles multiple AI models — including Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT — into a single workflow system capable of handling research, document creation, and data processing simultaneously.

Google rolled out Ask Maps, a new Gemini-powered conversational feature in Google Maps that allows users to ask follow-up questions, get personalized recommendations, and receive contextual tips about destinations — going well beyond standard voice navigation.

Meta unveiled four custom in-house AI chips under its MTIA family, designed to handle everything from content ranking to generative AI tasks as the company races to reduce its dependence on Nvidia and AMD processors across its growing data center network.

Claude can now communicate across Excel and PowerPoint, saving you from needing to keep switching tabs or re-explaining datasets at every step.

AI Jobs in Sports and Fitness

• Asics - AI Products and Business Engagement Manager
  Deckers Brands - Gen AI/AI Incubation Lab, Lead

• Nike - Generative AI Design Expert

• PlayOn Sports - AI Customer Experience Manager

• Trinity Health - AI Product Manager

• Whoop - Head of Applied AI

• Whoop - Software Engineering Manager (AI)

• Whoop - VP, Product (AI)

• Fastbreak AI - Optimization Performance Specialist

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