The athlete generates the data and everyone else owns it

Sleep, heart rate and load figures follow an athlete through selection and contract talks, and she usually cannot take them with her.

An athlete straps on a device, trains, sleeps, and produces a stream of numbers about her own body. Those numbers sit on a platform bought by a federation or a franchise. When she leaves, they stay. That arrangement is now normal and I do not think it should be.

Start with the practical harm. Longitudinal data is the only kind worth having. A single season of load and recovery figures tells you almost nothing, while five years of the same athlete tells a physiotherapist exactly what her body does before it breaks. If she changes programmes and the history does not follow, the new staff start from zero and she absorbs the risk of them relearning her in real time. That is a genuine injury cost, not an administrative inconvenience.

Then the bargaining question. Recovery and load data can be read as evidence of durability, and durability is priced into contracts and selection. An organisation holding a complete record of an athlete's worst months, which she cannot access, cannot correct and cannot present in her own framing, is holding something useful in a negotiation. Nobody has to behave badly for that to be an unfair setup.

The standard defence is that the organisation paid for the devices, the platform and the staff to interpret it all, so the output belongs to the organisation. There is something to that. Analysis is work and work is owned by whoever paid for it.

But the raw stream is not analysis. It is a recording of a heart beating, which is a fairly personal object, and the sensible line runs there. Give the athlete a portable copy of her own raw data as a condition of every contract. Let the organisation keep its models and its reports. Nobody loses anything they actually built.

The reason this has not happened is not philosophical. It is that no athlete wants to be the first to make it a sticking point during a contract discussion, and no governing body is going to volunteer to give something up.

So it will take a union, or a bad enough case to become a story. Probably both.