Sprinter first.
Engineer second.
Same problem, both times.
ODKI isn't a team, or a company with a floor of desks — it's one person building in the open. Here's the background, for anyone who'd rather know who they're trusting than take "open" on faith.
- Name
- Lodovico Cortelazzo
- Sport career
- Italian national athletics team, 200m sprint — national & European level, 2015–2019
- Education
- Sports Science and Engineering — deliberately both, not one then the other
- Currently
- Rapid‑prototype engineer in sport‑tech — sensors, embedded systems, computer vision
- Writes at
- lodocortelazzo.com ↗ — sport, engineering, and projects where they collide
- ODKI, legally
- A sole proprietorship — Lodovico Cortelazzo trading as ODKI. No separate company exists yet; that's stated plainly in the project's own licenses, and this page gets updated the day it changes.
Two backgrounds that don't usually share a room. Years on a track taught what the body actually signals near its limit, and where a lot of conventional coaching wisdom quietly stops holding up. Engineering is what turns that into something you can measure instead of argue about.
ODKI‑VBT came out of that overlap directly — wanting an honest bar‑speed number to train and coach with, instead of another closed gadget asking to be trusted on faith.
"Sport is full of practices that were never properly questioned."
That's the same instinct pointed at hardware: don't ship a black box just because that's how it's usually done.
First principles over received wisdom
Question the default — in training and in code — rather than inherit it.
A prototype beats a slide deck
Build the thing, put it in front of real athletes, see what actually breaks.
Cross‑domain thinking
The interesting fixes tend to live at the boundary between two fields that don't usually talk to each other.