October 12^th, 2019 was a red letter day for every athletics fan. That day, for the first time in history a human completed the marathon in under two hours! Eliud Kipchoge the current world record holder did the unbelievable and shaved off a good 2 minutes from his best time. It wasn’t just a triumph of human doughtiness and perseverance. The run was also emblematic of technology and analytics aiding humans in pushing the envelope. Specially made shoes and pacing lasers ensured energy efficiency. The chosen route and formation of pacemakers minimized wind resistance. The location was picked because of its closeness to Kipchoge’s time zone… a number of sagacious data driven decisions contributed to the feat.

As the year entered its final quarter, I was revisiting some predictions pundits had made for 2019. It’s an interesting exercise I go through every year. Estimating soothsayer accuracy is not the objective. Some predictions will be right, a few wrong and in majority of the cases it will be difficult to say – either the data isn’t there or it’s too early for any decipherable trend. Regardless of their chances of coming true, the ideas are inspiring and make a good segue to predictions for the coming year.