The Winter Olympics allows athletes to demonstrate their skills but many forget the role of science in athletic performance.

Brian Holmes, an emeritus San Jose State physics and astronomy professor, said sports involve many different disciplines of science including physics, kinesiology, psychology and nutrition.

“Physics is one way of understanding the [movements] you do with your body and there are some athletes who are totally aware of that,” he said in a phone call. “And there are trainers who will measure forces and will offer people advice based on their knowledge of physics.” 

Gunnar Cederberg, assistant Olympic sports performance coach and applied sports scientist at Stanford University, works with athletes and ensures they receive proper training to enhance their athletic skills.

“Our main goal is we try to take whatever specific scientific methods [are] being implemented across any [sport] and we try to implement those methods into our training aspects to then help our athletes succeed,” Cederberg said.

One way trainers do this is through data collection and implementation through assessment tests or other information collected from athletes during training, he said.

Cederberg, who works primarily with Stanford’s Olympic baseball and water polo teams, conducts force plate jump testing to assess leg strength and jump height.

A force plate is a small platform that measures variations in downward force between different points on its surface for stance stability and posture as someone stands, jumps or walks on the platform, according to Medical Dictionary. 

One assessment test for United States figure skaters is Standardized Testing of Athleticism to Recognize Skaters (S.T.A.R.S.).

The method tests young skaters on three categories: balance and coordination, strength and power, and flexibility.

Holmes said ice skaters must generate forward momentum using the force created from the push-off of their skate. 

“If ice skaters are at rest, they need to get the ice to make a force on them, so they make a force on the ice and the ice makes an equal and opposite force on them,” Holmes said.

This describes Newton’s third law of motion: when one object exerts a force on another object, the other object returns an equal and opposite force, according to NASA’s Glenn Research Center webpage. 

Peter Beyersdorf, SJSU physics and astronomy professor, said once a skater generates enough speed, they can transfer linear speed into vertical speed, which allows them to perform tricks.

“They do that by swinging their arms and their legs just before they jump and that causes them to spin,” Beyersdorf said in a Zoom call. “Then as they bring their arms and legs in close to their axis of rotation, the conservation of angular momentum causes their positive rotational velocity to increase. And that’s really the key to being able to do multiple spins while they’re in the air.” 

He said friction, or the lack of, plays a major role in ice skating and the sport of curling. 

“The blades [on ice skates] being very thin causes them to have a large pressure from the force to the weight of the person pushing down on them and that pressure is actually responsible for melting the ice,” Beyersdorf said.

He said curling, which includes a curling stone– a large circular piece of granite – and using brooms to melt ice to change the stone’s trajectory, creates less friction between the ice and the stone.

Cederberg said bobsledding is a push sport, in which athletes must focus a majority of their training on exercising both legs.

“Bobsledding is all about how heavy you can be, how fast you can be and how explosive you can be in terms of force production when pushing off the ground,” Cederberg said. 

Beyersdorf said once the bobsledders are off the ground, gravity and velocity forces are at play.

“The dominant effect that contributes to [bobsledders] speed is the gravitational acceleration . . . which is why they can go on these runs that are a minute and a half, (at) 90 mph,” Beyersdorf said. “What separates them at the end is a hundredth of a second because of the very minute differences in skill of the driver.”

He said viewers should appreciate the “slim margins” of what’s physically possible and what the athletes are doing and understand the scientific limits and where those limits are placed. 

“There’s a limit to how well something can be performed based on physics… and athletes are trying to come as close as possible to that limit,” Beyersdorf said.