What principles of physics and engineering are utilized by athletes to perform their Olympic feats?

The Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics have come to an end, and the athletes who competed in the games have left us all impressed. Behind the athletes’ skills are principles of mechanical engineering, such as thermodynamics, dynamics, solid mechanics, and fluid mechanics, which can make sports even more exciting to watch.

 

On February 20, 2022, the Olympic Games came to a close in Beijing, China. The sweat and tears of many athletes have touched countless people. There are many reasons why people are moved by the Olympics. The many dramatic elements of the Olympics, such as thrilling competitions, individual endeavors, and pushing limits, capture the attention of people around the world. Engineers can find something extra special in sports. The four fundamental mechanics that we learn in mechanical engineering can help us understand how athletes use the laws of physics efficiently and how their skills help them compete.
The first of the four fundamental mechanics, thermodynamics, describes the relationship between energy and motion. Specifically, it looks at heat as a form of energy and how it relates to motion. Many of the events in the Winter Olympics are performed on skates on ice, and thermodynamics explains how skating works. When skating on ice with narrow blades, high pressure is exerted on the ice beneath the blades. This pressure causes the melting point to change, and the sub-zero air temperature alone is enough heat to melt the ice into water. This energetic change of state causes the ice under the blades to turn into water, allowing the skates to glide.

01 A dynamic scene from the Winter Olympics (Source – CHAT GPT)

Based on Newtonian mechanics, dynamics is the study of the motion of an object based on the force, direction, and rotation of an object. Curling is one of the most representative examples of this. Curling is a sport in which a granite sphere, called a “stone,” weighing about 20 kilograms, is slid across the ice and placed on a set target. In competition with your opponent, you can strategize to push your opponent’s stone off the target or obstruct its path, all of which can be explained through kinematics. Curling is divided into two main parts: the delivery motion, where the stone is pushed forward, and the sweeping motion, where the stone is combed in front of it. In the case of the delivery motion, the accuracy depends on your stance to control the rotation and direction of the stone, and you can avoid or collide with your opponent’s stone. Sweeping also controls the friction and rotation of the stone’s expected path, which can be used to create the ideal collision of stones.
Solid mechanics is the study of how the shape of an object changes due to external forces. A typical example is a skeleton. Skeleton is a one-man sledding event that is part of the Winter Olympics, along with bobsledding and luge, and is practiced on the stomach with the head forward. Unlike the other disciplines, the risk of injury is extremely high, and for a long time it was not recognized as an official sport until the 2002 Salt Lake Games. Due to the skeletonized nature of the sled, forces are often concentrated in the first half of the sled, which increases the risk of fatigue failure. Fatigue failure is when a material becomes fatigued due to repeated impacts, and later fails at lower impact forces. To minimize the risk of fatigue failure, bumpers are designed to absorb as much of the impact energy as possible. This is common to all other sledding disciplines, and the dents minimize the impact on the rider.
Hydrodynamics is the study of analyzing the motion of fluids, such as liquids or gases. Speed skaters’ uniforms are famous for their lack of seams. The reason for this is to minimize air resistance, which in turn affects the speed of their times. The jerseys are also designed to make it easier for the skaters to keep their heads down in a prone position to minimize air resistance. All of these are examples of how hydrodynamics can be used to influence sports.
With these basic mechanics in mind, watching the Olympics will be much more interesting and inspiring. It’s not just the Winter Olympics, either, as many sports disciplines have developed into scientific disciplines such as sports science and sports mechanics. If you’re a sports enthusiast, you might want to give mechanical engineering a try.