Short Wave - What Makes Simone Biles The GOAT, Scientifically

Episode Date: August 2, 2024

Another Olympics, another set of stellar performances by the U.S. women's artistic gymnastics team. Thursday, the team won two medals in the women's all-around final: a gold for Simone Biles and a bronze for Sunisa Lee. The medals add to the team's overall count, which also includes a gold for the women's team final. Simone and Suni are expected to lead the team to more medals in the coming days. Each day the gymnasts compete, we are left to pick our jaws off the floor and wonder: How do they do that? So we called up one of our favorite science communicators, Frederic Bertley, to explain just that. He's the CEO of the Center of Science and Industry and our gymnastics physics guide for the day.Follow NPR's 2024 Paris Olympics coverage.Want us to cover the science powering other Olympians? Email us at [e-mail]. We'd love to hear from you!A previous version of this episode suggested that at the top of a gymnast's jump, they are moving with zero acceleration. In fact, there they have zero velocity, but still have the same acceleration. Also, gravity is constant as a person performs gymnastics tricks on Earth. A previous version of this episode also did not make clear that conservation of angular momentum happens as gymnasts move through the air in uneven bars — as opposed to when the gymnasts are on the bars themselves and the gymnasts are subject to additional forces. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Happy Olympic shortwavers. It's been a rush to watch some of the world's best athletes push themselves to the limits across all of the different events. Like Simone Biles, who's repeatedly gone viral for all of her innovative moves and wins, including Thursday when she won the gold for the women's all-around gymnastics final. When gymnasts like Simone fly through the air, twisting, flipping, jumping, all I can wonder is, how does she do it? Then I think physics.

I'm a kind of a lover of physics, and gymnastics, probably better than any other human endeavor, are a perfect personification of Newtonian physics. That's Frederick Bertley, or Dr. B, the CEO of the Center of Science and Industry in Columbus, Ohio. As a fellow science communicator, he's fascinated by how the human body is pushed to its limits in all of the Olympic events.

especially gymnastics. The biophysiology of the human body is not a static thing. It's made up of trillion cells. You got fluids flowing through your body. Your muscles are moving in different directions, and you're trying to apply basic Newtonian physics to all of your events. Plus, each skill happens in a couple blinks of an eye. So these athletes are making all of these decisions while they're flying through the air.

When you talk about what's going through the mind of a gymnast, for me it's really amazing. There is a pseudo-intellectual muscle memory in the gymnast at the highest level. Because whether you're tumbling, whether you're hitting that pomehorse, whether you're on the uneven bars or doing the loops on the ring, you are 100% a Newtonian physics experiment layer on muscle, tissue, cells, you know, liquid. And oh, that little thing called the brain where you have to completely, shut down any kind of distractions and focus in a hyper way to execute that activity.

Which the U.S. gymnastics teams have done repeatedly. Like Tuesday's team final, when the women's team beat the runners up Italy with a massive 5.8 point margin. And when the men's gymnastics team won their first team medal since 2008. Okay, Dr. B, it feels like like every year gymnastics and athletes and other sports are breaking more records or doing harder skills are actually. athletes getting better. The short answer is yes. The longer answer is yes because.

So today on the show, yes because. From launch to midair flips and twists, we get into the impressive physics behind your favorite gymnasts. What happens when this mind-body connection breaks down? Plus, how science could continue to push forward human progress. I'm Regina Barber. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. Okay, Dr. B. Let's let's like start when a gymnast launches themselves into the air, like the

vault competition, like what's involved there? Yeah. So the anatomy of the athlete is critical. We just got to start with that. But now you got the athlete and their anatomy whipping down that thing. They're about to hit the springboard to do the vault. Well, there's this real thing called gravity. Gravity wants to do one thing and one thing only. Pull you down to the center of planet Earth. So you now have to somehow, through your muscular buildup, through your kinetic motion, through your understanding of momentum, hit the springboard in a certain way, shape your body in a certain way. And then, of course, as you're springing up, you're further going to hit the actual vault. So you're going to hit that with your hands and push off with your hands all trying to defy gravity to get enough lift, enough height to do what. whatever maneuver you want to do.

And then each time you're trying to do your maneuver, whether it's a double flip pike twist into this, you're trying to do that. There's the acceleration up into the air. Then you hit that point where, like, if you remember your Bugs Bunny Roadrunner, now you're no longer ascending. And you're not moving for like an instant

at the top of that path. And now you're descending, and that's gravity pulling you down, but you still have velocity that's making you go kind of forward. And so now you have to continue your tricks, manage, oh, gravity's pulling you down. It's, again, it is really a symphony of Newtonian physics, you know, applied in a biosystem with things that change all the time and just really some cognitive mastery by the athlete to pull it all off and make it stick. Yeah, it's mesmerizing.

Okay, so once you're in the air, gymnast flip and they twist, but these things are like different forces. like flipping versus twisting. Like from a physics perspective, let's go through what that difference is. Yeah, I mean, so let's go back to the vaultic. Sometimes they do a flip, a front flip in the air. So that's basically your forward velocity, your forward momentum,

and then your front flip, so you're flipping about a center of mass, kind of your core, right? If you're doing, as Simone Biles likes to do, what's called the Biles, Biles, One in Bowsu, where she does a flip, She actually keeps her body fully straight, and so she's flipping.

Again, she's just, not just, she's doing a flip around one focal point, if you will, one focal point. But imagine you're now doing that flip, and to your point, now you're adding in a twist. So now you're interjecting a second completely different moment with its own trajectory, its own vector in a different direction, and you have to reconcile that with your initial one that's flipping in the other direction. so that ultimately in the case of gymnastics, you need to land on your feet. So it gets hyper complicated when they do one flip or one revolution versus two revolutions versus two revolutions and then a third one in a different direction versus two revolutions and two other twists in another direction.

And they keep adding these additional moments of inertia, these additional vectors to a situation, which, by the way, it's done in like three seconds. it's miraculous in a way. Right. And then the uneven bars event, right? Like when you see their body be straight and then they suddenly pull in their legs and then they spin faster, right? So now we're talking about angular momentum. And then if you pull up your legs, your mass gets concentrated closer to that axis of rotation.

And that means you're going to have a different spinning speed, right? So I don't know if Dr. B, you like to do this demo, but the whole thing where you're like on a student. and you have your arms out. Guilty. And then you pull your arms in. Well, you have your arms out. You're on a stool. You have your arms out.

And you're spinning on the spinning stool. And then you pull your arms in and suddenly that spinning speeds up. And figure skaters do it, right? So like, do you see that? Where else are they doing that? You know, dealing with angular momentum. So definitely in the uneven bars because you see them kind of flowing through in the pike position and they'll bend their legs up, etc.

But then they'll jump, let's say, to the high bar, and then they start extending their body, keeping it straight. And you can see their velocity picks up faster and faster. So they go from a kind of crowd position to extend a position. Where else do you see it? Definitely, obviously, in the floor maneuvers, again, when you see them running down and they'll jump and they'll do a straight flip where their body's perfectly straight,

versus now they tuck into your point, you know, tuck in their arms, tuck in their knees. and now they're doing twists and that slow kind of vertical flip speeds up into this incredible twist and then it might extend back as they land. Yeah, so this is a good example of conservation momentum, like where there isn't anything else like affecting that spinning, just like the shape of the spinning thing, like figure skaters bringing their arms in faster. I love the analogy you use because I am guilty as charged.

For those of you haven't done this, sit in your office chair that rotates and just spin around and bring your arms in and you can see, wow, that is what a gymnast or a figure skater will do. and that's exactly right, the conservation of angular momentum. And like you said, Dr. B, this all happens in, like, seconds, which is really hard for me to comprehend. And, like, sometimes in these few seconds, an athlete can actually freeze up, which in gymnastics is called getting the twisties.

This happened to Simone Biles during the Tokyo Olympics. She had this, like, dangerous mind-body disconnection mid-air and couldn't perform skills she'd done thousands of times before. Like, how does something like this happen? Yeah, I love the fact that, that they've come out and described this as the twisties and gymnastics. One, because it is a real thing. But two, it also is there in other sports.

I mean, at the end of the day, a lot of these things that they're doing, it comes into a combination of physical muscle memory and almost a programmed cognitive script. Like, you know, they're not literally standing at the, you know, ready to do the vault, and they're standing before they're running, thinking, okay, I'm going to run at this velocity, I'm going to hit the vault here. That's programmed in their system at this point. But what the Twistis has highlighted is that there still is this neurocognitive connection.

You know, you get the jitters, you get a little scared, you get something that just breaks that kind of cognitive physical connection. And this is so important because you don't have the chance to reprogram when you're in the air. And so what is amazing for me, and I remember Simaum Baez, I remember Tokyo. They, you know, at one point they dragged her through, you know, and we're talking about, oh, she let the team down, she's a quitter and all these really negative things. And to her credit, first of all, she just, you know, weathered it and now she's crushing it again at the next Olympics, one of the, the greatest actually U.S. gymnasts ever.

But what's amazing to me is how it doesn't happen more often, right? Right. So, like, how do you see all this, like, scientific understanding of physics, of kinesiology, which is, like, you know, the physics of the body and how it moves? How do you see it being used in the future to, like, push Olympic sports to the next level? Yeah, and this is something that really fascinates me. This idea of, you know, as we continue to break records, you know, will we reach a zenith? You know, and I don't know.

My guess is the record-breaking gaps will be longer and longer. The only reason why I say that is the evolution of the human body isn't that fast. You're talking about these micro, you know, I beat it by a thousandth of a second. You know, or I did another half-twist in this incredible gymnastics move. And so the technology we have and the advancements of understanding all aspects of what you just said, the physiology, the kinesiology, and all that stuff gets us really close to maximizing what the physical body can do. Then there's genetics.

You can never account for that. But I love the fact, and this is what's really interesting for me, I love the fact that a typical athlete will still endeavor to chase that sport because the odds of being a gold medal winner, a championship winner in baseball or a record setter in a given event. It's like winning the lottery, right? It's so small. But you set your mind, I'm going to be the best at. And that confidence and fortitude to work that hard, train that hard, and be the best that you

can be and hopefully move that needle a little bit, that's amazing because obviously it's hard to break a record. Thank you so much, Dr. B for talking with me about gymnastics. As always, it's a pleasure to have you on. Well, from one Dr. B to the next, it's absolutely so great to speak to you. Thank you so much. This episode was produced by Burley McCoy. It was edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez.

The audio engineer was Robert Rodriguez. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shorewave from NPR.