This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. A bit later in the hour, common household products causing outdoor air pollution.

But first, it is impossible to watch the performances in the Winter Olympic Games, the back-to-back 1440s on the snowboarding half-pipe,

the quadruple lutses and layback and camel spins on the skating ice.

Without wondering, how to heck do they do that?

Yeah, well, naturally being a science show, our first instinct was to call an expert in biomechanics to talk Olympic laws of motion.

Deborah King is that expert.

She's professor in the Department of Exercise and Sports Sciences at Ithaca College in New York.

Welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you.

Let me tell my listeners that if they've seen a stunt that they want you to decode, give us a call.

844-724-825-844 SciTalk or tweet us at SciFri. Dr. King, have you been watching a lot of the skating or do you like? What event do you like the most? Oh, that's a tough call. I like them all. I watch a lot of alpine skiing. I watch the figure skating. I love the bobsledged skeleton and luge. Ski jumping, aerial, snowboard, you name it.

Snow, ice, gravity.

It's all fun.

You do live up there where it's kind of snowy in Ithaca.

I can imagine why you do that.

All right, let's break down.

Let's go to the skate jumps, okay?

From a physics perspective, what's happening in those fancy skate jumps?

Sure, there's a lot going on in a very short period of time. The jumps take less than a second,

and the skaters need to go off the ice, jump up in the air. They jump about two feet in the air,

if you're watching the guys do their quad lutses. They spin around. They can easily reach rotation speeds above six revolutions per second,

and then they need to land without falling.

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