Math and Snowboarding.

  While visiting my brother, I had the chance to watch some extreme sports.  I watched someone on a snow board making multiple revolutions as he sped through the air.  I am not sure how many times around the athlete went but I know it was at least 4 times.  I was in awe of the wonderful skills needed to accomplish this.

Back in 2009, some students in Utah created a mathematical program designed to help the United States Snowboarding team decide which events to compete in the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Prior to this program being written, American snowboarders would compete in all the events they could in the hopes they would qualify for something but this program was designed to analyze the events to determine which events offered American Snowboarders the best chance of qualifying for the Olympics.  It was actually a spread sheet model which analyzed competition schedules, athletic scores, and financial costs to provide a ranking of the athletes most likely to make the Olympic Teams.  This is a perfect example of practical mathematical modeling.

In addition to this, there is math in every bit of snowboarding from the shape and length of the board itself, to the shape of the ride after taking off of the ground, to the spins involved in the turns.  Then there is the math involved in the physics with force, mass, acceleration, friction, and gravity.

Furthermore, there is quite a bit of math involved in designing the snowboard courses, especially the extreme ones you see on television.  Each year the athletes want to increase the height of the tricks, add more turns, make it more spectacular so the courses have to change and evolve to meet this need.

There are two major types of courses.  The first is The Big Air which is one long jump designed to have them to perform the biggest trick they can while the other is the slope style run.  The second one starts out almost level with rails, boxes, and grinds for tricks before the run heads off to three increasingly long jumps.  One important thing to keep in mind when performing these is to take into account gravity.

Designers use a simple ballistic calculator to took at what gravity does to moving objects especially if you know the angle and speed of the object because it helps calculate the distance and trajectory of the object.  It is possible to pinpoint where the object will land and as such the launch will have an angle of between 32 and 35 degrees while the landing area will have slope of between 34 and 37 degrees.  The landing zone must have this particular slope because if its too flat, the rider takes the downward force into their legs and if its too steep, riders cannot slow down properly and change the downward momentum into forward momentum.

On the slope style jump, the lip of the jump is four to eight feet above the ground because it gives them the hang time they need for tricks.  For both the slope style and the Big Air, the sweet spot for landing is between 55 and 75 feet from the point of launch. 

The above information is from this site. This company specializes in designing courses for extreme snowboarding and skiing competitions.

Let me know what you think.  I'd love to hear.