Which is most slippery? Figure skating, curling, speedskating, luge?

Technically, there are 15 sports on the docket of the Winter season Olympics in Beijing. But if you imagine about it—like, really believe about it—they all revolve all-around just one one, shared aim.

Compared with the Summer time Olympics sporting activities, which choose position on a selection of substances (water, sand, hardwood floors) and demand athletes to total a assorted range of bodily responsibilities, winter season Olympians fundamentally have one career: Slip around on frozen surfaces, and attempt not to fall.

Positive, the athletes may perhaps also be striving to jump far, obtain substantial speeds, or hit pucks into nets, but the primary problem they deal with is executing all those matters on slippery surfaces that make it difficult to keep upright or go their bodies or specific objects—a sled, a curling stone—in a deliberate course. The slipperiness is also what makes the athletics enjoyable to enjoy. It tends to make it achievable for athletes to do points they wouldn’t be capable to do on grass or concrete or a gym mat, like hurtle down a monitor at 90 miles per hour or tumble from 20 feet in the air devoid of shattering any bones.

So, sure, every single wintertime sport is the basically the similar matter: folks battling around who can most effective maneuver on slippery terrain. And above the earlier two weeks, as I’ve watched the athletes slip ’n’ slide all over Beijing, one particular huge dilemma has been nagging at me. The medal ceremonies explain to us which athletes are the best at controlling and directing their slipping. But which of these slippery athletics is the slipperiest?

Snow sports like skiing and snowboarding made the most injuries during the last Wintertime Olympics in PyeongChang. It is actually easy to tumble on snow! Primarily when you are traveling downhill on it with your feet strapped to just one minor slidey board or two even littler slidey boards. Having said that, I quickly ruled out the snow athletics as probable slippery front-runners, considering the fact that numerous scientific and humiliating encounters with unshoveled sidewalks have taught me that ice is additional slippery than snow.

But the query of which ice sport is the slipperiest is more intricate than you may well believe, since “ice” contains multitudes. “Ice” (are people scare prices obtaining my stage across?) is not a single object with established properties that always feels and features the very same way. It’s a classification of make any difference with a whole range of temperatures, textures, dimensions, and densities that have an impact on how objects slip all over on it. It is much less “hot puppy bun” and a lot more “bread.” Every ice activity at the Olympics requires a different form of ice.

Determine skaters contend on the softest and warmest ice. (If you’re amazed that ice can be smooth and warm, you’ve been taken in by hazardous stereotypes that limit the horizons of what ice believes it can be. Teach by yourself.) A determine skater’s blades will need to dig into the ice to propel a human overall body into the air, so super-tough things will not do. Excellent figure skating ice is just under freezing, in the mid-to-high 20s levels Fahrenheit. If the ice is much too chilly and, hence, challenging, skaters could also suffer ankle accidents when they land. But softer ice implies additional friction and slower skating, so figure skating functions are not the slipperiest.

Brief keep track of speedskating ice is a little bit colder than determine skating ice, which lets for better speeds. Hockey ice is typically a tiny colder and slipperier than that, since it desires to be difficult enough for players to make fast turns and stops without having resulting in much too a lot destruction to the ice.

The slipperiest skating ice is utilised for extended observe speedskating, in which athletes whiz about a rink on ice as cold as 16 degrees Fahrenheit. That ice is so challenging, and the speedskating blades so thin—just about 1 millimeter!—that the regulations of friction that bind the relaxation of us to a gradual, shuffling existence simply melt absent.

Okay, so speedskating ice is technically the slipperiest ice of all the Olympic ices. But is it the slipperiest sport? Maybe not. Curling features some of the weirdest ice in chilly-temperature athletics, and its idiosyncrasies could make it a dim horse contender for the slipperiest activity.

As opposed to all the other ices in Beijing, curling ice is not flat—if it were, the stone would skid to a halt extended in advance of it achieved the bullseye. As a substitute of spraying or pouring a amount layer of drinking water onto concrete, curling ice technicians have interaction in a sexually euphemistic–sounding exercise recognized as “pebbling.” They pebble the ice with a unit called a pebbler, which consists of a backpack whole of h2o, a hose, and a spigot named a pebblehead. The pebblehead of the pebbler sprays “pebbles” of sizzling water onto the ice, thus pebbling it. Make perception?

Pebbled ice is textured, which would seem to be to make it significantly less slippery. But when the curling stone operates throughout the frozen pebbles, the pebbles melt, making a layer of h2o “as slender as a bubble’s pores and skin” that buoys the stone across the ice. There is some unsolved thriller in the electricity of the pebbles—scientists are still not very crystal clear on why a curling stone moves the way it does—but they may perhaps also be responsible for the stone’s titular curl the curler you see sweeping the ice in entrance of the stone is brushing the pebbles to shift the spin of the stone.

The slippery, pebbly magic of the curling sheet is potent more than enough to make a 44-pound stone float throughout the ice with the effortless grace of a ballerina. But can such stylish slipperiness compete with the slippery spirals of a sliding observe? Luge, skeleton, and bobsled gatherings usually choose location on ice frozen to about 23 degrees, which is medium slippery, as much as I know. (Even though, seemingly, ice on the observe can get “sticky” if it’s as well chilly.) Confident, it is not as tricky and chilly as very long observe speedskating ice, but it has the distinct slippery advantage of a downhill incline. These are by far the speediest athletics in the Winter Olympics, with luge in the guide, a good indicator that they are also the slipperiest. I’m going to say that luge is the most slippery of the three sliding sports activities, and not just mainly because it is the speediest: Bobsleds are sturdier than any other skate or sled, and driving down the track headfirst, as athletes do in skeleton races, looks like it would supply a higher perception of regulate.

In my intellect, luge, curling, and speedskating ended up all tied for slipperiest winter sport—until I imagined basically interacting with any of the surfaces. Going for walks across a curling sheet or speedskating rink whilst preserving some measure of dignity would be hard, but not extremely hard. Gun to my head, could I make it to the bottom of Beijing’s Flying Snow Dragon, with its sloping ice partitions and 18 percent grade, with out busting my tailbone, cracking open my skull, and pebbling the sides of the keep track of with my mind make a difference? No, I could not. Luge wins the slippery gold!