St. Louis (US), February 9 (The Conversation) Thousands of the world’s top athletes will gather in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo in Italy in February 2026 for the 25th Winter Olympics. While sports enthusiasts are focused on the athletic achievements of the Olympians, science enthusiasts can also find enjoyment in observing them.
Many winter sports are governed by unique physical laws – from skaters speeding across the ice to skiers and snowboarders seemingly floating through the air. The artificial snow used by athletes is a remarkable engineering feat. Even the Winter Olympics involve mathematics. Mathematicians have found that luck plays a larger role in hockey games than in other sports, such as baseball, basketball, and football.
To help our readers follow both the sports and the science while watching the Games this year, The Conversation U.S. has compiled a collection of articles from our archives.
1. The physics of ski jumping
Olympic ski jumping is a challenging sport. Athletes jump down a slope about 300 feet (100 meters) tall before taking off into the air. They can then fly further than a football field before landing.
As physicist Amy Pope wrote in her article, three key physics concepts allow them to fly: gravity, lift, and drag.
The rules of the sport reinforce these concepts. Athletes must wear tight-fitting suits to prevent any extra lift from loose or flapping fabric. The skis used by athletes must also be the correct size for their height and weight.
“By turning their skis and bodies into essentially a wing, ski jumpers can fight gravity and stay airborne for five to seven seconds,” Pope wrote.
2. The physics of sliding sports
Unlike ski jumpers, athletes in Olympic sliding sports – luge, bobsled, and skeleton – don’t get any air, but they reach very high speeds while racing down the icy track, around 90 miles per hour (145 kilometers per hour).
However, like ski jumping, gravity plays a role in sliding sports. As physicist John Eric Goff described in his article, it acts as the force propelling them down the track. Sliders also wear tight-fitting suits, which help them gain more speed by cutting through the air. Unlike ski jumpers, they are trying to avoid drag and will lie as flat as possible on the sled. Bobsledders steer using controls, while luge and skeleton athletes steer using subtle body movements.
“All of these subtle movements are difficult to see on television, but they can have a significant impact – oversteering can lead to collisions with the track wall or even crashes,” Goff wrote. “Although it may seem that riders simply slide down the icy track at high speeds after they start, there is a lot more going on.”
3. The mathematics of hockey
As hockey players move across the ice, they are dealing with forces such as friction and drag. However, there is also another important concept: luck.
Mark Robert Rank is a social scientist who has written about luck. In his research, he found that compared to other popular team sports, luck plays a larger role in a hockey team’s chances of winning a game.
“Anyone who has ever watched a professional hockey game can see the randomness that occurs on the ice. Skates or sticks often randomly deflect shots when players cross the path of a puck’s trajectory. Pucks can take strange bounces as they travel across the rink. Goalies might just happen to be in the right place at the right time,” Rank wrote.
While Rank focused on National Hockey League games in his studies, Olympic athletes may also see a similar effect as they compete in Italy.
4. The engineering behind fake snow
While the Winter Olympics normally take place in countries that receive a lot of snowfall, the host city can’t always rely on nature to provide the perfect conditions for competition. It is now common for skiers and snowboarders to compete on artificially generated snow, and Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo will be no exception.
Engineering a phenomenon as intricate and delicate as snow is not easy, as atmospheric scientist Peter Veals explained in his article. Natural snowflakes are delicate, pronged crystals that fit together loosely. Their structure creates a light, airy texture.
Artificial snow is created by blowing pressurized water into cold air, where it quickly freezes into tiny icy droplets. These droplets don’t have the same structure as natural snowflakes and end up packing together tightly.
An athlete’s preference might depend on their sport – dense artificial snow might be better for a slalom skier carving tight turns, while a jumper might prefer a fluffy cushion of powder to land on.
“Artificial snow often feels hard and icy. Fresh natural ‘powder’ snow, on the other hand, provides skiers and snowboarders with a near-weightless feeling as they soar down the mountainside,” Veals explained.
5. Psychological biases
In many Winter Olympics sports, athletes compete in a specific order. As psychologist Robin Kramer explained in his article, the first and last events in a sequence tend to stick in your memory more. You might remember the first snowboarder to drop into the half pipe more clearly than the sixth, for example.
You are also more likely to judge a performance based on how you judged the previous one in the sequence.
Even Olympic judges are not immune to these decision-making effects. Some sports have pushed for computer analysis for judging to reduce human biases. But it is usually impossible to entirely remove the human element of scoring.
“Realizing that athletes could win or lose Olympic medals based upon where in a sequence they compete is both surprising and worrying,” Kramer wrote. “With more research into these biases, we can figure out how to prevent them from influencing important outcomes like who goes home with the gold.” (The Conversation)