Speed Skating

I was watching TV last weekend, and when I was flipping through the channels, I saw speed skating on one channel. Speed skating made me think of physics once again. In speed skating, there is a lot of physics involved. There’s momentum, uniform circular motion, a pivot point, and air resistance. At the start of the race, the skaters pump their arms back and forth in order to get some momentum going. The momentum helps them to build up their speed. Once they are going pretty fast, it is easy to see that they are moving in uniform rotational motion. However, they are skating around an ellipse, not a circle. Therefore, they have a constant speed while their velocity is changing when they go around the turns. Their velocity stays the same when they are skating the straight a ways. I noticed that when they make a turn, they stick out their inside hand toward the center of the ellipse so that it is easier to turn. I realized that their hand can be a pivot point as they rotate around the turn. In addition, they also keep their hands behind their backs as much as possible in order to make sure that they experience less air resistance. They also keep low when they go around the turns to cut down air resistance. With less air resistance, they can skate at higher speeds. All together, the strategies of winning a speed skating race have a lot to do with physics.