Why the triple axel is such a big deal

Why is the

triple

axis so important? We are in 1991, the last year of the Cold War, the year Street Fighter II hit the arcades “Mr. Gorbachev Hadouken this wall. and the year Tonya Harding became the first American woman to perform a

triple

axel

in competition. The famous rivalry that flourished is that between Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan. And in 1991, at the Target Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, that meant: “Nancy Kerrigan.” "Very elegant." "Here comes Tonya Harding." "Very powerful skater." Kerrigan had this music. (elegant music) Tonya Harding had Batman. "I'm Batman." And the triple axis is the 58 frames at the heart of that elegant/powerful division.

Mirai Nagasu is the only other American woman to land a triple

axel

in competition, and when you ask her to define it in one word: "Triple axel?" She has to think about it. And the more you know about the triple axis, the more impressive it becomes. "Jump. Jump towards that, towards that, you know you want to do it, do it." "Jump, you know you want to do it. The triple axle really starts with the approach. The triple axle has a forward take-off where the skater pushes off the outside edge of the skate, as opposed to, say, a toe loop, where the skater Jumper relies on the tip of his skate to push up and turn.

The approach is also forward rather than backward. Axels are jumps from the front edge, landing backwards on the opposite foot. forward to looking back, it is an additional half rotation, without the help of a toe. All that makes the approach... Deborah King's studied figure skating and the biomechanics of single, double and triple axles "Need. generate the vertical speed, but they also need to generate their angular momentum or their rotational moment for the jump, and all of that has to happen during the approach to takeoff." You will see skaters with a slight skid on the ice that helps, but for the most part The spin comes from their bodies, not the ice.

Once you're in the air, you have to

deal

with what you generated on the ice. Great skaters make big jumps. But rotation speed makes or breaks a triple axis. This graph shows a small sample of single, double and triple axis jumps. You can see that the jump length of the triple axis is usually shorter than the length of the double axis. This is because that extra energy goes into extra rotation. Harding needed to make a tight rotation as quickly as possible. The triple axis is a physics problem. "But in terms of body position, you don't want your elbows sticking out, you don't want your arms to be right in front of you, you don't want your knees sticking out, you want to look as close to yourself as possible." “You can do it with a pencil.” Skaters have to use a lot of upper body strength to keep their arms bent inward so as not to slow down their turn.

Only once they have rotated three and a half times in the air can they begin to figure out how to land. And then, its big obstacle is the deceleration. Skaters try to land on the ball of the opposite foot to absorb the rotational speed and heavy weight of their descent. Midori Ito was the first woman to perform a triple axel in a world competition in the late 80s. When she wobbles like that or Tonya Harding nearly falls, they are compensating for a huge rotational speed, while trying to look good. A triple axis turns physics into poetry, and that's probably why it's hard to describe, for anyone, in a single word. “Triple axis?” In the triple axis, power and elegance are complements, not contradictions.

Bruce Wayne and Batman? They are the same person. A lot happened after 1991. But at the Target Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota? Tonya Harding landed. "Oh, the zamboni is coming out, it's going to make noise." "Oh, the zamboni is coming, it's going to make noise."