Academic literature on the topic 'Bobsleigh performance'

Abstract When thinking about Olympic winter sports and watching events on television, people mostly focus on events where the chances of success are high for fellow-countrymen. For example, in the Netherlands speed skating is considered the main winter sports event. But with Kimberley Bos there is now also a Dutch medal candidate for the Winter Olympics 2022 in the skeleton discipline. Where speed skaters prepare in summer for the winter season with roller skates, Bos trains on an athletics track with a self-built board on wheels as a replacement for the skeleton. British athletes on the other hand can choose the bobsleigh and skeleton push-start track at the University of Bath for their summer preparation. We prepare for the upcoming Winter Olympics 2022 by taking a physics view on advanced sleighing. We show how school physics helps understanding the motion of athletes in bobsleigh and skeleton and increases respect for the athletes’ performance.

The Winter Olympics are a highly competitive sporting environment where subtle improvements in performance can impact the finishing order in many events. Aerodynamic drag is known to be a significant resistive force to human movement in high-speed sports, such as alpine skiing, speed skating and bobsleigh. Aerodynamic drag also represents an important determinant of performance in sports such as ice hockey, snowboard cross and cross-country skiing. From 2000 to 2018, a series of wind tunnel–based research projects were conducted to provide aerodynamically optimized apparel, equipment and wind tunnel simulation training to elite Canadian and American winter sports athletes involved in bobsleigh, skeleton, luge, ice hockey, speed skating, cross-country, alpine and para-alpine skiing, biathlon, ski-cross and snowboard cross. This article reviews the role of aerodynamic drag in winter sports, considers fundamental principles of air flow around bluff bodies and methods of drag reduction in ice and snow sports, while providing experimental results from an extensive database of wind tunnel investigations. Deficits in the literature suggest productive areas for future research to improve athletic performance in these sports.

Introduction: The body of scientific literature on sports and exercise continues to expand. The summer and winter Olympic games will be held over a 7-month period in 2021–2022.Objectives: We took this rare opportunity to quantify and analyze the main bibliometric parameters (i.e., the number of articles and citations) across all Olympic sports to weigh and compare their importance and to assess the structure of the “sport sciences” field. The present review aims to perform a bibliometric analysis of Olympic sports research. We quantified the following topics: (1) the most investigated sports; (2) the main journals in which the studies are published; (3) the main factors explaining sport-specific scientific attractiveness; (4) the influence of being in the Olympic programme, economic weight, and local influences on research output; and (5) which research topic is the most investigated across sports.Methods: We searched 116 sport/exercise journals on PubMed for the 40 summer and 10 winter Olympic sports. A total of 34,038 articles were filtered for a final selection of 25,003 articles (23,334 articles on summer sports and 1,669 on winter sports) and a total of 599,820 citations.Results and Discussion: Nine sports [football (soccer), cycling, athletics, swimming, distance & marathon running, basketball, baseball, tennis, and rowing] were involved in 69% of the articles and 75% of the citations. Football was the most cited sport, with 19.7 and 26.3% of the total number of articles and citations, respectively. All sports yielded some scientific output, but 11 sports (biathlon, mountain biking, archery, diving, trampoline, skateboarding, skeleton, modern pentathlon, luge, bobsleigh, and curling) accumulated a total of fewer than 50 publications. While ice hockey is the most prominently represented winter sport in the scientific literature, winter sports overall have produced minor scientific output. Further analyses show a large scientific literature on team sports, particularly American professional sports (i.e., baseball, basketball, and ice hockey) and the importance of inclusion in the Olympic programme to increasing scientific interest in “recent” sports (i.e., triathlon and rugby sevens). We also found local/cultural influence on the occurrence of a sport in a particular “sport sciences” journal. Finally, the relative distribution of six main research topics (i.e., physiology, performance, training and testing, injuries and medicine, biomechanics, and psychology) was large across sports and reflected the specific performance factors of each sport.

Aerodynamic performance of a bobsleigh is one of the most important factors in reducing the race time. In this study, an investigation on the aerodynamic characteristics of a bobsleigh has been performed using three-dimensional Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations with the k-ε turbulence model. An unstructured tetrahedral grid system was constructed in the computational domain, and the optimal number of grids was selected through a grid-dependency test. The major axis length and thickness of ellipse-shaped front bumper, and the radii of the cowling on side and front views, were selected as four geometric parameters to be tested, and the drag coefficient was considered as an aerodynamic performance parameter. It was found that the drag coefficient was more sensitive to the thickness of the front bumper and the radius of the cowling on side view of the bobsleigh than on the other parameters.