During the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, the athletes in all sports competed about winning 327 medals. Out of these, 69 (~21%) were awarded for events involving cross-country skiing and the biathlon. It is interesting to notice that, with merely a 1% higher performance, 13 silver medallists, 8 bronze medallists, 4 athletes finishing at fourth place, 3 athletes finishing at fifth place, 1 athlete finishing at sixth place, 1 athlete finishing at seventh place, and 1 athlete finishing at eight place, would have won the gold. Only in the skiing part in cross-country skiing and the biathlon, there are various improvements that could lead to a 1% performance increase, e.g., generation of propulsive- and reduction of resistive forces (Gløersen et al., 2018). While quite a lot of research has been invested on the former (Sandbakk & Holmberg, 2014; Pellegrini et al., 2018) by, for instance, finding ways to increase the biomechanical output, considerably less has been devoted to understanding the mechanisms involved in the latter. One key contributor to the resistive forces in skiing is the ski-snow friction, and factors as the stiffness of the ski, shape of its camber, structural design, ski-base material composition and topography exert a major influence (Budde & Himes, 2017; Spring et al., 1988). To minimise the ski-snow friction, better understanding of the interactions between the ski`s stiffness, camber profile, material, and topography of the ski base, in combination with information concerning the temperature and humidity of both the air and snow, as well as the nature of the snow, is required (Almqvist et al., 2022). To this end, this paper presents an update on the current knowledge and future insights in how to best reduce ski-snow friction by providing perspectives on investigations required to achieve this goal.
© Copyright 2023 9th International Congress on Science and Skiing, March 18 - 22, 2023, Saalbach-Hinterglemm, Austria. Veröffentlicht von University of Salzburg. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.