a new Olympic sport and scientific research into the modeling of kiteboards

Many sports disciplines call on researchers to win more medals. This is particularly the case in France with scientists integrated into the federations. Example with a brand new sport, kite foil. A report by Olivier Emond.

How science improves the performance of athletes. Today, many researchers are working on the performance of athletes to help them win more medals. Example with a new sport, kite foil, whose events will take place in Marseille from this Sunday, August 4th until August 8th.

Take a body of water: here we are in front of Marseille, which hosts all the sailing events. Add wind, take an athlete, feet on a board of about 1m, pulled by a kite sail: you have the elements of kitefoil, the events of which take place on a course detailed by Ariane Imbert, coach of the French team:

“We’re going to have a starting line that’s going to be perpendicular to the wind, and a buoy to go and find that’s going to be upwind, in the wind’s axis. So there, they’re going to tack to get there, and they come back down, and there, we do two laps, until they cross the finish line. And there, the first to arrive has won the round.”

This review is missing THE essential detail of this new Olympic sport: the foil, this submerged part located under the board, which allows it to take off above the waves, and to promote speed. “We have a vertical part that we call the mast, and at the end, a horizontal part that we call the plane,” explains Paul Iachkine, research engineer and scientific advisor for the French sailing federation.

For the Games, teams cannot modify these foils, the only possibility left is to choose from the different homologated models. And that’s where science comes in.

“The idea is to try to measure these differences, which can be geometric or mechanical. So a mast that is more or less stiff in bending or torsion. We will associate these objective parameters with the athlete’s sensations, and it is up to us to see what the physical phenomenon is behind it. There, it allows us to quickly get to the essentials.”

Paul Iachkin

research engineer, scientific advisor for the French sailing federation

The only space of freedom left to the athletes: the board, the float: “The board is relatively free, explains Philippe Mourniac, director of the French Olympic sailing team. So we think a lot on the scientific level, with a lot of tests on the water, to possibly work on the shape of the board, on its dimensions, on the anchor points, where we are going to put the foil, for example. It is true that unlike the other Olympic boats – where tolerance areas are of the order of a millimeter – with the kite board, we have an open space to, at the very least, think and try lots of different things.”

Developments in equipment that we will gradually see appearing in this brand new Olympic sport.