﻿On June 6, 2021,
Simone Biles won a historic seventh national title.
And among all the superhuman feats she’s pulled off in her career,
like a Yurchenko double pike in the US Classic,
and a triple double at the 2019 US Gymnastics Championships,
this one is especially important.
It’s called a Wolf Turn.
The Wolf Turn has been around for decades.
And it seems like recently, almost every gymnast has included it in their routine.
It’s certainly not an easy skill.
Something even Jessica Alba noticed.
Why do they always do that?
Because it’s like really hard.
So if this turn is so hard,
how do all these gymnasts pull it off?
The wolf turn is broken into four main movements.
A gymnast, like Simone, will get into a squat
position on the beam or the floor,
with their other leg stretched out.
She’ll then stretch out her arms and wind them up.
Once she finds her balance, she’ll start spinning.
And finally, she’ll stop, and return to her original stance.
All while making sure to keep her balance
and not fall over.
These four elements rely on a delicate balance of mass and inertia.
Try to get in the starting position for the wolf turn.
I think you’re gonna find it’s extremely difficult.
David Young is a physics professor at Louisiana State University
who's studied the physics of gymnastics and other sports.
When she's in that crouch position, the majority of her center mass is,
of course, still kind of in her torso.
As long as your center of mass
is above a point of support, that system will be physically stable.
If she leans back a little bit, she'll fall over.
Things start to get tricky as she attempts to spin.
To figure out what’s happening, let’s look at her moment of inertia:
How her mass is distributed from her axis of rotation.
In this case, the rotation axis is a vertical line
near the center of her body that passes through her foot.
When she winds up and starts spinning, notice how she'll bring her arms kind of in here,
closer to her body.
This distributes her body mass differently,
closer to the axis of rotation, which decreases her moment of inertia.
This means Biles can spin easier and faster.
And then right when she gets ready to stop, you'll notice that she'll fling her arms out.
Spreading her body mass out
increases her moment of inertia.
This makes it harder to rotate,
and helps her stop quickly.
All these movements require incredible strength
with gymnasts using mainly their arm,
shoulder, leg and core muscles to maintain their position.
And like Jordan Chiles' 2017 Nationals routine shows,
one wobble, and things fall apart.
Cannot believe what she just did there.
There’s a reason gymnasts go through this tricky balance.
They’re chasing high scores.
Olympic gymnastics is scored by combining points from two panels:
Difficulty and Execution.
Difficulty assigns a point value to the skill itself.
A simple turn,
like this single rotation Carly Patterson did in the 2004 Olympics,
is valued the lowest of all the turns.
A triple double,
where gymnasts are flipping twice and twisting three times all in one shot,
has one of the highest difficulty ratings of all gymnastics skills.
And a triple wolf turn is somewhere in the middle.
It carries the highest values of all the turns
where gymnasts are doing three revolutions on the beam or floor.
Execution scores you on how well you perform the technique.
Basically, are you executing properly? And if not, what did you do wrong?
Nicole Langevin is a gymnastics judge, choreographer and consultant.
To truly spin that with proper posture, proper foot position, proper execution
and precision of arms is pretty darn difficult.
First thing we look for is what position is the foot in when they start?
The support foot
is often turned out like a ballerina.
So that's how it has to finish at the end.
And usually it doesn't. Usually it finishes parallel.
Then I want to see that that extended leg stays extended.
There is a deduction in gymnastics on every single event,
and it's called dynamics:
Doing difficult things and making them look easy.
When you're spinning around going, whoa, with your arms,
that's not very dynamic.
A perfect wolf turn score
would combine its relatively high difficulty level
with a flawless execution--
something only top athletes can pull off.