Kite foil: a new Olympic sport and scientific research on the modeling of kite boards
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.
