Mary Theisen-Lappen lifts 359 pounds over her head. Jessica Stevens launches herself from a trampoline before completing multiple flips in midair. Vashti Cunningham high jumps over a bar set to 6 feet 5 inches, the opening height she needs to clear.
And they make it look so easy.
The athleticism that earns Olympians accolades, and for some, medals, is both impressive and, perhaps, underrated.
“We take for granted what we’re seeing on the screen,” said Elijah Walker, a photo editor for The New York Times. To execute a skill of strength, complete a rotation in the air or leap to victory, each athlete needs to master a series of precise movements. Greatness isn’t just skill — it’s science. A skateboarder must utilize energy; a gymnast needs to harness the laws of motion. But the athletes are moving so fast, and so flawlessly, that it can be difficult for viewers at home to understand the mechanics of the movements.
Walker wanted to show readers each step of an athlete’s moment of greatness. So, he and a team of colleagues produced an interactive article, which breaks down the complex biomechanics of Olympic athletes. The piece spotlights six competitors from different sports: rowing, Paralympics freestyle swimming, skateboarding, trampoline gymnastics, weight lifting and high jump.
First, photographers for The Times took single-frame images, in rapid succession, of each athlete performing a routine or completing a skill. Later, multimedia and graphics editors at The Times stitched together selected frames. As a reader taps through the article, the frames seamlessly transition into one another, showing, in slow motion, the steps that make up a movement.
Take Cunningham, one of two female high jumpers representing the United States at the Olympics. When watching her compete on TV, you see her run and jump over the bar. Impressive, yes, but blink and you might miss it.
The sequence takes a matter of seconds, but the Times article breaks down the feat, frame by frame. Readers see each of the nine steps Cunningham takes in her approach. Then they see the moment she jumps, pushing off her left leg, driving up her right knee. They watch as she arches her back and contorts her body over the bar. And they see the sigh-of-relief moment when she lands on her shoulders on the mat, having cleared the height. As the reader taps through the text, Cunningham flies. (In the print presentation, designed by Rodrigo Honeywell for today’s Science Times, individual frames create a flip book-effect, an animation akin to “The Horse in Motion” by the photographer Eadweard Muybridge.)
“We’re always trying to combine something you maybe see every day with the wonder of what’s going on underneath,” said Alan Burdick, an editor on the project.
The interactive article was a collaboration between multiple Times teams, including the Health and Science desk, the Digital News Design group and the photography department.
Before the Olympics began, photographers were dispatched to training events, and in one instance (Cunningham’s high jump) a competition. The goal was to show the athletes doing their real routines, not performing for The Times. Some of the events required photographs from multiple angles, which were spliced together to offer a more complete picture of the body in motion.
“We made sure we got every minutia of the moment,” Walker said.
Some sequences had hundreds of photographs to choose from. Paring them down to a few dozen was a challenge, according to Antonio De Luca, an assistant editor on the Digital News Design team. “We did a lot of experiments on ‘how much is too much’ and ‘how little is too little,’” De Luca said. Matt Ruby, Digital News Design’s deputy editor, coded the interactive, resulting in the smooth digital interface.
Each image was annotated with notes on the science behind the moves, based on interviews between Times reporters and the featured athletes.
“You can watch the body in different stages and we can write to that particular moment in time where the body is, which informs the readers at a slower, but deeper, pace,” said De Luca.
The reporter Gina Kolata, who interviewed Cunningham, said she was thrilled to understand how Cunningham was able to twist her body in midair, something that Kolata said seemed “absolutely impossible.”
“My hope is that someone who has never looked at a track event will look at this and say, ‘Oh, I want to see how she does. I want to watch her do this in the Olympics,’” Kolata said.
For Walker, the project puts into perspective the science of greatness. Jessica Stevens’s routine on the trampoline, for example, proves Isaac Newton’s three laws of motion. On the skateboard, Minna Stess demonstrates the push and pull between potential and kinetic energy.
“We’re trying to present to the audience these amazing things these athletes are able to do with their bodies, and break it down in simpler terms,” he said. “There’s a lot of techniques that they’re implementing that I don’t think we as the average viewers really know about.”
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