The 2007 Summer X-Games are ramping up. Skateboarding, surfing, rally car racing, motocross and freestyle motocross (FMX) – that’s what I call physics in action.
My favorite sport is the skateboarding, but freestyle motocross is a close second. Last year, Travis Pastrana landed the first double backflip ever in competition at the 2006 X-Games.
Check out this Youtube clip of Travis pulling off a double to win the best trick competition.
That’s pretty cool, but you may be thinking (as I did), what’s the limit to this backflip stuff? Triple backflips? Quadruple? Quintuple?
It turns out, based on the physics involved, that the most you can ever expect to see in FMX is a quadruple backflip.
To see why this is the limit, check out the first posting in my brand new blog Extreme Sports Physics.