Michael Holden's research helped put men on the moon and might someday put astronauts on Mars. But for now he's got a simpler, and decidedly lower-altitude, mission: putting Americans on medal platforms at the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy.
The 67-year-old aerospace engineer heads the Calspan-University at Buffalo Research Center in upstate New York, one of the world's foremost hypervelocity-testing facilities. "If it goes above Maché3," he says with a cheery English accent, "we test it here." The space race brought the British-born Holden to Buffalo in 1964, and these days he uses wind tunnels to streamline Martian landers, Scram jet engines, bunker-busting missiles, and, in his spare time, the United States' best winter athletes.
Holden, a long-time ace on the powder himself, threw open his doors to elite alpine skiers in the early '80s, after a chance meeting with a Team USA official that led to a question. "Know where we can find a wind tunnel?" Indeed, Holden did. His own research center had been using one to study air flow around buildings, until a budget cut sliced the program and mothballed that particular tunnel. So Holden got to work outfitting it to accommodate his new task of measuring drag on athletes. He installed cameras, modified the floor, and added a videoscreen so skiers could watch themselves in real time. The lab has hosted Olympic gold medalists like Tommy Moe and Picabo Street, and current stars Bode Miller and Daron Rahlves.
Other US teams, smitten with science, have tapped into Holden's know-how as well. The luge, speed skating, and skeleton sledding squads use the tunnel to learn how to go faster. For the US ski jumpers, Holden built a mechanized apparatus of pulleys and torsion bars that allows read-outs to be taken on jumpers suspended from the roof. He has contributed to seven US gold medals, donating time that would otherwise cost more than $1,000 an hour at the facility.
The 8- by 6-foot metal wind tunnel looks like a square submarine. It has a window on one side and an exterior decorated with autographed posters of Olympic greats. More than a few have inscriptions like THANKS DOC. COULDN'T HAVE DONE IT WITHOUT YOU. Though Holden scoffs at the idea of an official title, two decades of work have rendered him the de facto Team USA physicist.
Holden applies aerodynamic research to the choreography of elite racers as they streak down a mountain at 90émiles per hour. He shows skiers how a single careless move - say, allowing a hand to drift from the body for a moment - can add about 20épounds of resistance, more than is created by the friction of the skis on snow. That makes a huge difference in a sport where races are won by fractions of seconds. When Holden takes a skier through a tunnel session, they rehearse moving between turns and tucks, scripting a pattern that's low on drag and high on speed.
But it's more than just moving the body correctly. "Getting the suit to fit right, getting the goggles and the helmet on correctly - equipment can account for about 10 pounds of extra resistance," he says. Asked what, exactly, will give US skiers an edge in Turin this year, the old Cold Warrior protects his state secrets and politely demurs.
What Holden can talk about is his latest effort at marrying science and skiing. Using strain gauges he built into bindings, he's collecting info on how alpine skiers shift their weight from foot to foot while carving into a hill. At the bottom of the slope, Holden dumps the data into a computer that syncs with a video of the pass down the mountain. Coaches get a graphics-rich display of exactly how a skier moved.
Of course, the engineer knows that all this better-racing-through-science is nothing without world-class athletes. "If they can't ski," Holden says, "they'll still end up in the trees - just a little faster."
- Geoffrey Gagnon
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Team USA's Physicist
