Julia Lipnitskaya
I'm not following the winter Olympics very closely but know that Norway are not doing as well as (we) expected, something to do with the wax on their skis I believe. One news clip that caught my eye was of a 15 year old skater called Julia Lipnitskaya who seems to have an excellent understanding of rotational mechanics. There were a couple of things that caught my eye, firstly the incredible angular velocity she achieves at the end of the routine but mainly its the bit at the beginning where she goes from leg out to crouch position (technical ice dance terms). The change in rotational inertia doesn't appear to be very much but the increase in angular velocity is significant. I'm very glad that rotational mechanics is back in the new engineering option and hope that my students choose to study it, lots of interesting stuff and good experiments. A video analysis of this clip would make a great investigation.