What’s the Hardest Move in Ice Dancing? Twizzles

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Often, for non-athletes, watching the Olympics is an exercise in frustration. It’s just hours of gawking at extremely gifted competitors make very difficult things look very easy. The 2018 Winter Olympics will be no different. Alpine ski jumps, snowboarding moves, impossible-seeming hockey shots—it’ll be a buffet of heroic efforts. But what are actually the hardest feats to pull off? Probably not the things you think.

Take figure skating. You might think that landing on one skate after flinging yourself around in the air would be the hardest part. But if you ask the brother-and-sister ice dancing team Alex and Maia Shibutani, aka the ShibSibs, the toughest thing to pull of is a twizzle. “One of the most difficult tricks or elements—that’s the technical term—is twizzles,” says Alex Shibutani. “Twizzles are rotating turns done on one foot; they need to be done across the ice, in unison.”

But that’s just one of the hardest tricks, er elements, that athletes heading to PyeongChang will be pulling off in the coming weeks. For the latest episode of Tech Support, WIRED gathered a bunch of them to get all the pro tips before things get underway. What’s the toughest thing about bobsledding? Turns out it’s steering and, as Jamie Greubel Poser says, the pressure. Literally. “When we go down the track, we go about 75 to 95 miles an hour and we reach up to 5 Gs of pressure,” she says. “If you’ve never felt a G, it’s hard to explain until you’ve gone down and felt it.”

And snowboarding? Actually all of that is hard. At first. “Skiing is easier to learn, but harder to get good at,” says snowboarder Chloe Kim. “Snowboarding is hard to learn, but easier to get good at.”

Watch US Olympians and Paralympians answer all of Twitter’s questions about the 2018 Winter Olympics in the Tech Support video above.