Helpful Handicap

Quirk writes "National Geographic has an interesting article connecting the Olympics of ancient Greece with the modern principles of physics. The ancient Greeks used hand weights called halteres held in each hand when attempting the Olympic contest of the standing long-jump. The idea of hand held weights in the long-jump might at first seem counterintuitive but the idea is scientifically sound and was supposedly first fairly accurately explained by no less a person than Aristotle, the father of syllogistic logic."

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[gene_tailor]

For the visually oriented, there's pictures of halteres in the commentary in Nature along with another brief article. The technical description and data to support this theory about how the halteres were beneficial is here, but I think this is only accessible to Nature subscribers.

Re:Awesome if it pans out.

[gene_tailor]

>If this works, we should definitely re-introduce it to the games

That would be cool, but we'd have to re-introduce the standing long jump; apparently the modern Olympic event is a long jump with a running start, so it's not clear that the halteres make any difference with that.