All Pain, No Gain with Charles Liu

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

StarTalk begins right now.

This is StarTalk Sports Edition.

We’re going to talk about the science of the weird in this episode, but more on that in a moment.

Let me first introduce my co-host, Chuck Nice, Chuckie Baby.

Hey, what’s up, Neil?

Always good to have you, actor and comedian.

We get to say actor now, along with comedian.

You’re acting and stuff.

He’s acting like a comedian.

That’s what I said.

Oh, yeah, that’s what that is, okay.

Acting like a comedian.

Next time, you need our permission, you know, if you’re going to start acting.

So also I got my co-host, Gary O’Reilly.

Gary.

Hey, Neil.

Yeah, you’re stateside, but you’re fundamentally a Brit.

You sound Brit.

You talk Brit.

You think Brit.

If it walks like and talks like, it must be.

But we’ve got you because of your professional experience as a footballer, a soccer player in England.

It’s great to have you on the, you know, as co-host, as always, as always.

So tell me about the sports of the weird, Gary, because, you know, I looked at the notes and said, I don’t know what the hell Gary cooked up for this show.

So take us in.

I know there’s a lot in the recipe here, Neil.

Hopefully it’ll all come through and okay, in this episode, you’ll hear me mention Queen Elizabeth II, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sir David Attenborough, who is royalty as well, the Wu Tang Clan, Squid Games and cheese.

So you see sports, it’s a human thing.

No other species on this planet invents a pastime and then organizes it into a championship or a tournament.

The ancient Greeks, well, they had the Olympics.

And every village and town around them was-

Wait, wait.

Gary, even humans don’t have that list of objects and people and phenomena and then connect them in any way at all.

You’re telling me you’re connecting those in this episode?

Yes.

And you’ll see as we go along.

Now, it’s all about finding out the fastest and the strongest and who can throw the furthest, all of that sort of thing.

But there are sports that didn’t make it onto the Olympic playlist.

So if I mention a couple, extreme ironing.

Oh, that is, I love that.

All right, all mountain unicycling.

Right, so this Chuck, really, basically, what I’m saying is the Brits are mainly responsible for all of the silly, weird and wonderful sports that are out there.

And we are going to look, with our best friend, Charles Liu, at the science that’s going to be buried in there.

So, Charles Liu.

Welcome back.

Oh wait, wait, we got Charles Liu!

Oh my gosh!

Oh, geek in chief!

Geek in chief, Charles!

It is a great pleasure to be here as always, thank you.

Great to see you guys.

Yes.

This is like your 50th appearance on the show.

Something like that, yeah.

Clearly we can’t do the show without you.

So, you’re our geek in chief friend and colleague, a professor of astronomy and physics at the City University of New York, Staten Island.

And Chuck, always good to have you.

Oh, it’s such a pleasure to be here as always.

It’s always good to have you.

Well, Charles, it’s all, that’s right.

In this episode, I’m Charles because the true Chuck, there is the one true Chuck when it comes to StarTalk.

That would be Chuck Norris.

That is Chuck Nice right there.

Great to see you.

So, yeah, yeah, so all good.

And like I said, as our geek in chief, however geeky I think I am, you’re geeky-er.

So, that’s why we have you on here.

In the geek spectrum, which knows no bounds.

You speak so kindly of me, sir.

So, Gary, what’s the first sport you got lined up here, Gary?

All right, so I have to go straight for a British sport.

Cheese rolling.

Oh, yes.

On Cooper’s Hill in Gloucestershire.

Thought to date back 600 years and be rooted in pagan rituals.

All right, so here are the numbers, so pay attention.

Cooper’s Hill is 200 yards long.

It has a gradient of 50% and it’s near vertical in places.

The original wheel of cheese weighed between seven and nine pounds, but it is now fake cheese made of foam for the safety of the spectators, which is a bit sad.

The cheese has been clocked at 70 miles an hour and the object of the race is to get to the bottom of the hill first and probably still be alive.

It has been dubbed the world’s most dangerous foot race.

Charles, take it away.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, just to be clear.

When you say the cheese is going 70 miles an hour, it’s rolling 70 miles an hour.

Yeah, yeah.

Someone’s taking a speed gun and clocked it.

Yeah.

It’s a classic, it’s a classic freshman physics problem, Neil.

Remember all those days?

You roll a wheel of cheese without slipping down an incline of 50%, 200 yards at the bottom.

What is its velocity?

Remember those things?

Right, right.

But you have to know what the, you have to know how much did the thing like to roll.

That’s right.

There’s the moment of inertia, I guess they called it, yes.

The disc of the moment of inertia.

And then you have to figure out how much of the kinetic energy goes in the rotation and how much of it goes in the translation down the hill.

There’s this magical thing called rolling without slipping, which allows you to make some of these really cool calculations.

If you start sliding, then bets are off.

But we’re assuming that these cheeses roll, right?

They’re not just like slip sliding away down the hill.

No, they’re bouncing, Charles, because this is not a perfectly level.

Ah-ha!

I would say bounding.

They’re bounding down the hill, okay?

Okay, it’s get along little cheeses.

Okay, we’re moving along.

Here’s your take.

It’s 200 yards long, right?

Which is 600 feet.

At a 50% grade, roughly, that means what?

So square root of two by.7 is the height.

It’s 50% grade, 45 degree angle?

Correct, that’s what it is.

Yeah, okay, so square root of two out of the…

Mm-hmm, so of 600 feet, right?

So that’s about 400 feet or thereabouts.

Now, if you remember your physics from, like I said, one half AT squared, how long it takes to fall 400 feet, the answer is about four seconds, okay?

So the acceleration of gravity going straight down, about four seconds, at each second, you go 32 feet per second faster than you did before, or about 22 miles an hour faster, which means that if you’ve just fell straight down from the top 200 yards all the way vertically, like off a cliff, you know, Wile E.

Coyote kind of falling, when you hit the bottom, you’d be going around 80 to 90 miles an hour, but you’re rolling.

So some of it is going into your rolling, some of it is going away, and some of the times you’re bounding, then you’re not constrained by gravity at all.

So 70 miles an hour actually makes sense.

You could actually get to that speed.

Now, a human being couldn’t do that because we don’t roll without slipping.

When we roll, we slip badly, right?

That is how we roll.

There you go.

Score one for Chuck.

Man, that was a good one, Chuck.

I wish I thought of that one.

I said, that’s how I roll.

Now, a person running, right, Usain Bolt on a flat field will run 200 yards at a speed of about 20 to 25 miles per hour.

That’s about right, yeah.

Yeah, you get that gravity assist a little bit, then it’s a matter of trying to figure out whether you can plant your foot and rotate your speed fast enough, kind of like the Flash or the Road Runner or something.

Meet, meet, you know, you have to make sure that your feet are synced with how fast you’re falling combined with how fast you can turn.

So you could probably get-

Wait, wait, wait, do you see that’s something very important there, Charles?

What you’re saying is, as you’re running, I mean, this is so obvious that to say it, it’s like, what?

Is that what we actually do?

What you’re saying is, when I leap, I have to make sure that when I come in contact with the ground again, it’s the bottom of my foot that’s doing it and not my knee or my elbow or my head.

Or my chin.

Or my chin.

Okay.

That’s why you have the ambulances waiting at the bottom of the hill for this one, right, Jerry?

Oh, for sure.

So the answer is you have to time your motion of your feet to compensate not just for your regular running, but when you’re falling and then you’ve got to know where your foot’s gonna land.

And so that’s another physics problem.

Fortunately, human beings are great at physics, not necessarily great at writing down answers on a piece of paper, but great at sort of calculating where our foot needs to be at any given time to reach the ground just as we are reaching the ground.

You mean physiologically, we’re good at that calculation without even knowing we’re doing the calculation?

Our brains just do it for us, and it’s the translation onto your calculations with an equation or a piece of paper or a laptop.

That’s why babies look like they’re drunk when they’re walking.

Right.

Oh wait, no, you mean babies aren’t just, wait, babies aren’t actually drunk when they’re rolling?

If you actually watch people chasing a wheel of cheese down Cooper’s Hill, they are not smoothly running.

Right.

They are flipping, slipping, sliding, banging into each other and things, because this is a natural hill.

So it’s got all sorts of divots and bumps and lumps in it.

So it’s just hilarious to watch.

Is the idea that your wheel of cheese gets to the bottom first, and then you also have to be the first human at the bottom of the hill?

Yeah, that’s it.

It’s a complicated set of rules.

They throw the cheese over the edge first, and then a second later, everybody chases it.

And whoever gets to the bottom first goes home with a big cheese.

Yeah, you get to go home with the cheese you came with.

There’s only one wheel of cheese.

Yeah.

And you get to the bottom.

Do you take home their cheese wheel?

Oh, there you go.

No, no, there’s only the one.

If they have a race, there’s only one wheel of cheese.

You don’t bring your own.

Okay, so it’s just one giant wheel of cheese.

It’s a poor country.

They can only hold one wheel of cheese.

How about wheels of cheese racing against each other?

Because you could, if you know physics, you could fix that one, make your wheel come in first every time.

Charles, what would you do to your wheel if you wanted?

Oh, well, you want it to have the most amount of its kinetic energy going down the hill and the least amount of it spinning, right?

Okay, yeah.

Yeah, which would mean, wouldn’t you want to squish the cheese to more like a bowling ball rather than a wheel?

Into the middle, right, okay.

Yeah.

Uh-huh, uh-huh.

Bowling ball filled with cheese.

Wait, what, yeah, what’s the moment of inertia of a sphere again?

It’s smaller than the rim.

I think it’s two-fifths MR squared.

Two-fifths.

Okay, two-fifths will be the rim.

So, let me give you my equation.

Here’s what you do with the cheese.

Chuck’s got an equation.

You eat it.

You eat it.

Just eat it?

Just eat it?

Yeah, screw this game, guys, I’m hungry.

But the cheese is like 70 pounds, dude.

It’s plenty for all.

Okay, so it’s not a race.

Gary, can you eat a wheel of cheese after you roll it down a hill?

Is it still edible, is my point.

Okay, well, in that case, it’s-

You gotta wrap it really careful.

Oh yeah, they do.

They put a wooden sort of case around it.

I was wondering, it’s probably not Brie.

Tic, tic.

Cause Brie.

Now you’ve mentioned it, it will be double Gloucester, which is a harder cheese.

And therefore, not likely to end up sputtering everywhere.

Is this just what we would call cheddar, and you’ll call it double Gloucester?

No, double, no, no, no.

Oh gosh.

Sorry.

Don’t get your cheeses up.

Cheddar, double Gloucester, red Leicestershire, it’s all, it’s all-

But it sounds like firm cheese.

Okay, got it.

Yeah.

So I had it wrong.

We’re not racing cheese wheels.

You’re racing people down the hill, and then-

Following a chart.

And it’s not a straight line, and it’s not a thing.

And Chuck, getting back to your Usain Bolt reference, Usain Bolt might not win that race because it’s not a straight path.

Correct.

It’s like a cross-country run, but at a breakneck pace, and where you can possibly actually break your neck.

Yeah.

That’s about right.

When you explain it that way, I wanna watch this sport.

Damn, okay.

All right, so, and this has been going on for how long?

About 600 years.

Oh, yeah.

Now, if they use the same wheel of cheese, that’s one hard cheese has lasted for 600 years.

That’s like not double Gloucester, that’s like a quintuple Gloucester by then, right?

No, that’s not gonna be happening.

Definitely evidence that there was no cable television then.

Ah!

No HBO for sure.

Exactly.

All right, so Gary, what’s the next sport?

What’s the next crazy ass sport you have from your home country?

Okay, we’re moving out of Britain, but not too far.

We’re going to Norway.

There is such a thing as the World Belly Flop Championships.

Okay, wait, wait, okay.

I don’t have time, wait.

We gotta put that in the next segment.

What?

Don’t even start that until we have a fresh segment to put that in.

This is StarTalk Sports Edition, weird sports from throughout the world.

Brought to you by Gary.

I got nothing to do with this one.

This is all Gary.

All right, we’ll be back in a moment.

We’re back, StarTalk Sports Edition.

Gary O’Reilly has culled from throughout the world, specifically his part of the world, crazy ass sports, that Gary, I think you made this episode take place so that one day we will look at curling and say, hey, that’s a good sport.

I think you’re trying to reset, or you’re trying to recalibrate how any of us have ever looked at the sport curling.

We got a geek in chief, Charles Liu, who’s always good to take us to places we didn’t even think of going.

And of course, Chuck Nice.

So keep it going, Gary.

All right, so the world championships of belly flopping is a thing, but it’s really taken on a massive interest in Norway where it’s known as dodging, which translates apparently into death diving, right?

Now this sounds weird.

It was invented in 1972 by Erling Bruno Hovdun.

You start on a 10 to 14 meter diving tower.

But just to be clear, 1972 was before lead was banned in drinking water.

That’s one year before the laws went into effect at least in the United States of banning lead and leaded gas, but gone.

Could be anecdotal, but could be a connection.

Put it out there.

So you’re diving off of a tower into a swimming pool at 32 to 45, 46 feet high.

There’s classic belly flop, arms outstretched, legs outstretched.

You just hit the surface of the water.

Then there’s freestyle, where in midair you have stunts.

And then just as you’re about to impact, you just curl up in a ball and cannonball through it.

I said a belly flop, that’s a cannonball.

No, but there’s classic belly flop.

So there’s two different events.

You can enter the classic or go for the freestyle.

Oh, so the freestyle.

Oh, okay, so the freestyle is it, it’s not how much splash you don’t make, it’s how much splash you do make.

And it’s, no, it’s the mid-air stunts.

You have to perform a mid-air stunt and hold it for as long as you possibly can.

Got it, okay.

So I mean, a Dodds is the dive.

There is an international Dodds Federation, although the delightful people of the Norwegian Swimming Federation do not recognize it.

The World Championships will attract something like 3,000 paying spectators.

So it’s quite a thing.

If you see it, it’s really, I mean, I suppose Norwegians are famous for ski jumping.

So this is basically how to ski jump without the skis and without the snow.

So Norwegians have some of the highest per capita income in the world.

Well there you have it.

So is that it, Chuck?

Is it?

Because survival is not a thing they got to worry about.

So they have to introduce ways they might die just to bring excitement to their life.

So Charles, if I take a running jump as say like a man of 170 pounds or something like that off a tower some 30, 40 feet high, what sort of force am I going to hit the surface of the water?

That’s a good question, but you have to be a little bit careful about this because it’s not so much the force that matters, right?

The amount of force you’re experiencing from gravity is a constant amount, right?

Your mass times the acceleration of gravity, 9.8 meters per second.

Rather, it’s the momentum you have when you reach the water and how much time it takes for you to slow down, right?

And then that leaves you with the thing called impulse.

So the amount of force you experience is if you have a whole bunch of momentum and you’re falling and in a very short time or a very long time, you reduce that momentum to zero, right?

So that’s why, for example, when you’re on the side of the road, you have these crash pads or near the toll booths or something like that.

The longer it takes for you to stop, the less force you will experience at any given time.

So that’s why high jumpers have big pillows on the other side of their…

Exactly.

You want to slow down their fall, not so much to sort of stop it.

So, it’s not just the amount of force, which would be the mass of the individual.

Well, 170 pounds is, what, about 80 kilograms or so.

I got to say this just so that Chuck doesn’t have to say it.

So there will be another Olympics where you have the pole vault and they land on cement.

That’s a different sport.

Did the Norwegians invent that too?

They are tough people.

I thought the ski jump was already bad enough.

I don’t know if they invented them, but imagine going down a hill in your skis through the air, like 300 feet and then landing.

That’s really amazing.

Those guys are very impressive.

So bottom line is, if you’re belly flopping, you are hitting not only quickly, you’re stopping really fast, but you also have a large surface area on which that you’re hitting.

So every single spot on your skin gets smacked.

Those good divers, well, I don’t want to say good, those professional divers or Olympic divers, they’re always trying to be as vertical as possible.

As little splashes.

That’s right.

So that when you hit, you have the smallest surface area sliced through and you don’t actually feel a lot of pain.

Then you let the water stop you.

And the underwater cameras, they go down 10 feet or something.

So over that 10 feet, they’re slowing down.

That’s right.

So now at what point does the water itself offer enough resistance to just break you in half or like bust your bones up?

I mean, there’s got to be a point where that water becomes as hard as cement.

The Golden Gate Bridge.

People don’t survive jumping off that bridge.

Right.

It’s a surface effect, as it turns out.

Basically, by the way materials work, because you’re going from a low density into high density, even if that water is liquid, when you hit, you can have a substantially strong amount of impulse that gets hit to you at that time.

Exactly, when you’re jumping from a high distance into water, if you hit even from your platform there at 30 feet or 40 feet, Gary, you can break bones, you can snap joints if you’re not careful.

So those belly floppers aren’t just playing around.

They’re probably being very, very careful that they hit with the soft part of their torsos, so they don’t actually hit with their head and their chin going up against the rest of their body, and thus snapping something like a spine.

I mean, the record is over 100 feet.

With the record for someone who lived?

But that’s not the classic belly flop, right?

I’m sure that’s the curling into a cannonball at the last moment.

You could probably hit with your buttocks or something like that, and you’re much less likely to break something that’s irreparable.

But you can’t sit down for at least a week.

Yeah, so it is interesting.

So in the cannonball, if you hit butt first…

So Charles, is a fat butt or a narrow butt better for a cannonball land?

Oh, well, there are two actors at work there, right?

Because when you’re talking about…

I mean, the left butt cheek and the right butt cheek.

The left and the right.

Yeah, that’s exactly.

If you’re trying to minimize your cross-sectional area hitting the water, then you want that narrow tuchus, right?

On the other hand, the tuchus has substantial padding, and that will slow down your time of deceleration, right?

The amount of time it takes for you to reduce your speed, just like a bumper on a car would.

So you may want more bumper to slow you down, and thus you may not want to hit directly as tail-on as possible, but just a little bit off to the sides, you get that nice fatty cushion.

Doesn’t that dissipate the energy better?

Yeah, I’d have to do the calculations.

I think that would be a lot of fun to do.

Okay, so Gary, this is now a 50-year-old sport.

Does it make money?

If there’s 3,000 spectators turning up for the World Championships, I’m guessing they make money, because there’ll be all the sort of merchandising, there’ll be also…

And it appears on TV.

So they’re selling the TV rights, they’re selling out spectators in stadiums in Norway.

So, yeah, the World Championships are belly flopping, it’s on.

It’s out there making money.

Norway television must really suck if this is…

If that’s a primetime special.

Right, if this is a primetime sport.

Okay, Chuck, let’s just get this fair.

The winters in Northern Norway are long and dark.

And the summers, the sun, up in places like Narvik, the sun will not set during summer.

So there’s a lot of difference.

So the summer is the opposite of the winters.

The days are long and it never gets dark.

Yeah, because I think in the winter, the nights are long and it never gets light.

Right, so that all switches out.

So, Charles, any calculation, fast calculation in your head about whether a 300-pound fat person relative to a 130-pound skinny person would do better in this kind of event?

Oh, gee, calculate real quick.

Because we think with a lot of fat, it protects your inner organs, right, on a fall.

If in the classic, in the classic, where you’re actually landing on your belly, you do want more subcutaneous belly stuff to slow you down.

In the classic belly flop, as long as you have good technique and you’re landing on your belly properly, right, without like bending your spine too much that you wind up snapping it or something, then you probably want to be larger and have more fat.

So that would take the energy of contact and dissipated into your fat without breaking your ribs, for example.

That’s right.

That’s exactly what you would want.

On the other hand, if you were that cannonball thing, you do your tricks in the air, then you curl into a ball and drop in, I think being thin would be better because then your profile going in will be smaller.

Right, and if you’re heavy going in into the cannonball, it’d be like in all of the water parks with the fish show, with the porpoise shows.

There’s a splash zone.

Yes, that’s right.

First 10 rows.

Watch out.

Yeah, you would wind up producing quite a splash.

No question about it.

So Gary, anything else you want to add to this before we go on to the next sport?

Uh, no, I think we’ve covered it.

Allow me to say, allow me to just, a shout out to the Norwegians, okay?

At this moment, the Norwegians, they have this fascinating sport, which is still intriguing to all of us on this panel, but they also have the world record for the 400 meter hurdle, and they have the highest ranking chess player there ever was.

And this is a country of how many people?

Eight.

Eight people?

Eight people?

No more people.

A few million, like somewhere between, like a five million people, maybe?

As many as in a metropolitan area of a city in America.

So that’s, they’re doing something right.

Give them their belly flop if the rest of this is going down the way it is.

Yeah, hooray for Norway, I say.

Yeah, all right, so Gary, what sport is up next?

Face slapping.

Uh-oh, uh-oh, all right, all right.

Yeah, there it is again.

Okay, we’re gonna take a break, and we’ll come back.

We’ll come back and talk about face slapping as a sport.

Face slapping as a sport on StarTalk Sports Edition when we return.

We’re back, StarTalks, Sports Edition.

Odd, unusual sports, all of which Gary invented.

With my Norwegian jumps.

Yeah, we talked about cheese rolling, we talked about belly flopping, and what’s the next topic here, Gary?

Face slapping.

And I do not have an origin as national identity for this thing.

It’s been featured in Squid Games, the Netflix show.

Get out.

Yeah, so here we go.

They love it in Russia.

One of their slap kings, that’s the official term, is Vasily Chemostitskaya, or affectionately known as Dumpling, who weighs in at 370 pounds.

It’s open to both men and women, but they don’t hit the end.

You say, you know, women slap women, men slap women.

The rules are simple, you get five slaps each, that’s if you get that far, and if you evade a slap, you get a foul, two fouls and you’re out.

You can only use the upper part of your palm and cannot touch the jaw, temple or ear.

What’s left on the face to slap?

The cheek, the cheek, right here.

Yeah.

But the cheek is connected to the jaw.

But you don’t hit the jaw, you can only hit the cheek.

Yeah.

Yeah, that makes sense, because you want to break the jaw.

Charles, you sound like you would help write the rules.

I thought you were as new to this as the rest of us on this call.

All right, go on, Gary.

What else?

So, we’ve got someone who’s 370 pounds.

His arms are probably like my legs, and he’s going to slap me in the face, and I’m standing there and letting him do it.

So, what determines who wins?

Oh, if you just say, I’ve had enough, you have to stand your ground and be slapped.

But wait, you only get five.

And then it’s your go.

You only get five shots, didn’t you just say?

So, anyone can handle five shots.

Not when someone has meat hands coming at you, 370 pounds.

Because you’ve got a straight arm lever, you’ve got a gigantic hand that’s coming at you.

I can’t imagine what sort of speed, but I don’t like the idea of that at all.

This game works for me.

I get to go first, and then I quit.

I go first, and then I forfeit.

I lose.

Oh.

So broken up.

But you know there’s going to be someone who is so determined not to quit, they’ll stick it out.

Unless there is one out.

These are crazy people.

Right.

These are people who, like…

And what country leads this?

I don’t think there is a leader, although it is popular in Russia.

So is this a spectator sport, Gary?

Yes.

They have championships.

And although the prize money isn’t enormous, you get to walk out there with about $1,000 or something like that, and they’ll have championships based around places.

And obviously there’s weight categories, I would imagine.

The 370-pound giant pitching up against the 100.

You don’t want anybody slapped into orbit.

That’s exactly it.

Are you allowed to enter other people?

As attackers or as targets?

Well, yeah, as targets.

Well, I’ll tell you what, Gary.

$1,000 or so can certainly buy you a lot of ice packs.

Just exactly the right amount of ice packs.

That’s right.

But I would not necessarily discount a thin person or a lightweight person doing poorly compared to a heavyweight person in this kind of competition.

Why?

Well, think about it.

It’s arm speed, right?

The arm speed is what matters more than anything else.

The kinetic energy is 1 half mv squared.

V, the velocity, it increases much faster than the mask, which is going places linearly.

Right.

So if you can be really fast, then you’re good.

Not to mention, let’s say if you are thin, you might be more limber in your joints.

And thus, when you get struck, you might be able to absorb it a little bit better by allowing your face and your joints to change.

It’s increasing the amount of time your body has to absorb the force and therefore experience less force.

As we talked about earlier, and just to emphasize a point Charles made, the most lethal bullets fired out of a rifle are not the fattest, heaviest bullets.

They’re very small.

You know, the M16 rifle, high velocity, high muzzle velocity, is it like a 22 caliber, somewhere around there?

Yes,.

223.

So basically a 22 caliber bullet.

So they said, let’s give up some mass, but put it all in the velocity.

And that’s what makes it so lethal.

So very good point, Charles.

So Charles, what if you have less nerve endings in your cheek?

I mean, how many nerve endings in a human cheek?

Answer please.

A million.

But yes, if you were somehow genetically predisposed that you had fewer cheek nerve cells, then you might tolerate the pain a little bit more.

But I’m thinking more along the lines of the damage that it would do to your face.

How many blood vessels would break?

The millions of capillaries that are in your cheek muscles.

Those kinds of things.

And so in that sense, you can imagine a very not heavyweight person, but with a lot of cheek fat.

And that would make you a very strong candidate in this kind of contest.

So the similar thing to the belly flopping, so the dissipation of energy through the cheek.

Right.

Gary, you got one more sport, I think.

Is that right?

Yeah, let’s do another one of the finest sports ever created by the Brits, shin kicking.

Shin kicking.

From slapping to kicking.

Why do these sports have to be so violent?

What gets you ready for soccer?

Because they kick in each other’s…

Why can’t you just do something like carry your wife or something?

Wouldn’t that be a better sport?

There is that.

The Finns do that.

There is a wife carrying competition.

What?

Yeah, it’s over an obstacle course.

Is this before they’re married or after they’re married in preparation for the threshold for the wedding night?

You don’t actually have to carry your own wife or have a wife.

You have to have a young woman or a woman over the age of 17 who you carry over…

I think there’s two dry hurdles.

I would just assume they would be marrying over that age anyway and that wouldn’t have to be a rule in the sport, but go on.

That’s a rule.

The rule is, and wife carrying, the woman must be over 17 years of age.

You throw her over your shoulders, there’s different styles.

Like a sack of potatoes, okay?

Well, I’m not referring to young ladies as a sack of potatoes.

Okay.

Then there’s the fireman’s carry, then there’s a thing called a stonia style.

Oh.

Okay, so basically the woman is over your shoulders and her legs come over the front of you.

And you hold on to those.

And that, I suppose, Charles, is kind of like a counterbalance, a lever.

Yes, that’s right.

And allows you to then run.

That’s just a piggyback ride you give your kids.

No, no, it’s the reverse piggyback.

Oh, no, the woman’s upside down.

Okay, I thought this was a family show.

Because…

Let me tell you what you just described.

I didn’t invent the sport.

I was going to go for shin kicking.

Charles wanted to do one very…

These are sports at all.

So how did this begin?

The wife carrying thing…

No, no, no, just go to the shin kicking.

Go ahead.

Alright, so shin kicking is another British thing.

It’s in the same part of the world as the cheese rolling.

So obviously, they definitely don’t have cable TV.

It goes back about 400 years to a thing called the Cotswold Olympics.

And that’s Olympics spelt with a K.

It should be, on the surface, the stupidest sport anyone could ever, ever have invented.

But there’s something going on with it.

It takes place in the beautiful area of the Cotswolds.

They have banned steel toe caps.

Wait, wait, is that a person, place or thing, the Cotswolds?

It’s a place, the Cotswolds.

It’s an area of Britain, just to the south west.

Okay, thank you.

Forgive my American geographic ignorance.

I think there’s a cheese name Cotswold, isn’t there?

Yes, there probably will be.

It does have a deeper meaning and it’s strange, but if I explain it, maybe then you’ll have a better understanding.

Shin kicking is absurd, right?

But not without this meaning.

It’s about standing your ground.

It’s about stubbornly resisting the assaults that come your way and giving back as good as you get.

Okay, so it’s about revenge.

It’s a bit weird.

There’s rules.

Wait a minute.

There are rules.

You stand there, stand your ground.

You kick somebody in the shins, and then how much time do they get to recover?

Because I’ve never been kicked in the shins, I’ve never bumped my shin on a coffee table, I’ve never even scraped my shin without immediately pulling it up to my chest and writhing in pain.

So how much time do you get to recover?

It’s an ongoing bout.

So each, here we go, this is the quaint British tradition, each person has to wear, there’s two people in a ring to begin with, right?

A circular ring, and there’s a judge outside.

And they both have to wear white coats, they have to hold on to the collar of each of their opponent, and if they get them on the ground, they win and there are three, count them, one, two, three, rounds.

And you can only kick between the knee and the foot.

Okay, so it’s like wrestling with kicking.

You’re holding the person like the, I forget the hold that when you see those guys wrestling, they start off with their hand on the neck, and then you get to kick the guy, and if somebody goes down, then they win.

Yeah, you ground your opponent, you get a point, and you get as many, whoever gets the most points after three rounds wins, or if someone says, you know what, I’ve had enough, my shins really hurt now, I’m going home.

It still sounds like, Gary, that people, they need more streaming TV services.

There are a lot of bored people, and the twisted mind that came up with this, I don’t quite know, but it’s a thing, shin kicking.

I hope they’re allowed to wear shin guards.

That’d be okay.

Do you know what they do?

Okay, so they wear trousers, and they stuff hay down the legs of their trousers to give them some protection.

So it’s not the least bit uncomfortable either.

The tried and true tradition of stuffing your pants.

Yes, I understand.

I would have stuffed a metal plate down my pants.

This is 400 years old.

The access of ready-made metal shin guards wasn’t really there.

That blacksmith would have been my friend.

I’m with Neil on this one.

Hand on top, metal against the skin.

There are so many more weird sports.

There’s a sport called goanna pulling.

The Aussies came up with that.

You mean like Australians, not the Aussies like Ozzie and Harriet.

No, the Australians, the Down Unders.

Then you’ve got chess boxing.

Which has become, yes, you heard me, no tea in there, Chuck, chess boxing.

So you have a round of chess.

They play blitz chess.

So you have a round of chess, and then they go and have a three minute boxing round.

Come back, round of chess, three minutes, and they alternate.

So you win by checkmate or knockout.

Why?

Really, you have to have, I think it’s called an ELO, isn’t it?

The chess sort of gradient system.

You have to have 1,600 and above.

It’s pretty good.

As a chess.

And have been at least, have 50 amateur bouts as a boxer to compete professionally.

So this guarantees that you will lose your cognitive abilities.

Exactly.

So there will be good data there.

Find out what happens to your chess rating every time you get knocked out.

And then this is important concussion data.

Oh my gosh.

I mean, the thing is, science has taken an interest in chess boxing because it’s the ability to flip flop out of a physical strenuous demand, like a round of boxing, and then sit down and be calm, cerebral, and focused.

Yeah.

I don’t know any real life situations where you might have to do that.

I think it’s how the brain works and comes with stress and moving in and out.

But right now, I got to do some calculus.

That’s what happened to me all the time in high school, Chuck.

Well played.

Says the geek in chief.

So guys, we got to land that plane.

So Gary, there’s probably a longer list than we were even able to get to today.

Oh gosh, yeah.

I mean, okay.

Conkers?

We’re out of time, Gary.

Look, I’ve got to drop some names here.

Just in case, the ones we’ve already discussed are not weird enough.

A favorite of Queen Elizabeth II and Sir David Attenborough.

So I got those two names in.

And Arnold Schwarzenegger is a big fan of face slapping.

And the Wu-Tang Clan have a song about chest boxing.

Nice.

There you go.

All connected.

By the way, we’ve had the Jizza on StarTalk.

That was many years ago in our early seasons.

So we get around on this show.

So what’s the favorite sport of Queen Elizabeth?

She was a big fan of Conkers, which is a horse chestnut.

You know those things in the autumn that fall off.

You drill a hole, you put a string through, and then you try and smash your opponent’s Conker with it.

Conkers.

What’s a Conker?

Another British sport.

What’s a Conker?

It’s a horse chestnut.

What do you mean you won’t have to smash their Conkers with your Conkers?

Yes.

Interesting.

Again.

You had me at horse chestnut.

I would have more fun swinging cantaloupes at one another and having them smash.

That’s the Gallagher version.

Now explain to everyone who Gallagher is.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You got to look up Gallagher.

There’s no explaining him.

Look him up.

If you don’t know who Gallagher is, kids, just go to YouTube.

Yeah.

Look up any Gallagher clip.

It’ll see exactly what you got to tell.

My favorite line from Gallagher, and then we got to call it quits.

He was the one that came up with, which was later than repeated by other comedians.

I think he said, if pro is the opposite of con, then progress is the opposite of congress.

Oh.

Yeah.

And God, that saying just keeps getting better.

That came out of him.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right, guys.

Gary, we got to do this again, because apparently we did not exhaust your list.

This has been StarTalk, the weird sports edition.

And Charles, always good to have you, man.

Pleasure.

All right, guys.

That’s has been StarTalk Sports Edition, and I’m Dr.

Neil deGrasse Tyson here, keep looking up.