By Alex Leeds Matthews, CNN

(CNN) — Competitions at the Winter Olympics are defined by extremes: extreme air, extreme speed and extreme temperatures.

On sliding tracks, athletes in luge, bobsled and skeleton break highway speed limits. In the halfpipe and big air competitions, snowboarders hit huge jumps, completing dizzying numbers of spins while airborne. They complete these feats often at elevations of more than mile high, where air is thinner, and at temperatures below freezing.

These charts show just how extreme the Winter Olympics can get.

Speed

In the summer, Olympic sprinters and swimmers try to push the limits of the human body alone on land and in water.

But in winter sports, athletes test those limits even further with the aid of gravity or vehicles such as skis and bobsleds to reach or exceed highway speeds.

The Vancouver 2010 Olympics saw some of the fastest-moving Olympians at the Whistler Sliding Centre — one of the fastest tracks in the world for bobsled, luge and skeleton.

The maximum speed reached on that course during the Olympics was by Austrian Manuel Pfister, who exceeded 95 mph (more than 150 km/h) during a luge training run. The next day, Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili fatally crashed on the course, a tragic reminder of the sport’s danger.

The most recent Winter Games at Beijing in 2022 had the fastest alpine skiing race in Olympic history, where gold medalist Beat Feuz of Switzerland won gold cruising at an average speed of 68.7 mph (more than 110 km/h). On that same course, Norwegian Adrian Smiseth Sejersted hit the fastest maximum speed: 86.8 mph (about 140 km/h).

Jumps

While alpine skiers race downhill, the jumpers turn their skis into wings, remaining airborne for distances of more than 100 meters, or nearly 330 feet – almost as long as an NFL football field. The men’s large hill record is more than 160 yards, set when Austrian Gregor Schlierenzauer jumped 146.5 meters in Vancouver.

The focus of snowboarding halfpipe and big-air competitions is often the tricks and landings. But the amplitude of the jumps are equally impressive. In Beijing, Japanese snowboarder Kaishu Hirano set the world record for halfpipe air: 7.41 m, or nearly 24.5 feet.

Two-time snowboard halfpipe gold medalist and 2026 silver medalist Chloe Kim has also gotten big air in the event: During the American’s third run of the 2022 halfpipe final, she exceeded 4.1 m, with a jump of 13.5 feet.

Elevation and temperature

The Winter Olympics are usually held in mountainous areas for easy access to ski events. While some host cities, such as Sochi and Vancouver, are close to local mean sea level, the venues for alpine skiing are typically higher.

This year, men’s skiing events will be held at Stelvio Ski Centre in Bormio, roughly 1,500 meters (almost a mile) above sea level. The feels-like temperature at the Stelvio venue has averaged just over 20 degrees F, below freezing for the first week of the Games, while the city of Milan has

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By Jacopo Prisco, Jackie Wattles, CNN

(CNN) — As he took his final steps before leaving the moon, Apollo 17 commander Gene Cernan had some poignant closing words: “We leave as we came, and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.”

It was December 14, 1972, and Cernan knew his footprints would be the last to impress the lunar soil for a while, because the planned Apollo missions that were supposed to follow — 18, 19 and 20 — had long since been canceled. But he probably wouldn’t have guessed that, over 50 years later, his speech would stand as the last words spoken by a human on the moon.

Artemis II, which NASA is preparing to launch as soon as March after recent testing delays, will perform a lunar fly-by rather than a landing. Still, the mission will mark humanity’s first journey to the vicinity of the moon since Apollo 17.

So why has it taken so long for astronauts to go back?

“The short answer to that question is political will,” said Teasel Muir-Harmony, a historian of science and technology and the curator of the Apollo Collection at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. “It takes a whole lot of political will to send humans to the moon. These are extremely complex, really costly, major national investments. It has to be a priority over a sustained period of time.”

In the years since the Apollo program ended due to budget cuts, there have been a number of other federal initiatives to send humans to the moon again, Muir-Harmony added. “But what’s happened is that as presidential administrations changed, space priorities for these large-scale programs also changed. And so we just haven’t seen the sustained political will to follow through with a program that will take many years, significant funding and lots of resources in general.”

Les Johnson, a former NASA chief technologist who worked at the agency for over three decades, agreed that rapidly changing political objectives have been a key factor: “Every four to eight years, NASA has its human spaceflight goals and objectives completely, totally, radically altered,” he said.

“When I joined NASA in 1990, we were directed to go back to the moon by then President George H.W. Bush. But when President Clinton took office in 1993, he canceled that. He said, we’re going to make the space station happen — don’t do anything associated with going back to the moon,” Johnson said. “We did that for eight years, and then in 2001 we got George W. Bush, and he said, cancel all this other stuff and let’s focus on going back to the moon. So we did, and a project called Constellation was born, which survived the two terms of the second Bush presidency.”

The cycle continued with Barack Obama moving NASA’s priorities more toward sampling asteroids, and President Donald Trump coming in and shifting back to lunar goals. Then, after 2020, Joe Biden broke up the pattern.

“He was the first president in my career at NASA who did not change everything,” Johnson said of Biden. “He said, I really didn’t like a lot of what Trump did, but I think going back to the moon is a good idea. Let’s just keep going.” Now, in Trump’s second term, his administration has recently doubled down on returning astronauts to the lunar surface — intent on outpacing China in the new space race.

Political hurdles aside, however, moon missions also present a remarkable technical challenge. Earth’s natural satellite is roughly a quarter of a million miles (over 400,000 kilometers) away, and over half of all lunar landing attempts have ended in failure. The Artemis program —

By Amarachi Orie, CNN

(CNN) — A Sydney council has banned beachgoers from boarding a community bus while shirtless or wearing bikinis, reigniting a decades-old debate over public decency in Australia.

“Please dress appropriately. Clothing must be worn over swimwear,” reads a sign for the Hop, Skip and Jump bus, which is funded by Northern Beaches Council and drives through the northern Sydney suburbs of Manly, Fairlight and Balgowlah. The sign was shown in a report by CNN affiliate 7News Sydney on Friday.

Bus is the main form of public transportation in the coastal region, the council’s website states.

Denying passengers a ride due to their clothing, or lack of it, will be down to the driver’s discretion, according to 7News.

The change follows complaints from passengers, according to CNN affiliate 9News, with many older commuters in support of the restriction.

“We’re a bit old-fashioned. We’d probably like people to dress properly, especially if you’re on public transport,” one woman told 7News.

Another woman described passengers wearing swimwear as “confronting,” adding that the bus is “small” and “very contained.”

“I think it’s a little off-putting sometimes when you see people get on with virtually no clothes on,” one man said.

However, “the problem becomes where you draw the line,” a younger woman said, adding that “a lot of people will wear activewear on buses.”

The council has not yet added the new rule to its code of conduct for the bus service on its website. The code already instructs passengers not to eat, drink or smoke on the bus, or board with large objects such as surfboards when the bus is full.

CNN had reached out to the council for further comment.

Bikini wars

Australia has a long history of controversy over beachwear.

In the early 1960s, decades of tensions between female beachgoers and the local authority in the eastern Sydney suburb of Waverley rose to the point of being dubbed “the bikini war” by local media, according to local council archives. Similar “wars” raged elsewhere in Sydney, 7News reported.

It followed the arrests of more than 50 women on Bondi Beach during a long weekend in October 1961, after a 1935 ordinance required bathing suits to meet strict measurements, with beach inspectors enforcing the rule.

While the ordinance was abandoned later in 1961 in favor of a simpler requirement for “proper and adequate” swimsuits, debate over appropriate beachwear continues.

In 2024, a call for a ban on wearing G-string bikinis on the streets of Australia’s eastern Gold Coast sparked protests and nationwide debate.

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The post ‘Off-putting’ and ‘confronting’: Bikini

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