The Portugal captain succeeds new Juventus teammate Mario Mandzukic as the winner of a prize which Barcelona superstar Lionel Messi has won twice. Ronaldo was nominated as the Champions League representative over Gareth Bale, who struck a similarly acrobatic effort in Madrid's final win over Liverpool.
They calculated that Hernandez’s leg moved at a speed equivalent to 300 revolutions per minute - which is roughly the same speed at which a helicopter’s wings rotate.Cristiano Ronaldo's amazing overhead kick for Real Madrid against Juventus has won the UEFA Goal of the Season award. Think of it as the hands of a clock: If in a regular kick, a player’s leg moves from 4:00 ? to 7:00 ?, a bicycle kick allows a range of motion that’s far more like moving from 4:00 ? to 12:00 ?. Taking into account the movement of his leg as well as the rotation of the body itself, the path the leg travels is much longer than the path it would take on the ground. With the ball over his head, he jerks his body upward, and with it goes his leg. Without gravity pulling him downward, he has room to maximize the range of motion of his kicking leg. See also: Shaun White’s Gold Medal Run Perfectly Illustrates the Physics of Speedīefore measuring the angular velocity of Hernandez’s leg, they flip him upside down using a harness in order to remove the effects of gravity. Physiological constraints make it impossible for Hernandez’s leg to do a 360, like a helicopter, of course, but the basic principle is the same.
The bicycle-kicking legs of Major League Soccer player Jason Hernandez, they explain, are like the blades of a helicopter, in that it rotates around a single axis. (It certainly helped that Ronaldo’s kick was aimed at the back right corner of the goal.)Ī bicycle kick allows the leg (and body) more room for rotation, which ultimately increases the force applied to the ball. In the case of the bicycle kick, the leg moves so fast that once it meets the ball, the distance the ball can travel is exceptionally far, and the speed that it reaches is exceptionally fast. Generally, the speed of the leg is a key part of the force that’s applied to the ball when it is kicked. What sets the bicycle kick apart from the other kicks used in soccer is that, because the player’s body is so high up off the ground and is angled upward, there is a greater distance for the leg to kick - and, therefore, more opportunity to gain momentum. The notoriously difficult move was, for many reasons, a superhuman feat of physics. In the 64th minute in a match against Juventus on Tuesday, Cristiano Ronaldo of Real Madrid executed a breathtakingly powerful bicycle kick over his head that he later called his “ best goal.” Hurling himself high into the air and rapidly scissoring his right leg upward, his shoelaces met the ball just in time to kick it past Italian goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon.