Nearly every snowboard trick carries a number. A 1080 means three full rotations. A 1440 means four. The convention is simple: add up every rotation around every axis and count in 180° increments. For decades it’s served as the sport’s universal shorthand for difficulty. Judges, coaches, and athletes all speak this language fluently.
It’s also, by necessity, an over-approximation. Without sensors on the athlete’s body, there was never a way to measure what happens mid-flight. The trick name counts planned rotations and assigns each one a full 360°. That was the best available approach — until now.
Working with U.S. Ski & Snowboard ahead of the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026, we built an AI tool on Google Cloud that extracts full 3D biomechanical data from ordinary video. Using Gemini and frontier computer vision research from Google DeepMind, it turns any camera into a motion-capture system that can help with athlete training and analysis.
We built the tool to track rotational speeds, body posture, airtime, and more. The results were easily understandable to athletes and coaches. But when we started tracking the actual geometric rotation of athletes’ bodies from takeoff to landing — across dozens of elite riders — we found a consistent gap between trick names and physical reality.
Consider U.S. Olympian Shaun White’s Cab Double Cork 1440 from the 2017 U.S. Open in Vail — the trick famously dubbed the “YOLO flip,” because back then you’d have to be crazy to try it. The name breaks down like this: two off-axis inversions plus two horizontal rotations, each assigned a clean 360°, totaling 1,440°. White had been working on it for years before stomping it in competition, and it helped him win a seventh U.S. Open title by nearly ten points. When we measured the true geometric rotation of his 3D pose through space, the number came back at an estimated 1,122°. That 318° gap is a measure of mastery. The fewer degrees an athlete needs to complete a trick, the more precisely they’ve controlled the axis — and the more margin they have for style, amplitude, and a clean landing.
