Beckham springs forward. At the moment before impact, he is a picture of serenity and balance, his legs splayed, his right arm pointing straight down, his left arm extended like a traffic cop’s. All angles and energy, he looks like a Keith Haring drawing come to life. Physicists from Europe to Japan have spend hundreds of hours studying his free kicks, the perfectly calibrated mix of forces—angle, speed, spin, and direction, that conspire, as one researcher puts it, to achieve “optimal turbulent-laminar transition trajectory.” Or, as Beckham says, he knows precisely how “to get as much whip on it as possible,” to strike the side of the ball with his right instep, sending it screaming over the wall, then dipping, improbably, thrillingly, under the crossbar, past the helpless keeper’s outstretched hands.
The Beckham Experiment | Grant Wahl
