Nanogirl Michelle Dickinson: Beneath the surface of the Winter Olympics

The ice is tailored to provide the perfect slippery surface needed to help increase the speed of a luge. Photo / AP

The Winter Olympics has started and I'm glued to the screen watching athletes compete in sports that I rarely get to see.

I'm in awe of the skills needed to speed down a steep slope filled with snowy lumps, flip and twist upside down while strapped to a rigid board and dizzyingly spin while balanced on razor-thin metal blades.

As an engineer, the surfaces around the athletes have been capturing my interest just as much as the sports themselves with bright skin-tight outfits and shiny ice rinks adding to the Olympic story.

Each outfit worn in the Winter Olympics is specifically designed for the individual sport they will be used for.

Speed skaters, for example, need to be as aerodynamic as possible, even the tiny hairs on their legs could potentially create enough drag to slow them down by a few hundredths of a second.

To counter this, they wear skin-tight suits made from body-hugging, flexible fabrics like nylon and lycra which help to flatten lumps or bumps on the skin and smooth out the athlete's silhouette.

The suits are carefully sewn so that they don't have raised seams which in addition to reducing drag also minimise friction so that the force created from the skater's thighs rubbing together doesn't slow them down too much.

Some suits also have a dimpled surface similar to a golf ball where each dimple creates a small whirlpool of air which also reduces drag. In addition to the physical properties of the athletes clothing, their connection to mental performance is just as important.

This year the team from Norway decided to wear blue suits instead of their traditional red because they skated faster in them during training.

Even though there is no scientific reason why the colour blue would be faster than red, the theory is that athletes who feel faster in a certain suit, could actually perform faster thanks to their increased mental confidence.

In addition to the surfaces that cover their skin, the surface that an athlete performs on is just as important.

At the molecular level, snow and ice are just frozen water - molecules arranged in a hexagonal structure. However, the properties of each created for the Olympics are perfectly tailored for each sport to provide the slippery ice needed to help increase the speed of a luge or the firm, flat snow needed for a cross-country ski race.

When you make ice cubes at home, you probably just fill an ice tray from the tap and let it freeze over time.

Tap water, however, contains dissolved impurities such as salts and chlorine. These impurities get in the way of the water molecules preventing them from creating their hexagonal structure, which stops the ice from freezing evenly.

This doesn't matter in an ice cube used to chill your drink, however, it can cause weaknesses and unevenness on an ice rink.

To counter this, the ice created for the Winter Olympics is made from water that has been through a reverse osmosis and deionisation system to remove any ions and molecules from the water.

The ultrapure water is then sprayed on to the surface of the concrete rink as thin layers which are rapidly frozen using an embedded refrigeration system.

As each layer freezes, another layer is added in a painstaking process that can take several days to complete.

Add that to the use of Nasa and 20 other agencies from around the world collect snow and other weather data every 6 hours to the winter games and power of the science behind the Winter Olympics is just as important as the skills of the athletes themselves.