While Olympians on Earth were sprinting, sparring, and contending with misbehaving horses, astronauts on the International Space Station held their own friendly competitions in microgravity.
In the first-ever “Space Olympics,” the seven-person ISS crew faced off last week in ball games, target practice, and flipping and floating routines.
“We did give medals to each other, but it was always unanimous,” NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei told Insider in a recent call from the space station.
Thomas Pesquet, a European Space Agency astronaut, posted videos of each competition on Twitter. The main event was synchronized space swimming, in which the astronauts used their weightlessness to perform coordinated dances that would be impossible on Earth. For the full effect, turn the volume up on the video below.
The crew split up into two teams – Soyuz and Dragon – named for the spacecraft that carried them to the ISS.
Team Soyuz members launched to space aboard Russia’s Soyuz rocket; the group included Vande Hei and cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Oleg Novitskiy. Team Dragon is the second full crew to launch aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spaceship: NASA astronauts Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbrough, along with Pesquet and Akihiko Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.
Team Dragon took the gold for their synchronized space-swimming routine, in which they shimmied, leapfrogged, summersaulted, and touched feet in mid-air.
“It was really, really impressive,” Vande Hei said.
Ball games and target practice work differently in space
Having a little fun is crucial for making it through a six-month stint on the football-field sized orbiting laboratory.
“We deal with frustration with humor,” McArthur told Insider.
Laughter came easily when the astronauts played “no-handball,” in which they used only their breath to move a ping-pong ball into nearby doorways, or “hatches,” that served as goals.
The game looked difficult.
“We had to adapt the rules a bit during the match,” Pesquet said on Twitter.
They also competed in “sharpshooting,” using their thumbs to slingshot stretchy bands at a black-and-white target.
The astronauts even took inspiration from Olympic gymnasts with a “lack-of-floor routine.” Each crew member showed off their best flips, twists, handstands, wall crawls, and other stunts (while bumping into a few things along the way).
The crew wrapped up their competitions with a little ceremony. Hoshide, who is Japanese, passed a printout of the Olympic rings to Pesquet, who is French, symbolizing the end of the Tokyo games on Earth and looking forward to the Paris games in 2024.
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