Cheetah eyes

A theory of elite athletic movement

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Cheetah eyes

Halfway through writing a book about human movement expert Marcus Elliott M.D., I happen across stunning slow-motion high-definition video of a cheetah. It’s a symphony. Long polka-dotted front legs stretch perfect paws out in front. They land, grab, and--smooth as the oar of a skull dipping into the river--pull the ground along. In good time, a back foot arrives impossibly far forward, beneath the neck, touches down, and takes its massive turn hurling the entire 150-pound cat fluidly forward. Cheetahs reportedly travel 20 feet per stride, it looks like more. They say running is ballistic, and voila: The cat flies.

I text the video to Marcus.

“Poetic,” he instantly replies.

Marcus and I have talked often about the best movers on the planet. Sometimes it’d be a story about Anthony Edwards or Zach LaVine, or the foot strike of an Olympic sprinter or rotational force of an MLB second-baseman.

But other times the conversation would drift to those whose survival truly depends on perfect athletic performance: animals. If you study range of motion, power, balance and the like, there’s no way around admiring ospreys, bears, and bobcats. I spent one whole day at the library learning about giant squid and then at least another two obsessing about owls, who are mind-blowing.

For many animals, the trial of survival is weeks of straight-line trudging to the next grassy plain. Cheetahs take the whole grueling drama of survival and compress it to the 20 or 30 seconds they can sprint without overheating. The best movers, I couldn’t help but notice, by and large are predators.

Sports mimic that, in treasuring the cheetah’s power, speed, and Formula One design. But I wonder if the best athletes also carry some of the animal world’s more secretive advantages.

One day, settled with my laptop on our back porch in New Jersey, a great cry emerged from the willow tree. Robins and catbirds raged.

Peeking out from the vine covering the chain link: huge piercing eyes. Prey animals tend to have an eye on each side of the head. Predator eyes face forward. This pair was wildly predatory, so huge, so forward, more moons than eyeballs.

Then it hopped into the open, onto the gravel between the raised beds. As every other bird in town formed a hoard of shrieking paparazzi, the superstar at the center of the action glistened in the sunshine. The most decorative, fluffed, and striped legs in nature. Talons, skin around the eye, and weaponized hook of a beak all in matching gold. Dazzling herringbone down the chest. The bird arrived like a knight in armor, a fashionista in the capitol in The Hunger Games, or a Formula One race car on the starting grid. A killer of a bird, a total F-14.

The bird book later revealed, without question: a peregrine falcon. Not just the fastest bird but the fastest animal.

And at that moment, shockingly not moving at all--eyes locked with safe-cracker stillness into the greenery. It was late spring, the wild vine that owns the chain link fence had erupted in green. The leaves almost totally hid what the paparazzi and I knew was in there: a nest full of baby catbirds.

With one effortless hop, the falcon halved the distance, landing on the lattice leaning on the fence for melon vines to climb. In The Wire, the most fearsome killer, Omar, attacks in broad daylight at a walk, heart rate a tick above napping. The peregrine’s expression was simple: let’s kill and go home.

It was time. The falcon leapt--clean and savage--leathery adult talon snatching tender pink infant.

The catbird parents had their moment to dive bomb. But the brilliant falcon didn’t land. In nature’s alley-oop, the falcon snagged a catbird baby without touching the fence and kept moving, falling prey-first clean over the fence and six feet down to the neighbor’s lawn. I leapt up from my seat to see what was happening behind the fence, and watched the raptor rest in stillness, crimping off a young life. Down there the parents couldn’t attack from above thanks to the vine and the fence above. Then the falcon took a breath, girded for punishment, swooped up and over the fence, under the gazebo, and off between the houses with lunch in hand, to the fussy hassle of bereft parents.

A friend just sent me a video about how we underrate the eyes in sports. There’s no question. Scientists have examined cheetahs like they’re cars--how fast they accelerate, their mass, and top speed. None of that matters, though, if the big cat misses its prey. There’s a reason the peregrine took a minute or more to locate the baby catbird. Predation is targeting. Only part of the game is ballet, another part is free throws, or darts.

David Epstein’s Sports Gene drops a dozen signs that eyes are wildly underappreciated in sports. If you show most of us a photograph of a volleyball game for 16 thousandths of a second, we see only a flash of light. World-class volleyball setters, though, can tell you where the ball is, and sometimes other stuff like where the picture was taken and who was playing. An ophthalmologist named Louis J. Rosenbaum used nothing but vision tests to successfully predict which baseball prospects would become MLB stars, and found that major league baseball players have, essentially, the best eyesight on the planet. Another test trained two groups of women to catch tennis balls shot from a machine. Those who pre-tested with excellent depth perception quickly improved their catching scores; women with poor depth perception didn’t improve at all. Epstein also describes the work of Harold Klawans, who wrote a book arguing that Michael Jordan couldn’t hit a major league curveball because as he grew up playing basketball, his brain pruned away the neurons he would have needed to pick up the nuances of a hard-flung small baseball.

After the peregrine’s eyes dazzled me, I noticed something new in the cheetah video: As the body is a blur, and the world whips by, the cheetah’s eyes are granite still. Much evolution designed this symphonic system, it’s incredible. The engine, the paws, the range of motion--it’s all for naught unless it delivers the eyes close enough to target a vulnerable patch of high-speed antelope.

“Curiosity,” wrote Victor Hugo, “is gluttony. To see is to devour.”

Humans have some of these skills. Check the face of a longboarder at 50 miles an hour, a big-wave surfer, or anyone about to jump off a cliff. Or, watch Kyrie in traffic. Or Harden.

All this thinking about eyes connected with some other things I learned in writing Ballistic. The massive trove of granular movement data at Marcus Elliott’s P3 lab tells many important stories about how we move. In some cases, there’s a Perry Mason, open-and-shut feeling to the case--landing with your foot or hip just so sends your injury risk skyrocketing.

But their findings about deceleration contain some unsolved mysteries.

P3 struck a deal with Adidas in 2015. About the time James Harden devoured the whole NBA with his scoring prowess, P3 assessed Harden’s movement and found he was no cheetah. He didn’t run especially fast nor jump notably high. So, how did he roast every defender 29 other teams threw at him? Eager to have something to report to the waiting Harden and a group from his shoe company and ad agency, P3’s head of biomechanics, Eric Leidersdorf, noted that while he couldn’t run or jump in any special way, Harden could really stop.

Harden won the MVP the following season; it felt like stopping mattered. Eric’s team explored deeper and, in a nutshell, it remains almost strange how much deceleration correlates with sports success. P3 tests for it and trains it as a matter of course.

As has been discussed in the Wall Street Journal, ESPN, and elsewhere, the power to brake affects athletic success more than anyone thought likely. When they see young players with elite decel numbers--teenaged Luka was once that guy--P3 keeps an eye on them. They do well.

For many years, the Joe Gibbs Racing NASCAR team used P3 to screen candidates to join their record-setting pit crew. The executive who ran the project told me that all things being equal, he would hire the best decelerators. The job is a three-yard arcing sprint from one side of the car to the other. You might think you’d want furious acceleration. But on arrival to the next wheel well, you have to place a tire just so or a gun on lugnuts. It’s no good getting there without the ability to be perfectly precise.

Marcus has a story about a volleyball player who came in with kyphosis, also known as “computer back.” One of the problems with stooping forward is that it keeps you from using the muscles along your spine as designed. P3’s training got the vertebrae of his back stacked properly, and his game blossomed because now, in the air, he could hold his head on the top of a spine with the muscles and bones available to stabilize his eyes. He had always been able to jump, and always had long arms, but only now could see his prey like a peregrine, and rack up kills.

Harden doesn’t merely need to evade a defender, he needs a quiet eye to fixate on the rim. He needs to make the shot. The falcon doesn’t just need to find prey, it needs to place a precise talon while dodging the parents’ many bullets.

My own homespun theory emerges. The cheetah lands with plenty of force, but has clever, strong, and coordinated muscles up and down the body that attenuate that force so as not to rattle the eyes. Not everyone can keep their head still while landing at 70 miles an hour. Does good deceleration come with a cheetah-like ability to keep the eyes still and focused?

Perhaps bodies that are good at braking facilitate still eyes, and therefore brains good at sizing up the world in intense moments.

It’s a cinch to imagine that braking skills might correlate with a better, more clear view of the world. There’s a part of the P3 assessment where you leap off one leg then land on that same leg on a force plate--the point is not how far you jump nor how hard you land, but how soon after touching down you settle into stillness. Those little leaning wiggles that cost points in gymnastics competitions can also lead to injury when the force get big enough. You want to stick the landing.

But also, it strikes me, when you stick the landing, and don’t wiggle around, your eyes get a better read of the world around you. And good landings are trainable. From the quality of the tissue in our feet to the neuromuscular coordination of every muscle up the chain, there’s work that can make it better.

The eyes are in the head, the head is on a stack of vertebrae atop the sacrum. The sacrum sits on the pelvis and hips, and the hips on the femurs, the knees, tibias, ankles, and feet. And the feet sit on the earth. All of that is managed by soft tissues orchestrated by the nervous system. Get those soft tissues strong, stacked, and moving cheetah-smooth, and your eyes might become killers.

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