CRISTIANO RONALDO - Tested To The Limit! | A MACHINE! | HD

Cristiano Ronaldo is one of the most valuable footballers on the planet. His talent is mesmerising. He's really good technically, he's really fast. He's an athlete, a complete athlete. Cristiano Ronaldo is one of the best players in the world. But what is it that gives Ronaldo the edge over other players? To find out, he's come to this specially created state-of-the-art laboratory in Madrid. Here, in a world exclusive, sports science experts are going to forensically analyse what makes him such an efficient machine. Ronaldo will submit to an array of tests, each one designed to investigate a different strength in his game. It's amazing to see how my body works, so it's a fun, fun day. The results are revealing and often surprising, as Cristiano Ronaldo is tested to the limit. In this sports laboratory, Cristiano Ronaldo is about to undergo a series of challenges unlike any he's done before. He'll undergo tests for body strength, mental ability, technique and finally skill. Guiding him through this is football consultant Andy Ansar. He's teamed up with leading sports scientists, hoping to uncover the secrets behind Ronaldo's tremendous ability. The first of the four challenges is one of the most crucial on a football pitch. Body strength. With 40 goals in a single season, Ronaldo is La Liga's highest scoring player ever. One of the fastest men on the pitch, his lower body strength gives him the acceleration to get that hair's breadth nearer the ball. And in today's game, every millimetre counts. To test Ronaldo's sprinting ability, Andy has developed a two-part challenge. First, a straight sprint over 25 metres. Then, a 25 metre zigzag sprint, designed to measure speed and agility. To draw a comparison, Ronaldo is going to race against professional sprinter Angel David Rodriguez. Rodriguez is the Spanish champion over 100 metres, but how will he compare with Ronaldo over 25 metres? Infrared beam timing gates will give split-second results. And in charge of the test is biomechanics expert Neil Smith. We want to see the different muscles and the different components that are used in order to find out who's quicker, a sprinter or a footballer. Rodriguez is going to go first. Take your marks. Set. How do you do, Neil? Angel hit 3.31 seconds there, Andy. Angel, quality. Different class. He's fast. What do you think Ronaldo will do? Maybe the same, strong athlete. You sure? Yeah, I know. Slow-motion replays reveal that Rodriguez makes a strong, explosive start, reaching top speed in under half the distance. All his movements are in a straight line, very linear, nothing from side to side at all. Everything is moving in front to back directions. No energy is wasted. Rodriguez has a high-knee action. This gives him a very long stride length of 2.5 metres. Ronaldo's target to beat is 3.31 seconds. Let's see what he's got. Come here, buddy. Let's get Ronaldo on the blocks. OK, Neil. Set. Angel, come and join us. What was Ronaldo's time? He's done well, Andy. He's got 3.61 seconds. And what was Angel's time? Angel clocked in at 3.31. So that's 0.3 seconds. 0.3 difference. Different class. Considering Angel's class as a sprinter, that's not bad at all. So Ronaldo narrowly lost the straight sprint. On closer analysis, the reasons why are clear. From a sprinter's point of view, Cristiano Ronaldo's technique isn't the best, but then Cristiano Ronaldo's not a sprinter. He's very quick off the mark, but his style is quite different. He has to still think about the sprint in. That's where his head goes back in. If you go like this with your arms, the chances are behind you, your legs will be doing that also. And that means lower knee height. Because of his usual increase in speed and decrease in speed during a game of soccer, his stride length is quite short and quite sharp, quite staccato, and only covers 1.7 metres per stride. In a 90-minute match, Ronaldo will usually cover over 10 kilometres, but very little of that is in straight-line sprints. In football, the ability to abruptly change direction is vital, so the zig-zag course is designed to replicate what happens in a game. How well do you think you'll do on the zig-zag? Me? Yeah. He kicks me. Let's go and do our thing. Come on, guys, let's give it a go. Take your marks, get set, go! Rodrigues is still very fast around this course. He navigates the poles well, keeping his balance even when his body is almost at 45 degrees at some points. Rodrigues completes the zig-zag course in 6.86 seconds. So, Ronaldo, 6.86 to beat. What do you think? Well, because this is my type of work, I use more this in the game. I don't run in straight lines, so this is more my profile, my style. Perfect. Let's get him set. OK, good man. Take your marks, get set, go! Ronaldo's style, again, has very little in common with the sprinter's. OK, Angel, come and join us. So, first of all, Neil, remind us of Angel's score. Angel came in at 6.86 seconds. 6.86, and then Ronaldo's? 6.35. So, what's the difference there? Almost half a second there, Andy. Superb. Exactly what we were expecting from our footballer, correct? Yeah, well, what we're hoping there, you can see a very big difference between a straight-line sprinting. We've got very long strides, nice high centre of gravity. Cristiano comes into his own here. We lower the centre of gravity, we enable ourselves to push off and accelerate sidewards. That centre of gravity nice and low, the knees are bent, the hips are bent, and the muscles are hopefully working at their optimum length. Because this is my style, you know, I use this a lot in the pitch, so I guess that I have more chances in this type of run, that straight line. Without a shadow of a doubt, improved it. When we look at the zigzag movements, we can see a way that Cristiano anticipates the change of direction coming into play. As Cristiano approaches, we see a lot of shorter steps. This is in stark contrast to what we see from Angel. To change direction, he does something that probably most people wouldn't. They would almost drop down to the ground to change movement. Cristiano Ronaldo almost goes upright, goes taller. Look, he jumps into it with two feet this turn. Here we go. Yeah. There we go there. Yeah, we can see Angel using one foot there to brake in one particular stride and to try and push off in the very next. Cristiano's decelerating using both feet. Yeah. Places his centre of gravity inside the line of his foot. Yeah. And away he goes. It's almost like he uses one foot primarily for taking the braking force, as we see that inside foot there. Then the outside foot is more for the acceleration force. And Cristiano places approximately five body weights worth of force through that outside foot towards the next turn. So in what we're seeing now is he's multi-talented. That's a given anyway with Cristiano Ronaldo. But the way his body works and the way it's built and all the different components that he uses when sprinting affords him the ability to maybe perform in terms of an athletic sprint at the very, very highest level. Yeah, he's up there. We've seen his speed is up there. We've seen the movement and the agility is up there. He can change direction quickly. He can accelerate and decelerate whilst he's still concentrating on the game. Ronaldo won by quite a margin. His time over the zigzag sprint was 6.35 seconds. Clearly, his ability to corner at speed gives him an advantage. And fundamental to this is muscle strength. So before the next test, Ronaldo's muscles are going to be measured to see if there's anything unusual. OK, Ronaldo, this is Luis. Hi. So we want to look at your body. We want to check everything out. What makes Ronaldo special? OK? OK. This is a state-of-the-art precision 3D body scaler. It uses a laser beam to create a visual profile of the exterior body shape and gives us exact measurements like height, 185.1 centimetres, chest, 109. Ronaldo has extremely lean, well-defined musculature. He has 3% less body fat than a supermodel. His thigh circumference is 61.7 centimetres, which is well above average. But his calf muscles are less developed and the scan exposes a fact about their size that surprises Ronaldo. Having uneven calf muscles hasn't held Ronaldo back. In fact, his body dimensions are part of the secret to his success. He has the long legs of a sprinter, the lean physique of a middle-distance runner and the powerful thighs of a high jumper. What sets him apart is that he has all those attributes in one body. Like tuning an engine for high performance, Ronaldo has tuned up his body strength significantly over recent years. He's increased his win rate in the air from 40% to over 66%. He can now fly higher than many of his opponents. So next, Ronaldo's explosive jumping ability is going to be tested. Here we are. OK, Ronaldo, this is the high jump. Now explain to us how this works. What we're going to get you to do is a test of lower body power. The higher you jump, the more powerful your legs are going to be. So we're going to place you on the mat. We're going to instruct you to jump as high as possible, give it your maximal effort and try and land back on the mat again. This mat is actually a very sensitive pressure sensor that measures take-off force. And the key thing is having his hands on his hips, correct? We're going to try not to use the arms as an extra counterbalance. So that's why we do this, so that he can't use his arms as elevation. It's just about the leg. Concentrate just on explosive leg power. OK. Three, two, one. The result is surprising. Ronaldo jumps only 44 centimetres, barely average, with a force of just one and a half times his body weight. Something's wrong. So now, this is the thing. You don't jump like that in a game. We have to make it relevant to football. Of course, if you jump with three hands, it's better. You jump more, then you're quite limited. So can you also register that? If I get Ronaldo to jump, if he comes in and jumps up off one foot and lands... We'll get the impact of the pressure as he hits the pressure plate. Let's try that. Let's try that. Three, two, one, go. Now the results are very different. Ronaldo's body strength enables him to jump 78 centimetres, which is higher than the average NBA basketball player can jump. His take-off force is almost five times his body weight, or 5Gs, the same as an astronaut goes through at take-off. But what's more intriguing is what he does in the air. When he jumps high, he tucks his knees and his legs up behind under his buttocks. This has the effect of raising the centre of gravity temporarily, but it enables him to give this impression of hanging in the air, ready for him heading the ball into the goal. Good, good, good. Awesome, Ronaldo. Let's move on to our next test. Very hard, because you have to give 100% everything that you involve. Ronaldo's muscle distribution and raw body strength contribute significantly to his ability. But the next set of tests will reveal how important his mental ability is to his game, and the results are truly stunning. For the first time, Cristiano Ronaldo is being put under the microscope. Sports scientists are testing the component parts that make him one of the world's most valuable footballers. His body strength has been tested, but now scientists are going to test his mental ability. How much of Ronaldo's success comes from what his mind is doing on the pitch? He is, as well, a little bit of arrogance, you know, but believe that he is the number one. First, it comes from the fact that you know you can. Deeply inside himself, he knows that if he wants, he can pass anybody. If you are strong mentally, the quality is coming natural, so I always try to be focused in my game, and my mental is quite good. To find out how his mental ability contributes to his performance, the scientists are going to start by testing Ronaldo's spatial awareness. They're fitting him with these state-of-the-art eye trackers that will reveal exactly what he looks at when he plays. OK, left one. They are operated by equipment specialist John Ward. And up to the top. Perfect. That's good. And running this test is sports psychologist Zoe Wimshurst. With Ronaldo, he's going to be using all of his senses pretty much while he's playing. Probably around between 80 and 90% of the information that he's taking in will be coming through his eyes. During this test, Ronaldo is going to try to stop Andy taking possession of the ball, and the technology will reveal how he does it. So, John, the eye tracker, explain to us exactly how this works. OK, so you're both wearing equipment where we have a camera looking at the eye, and it uses infrared light to reflect from the eye. This picks up an image, and we have a camera at the front here that looks at what you're seeing, so yourself and Cristiano. The software will then match those two together, and we'll see exactly what you guys are looking at. Fantastic. Let's do this thing. OK, let's see if you can keep that ball five seconds away from me. Play. That's a good five seconds. That's a good five seconds. That is quality. There's no doubt that Ronaldo's feet are fast and effective, but what part does his mind play in this ability? The eye trackers show intriguing results. On the replay, the little red dot shows exactly what Ronaldo's looking at. You'd expect a lot of players to be focused on the ball the whole time. With Ronaldo, he did look at the ball a fair amount of time, but he was much more looking around, looking at the defender and taking in the information from his body, and also scanning for the spaces beyond the defender. Andy, on the other hand, can't afford to take his eyes off the ball because he doesn't have quite the same ability to predict where the ball is going. To actually see what's going on, we need to slow it down to one-third of actual speed. That's how fast Cristiano is, so you didn't have much of a chance, I'm afraid. In eight seconds, he pulled 13 moves on you. OK, and we're not just talking kicks of the ball. We're talking step-overs, spins. Oh, it was beautiful. So you can see here on the gaze data, you can see he's concentrating on the ball. But what you'll see, and the interesting thing, is when he wants to go past you and look at how you're moving, he's predicting where you're going to be, he's looking for movement in the hips to plan his next move. So he looks at the ball, then he looks at where I move, and then he executes his trick. You see it comes in, looks at your foot, looks to the other one, up to the hip. Really accurate, precise, sharp movements. And then when we look to watching you, you're mostly trying to follow the ball, which means you're only ever going to be able to react to where the ball is moving rather than anticipate in advance anything that he's going to do, so you're always going to be that one step behind. And also, your eye movement, you can see, is much more all over the place. This looks more like a pinball where my eye's going. He's locked in. You're constantly chasing him, basically. And I bet if you asked him, you probably wouldn't know what it was that he was looking at. It's all in his subconscious. He knows where he's picking up the information that's going to best help him, and without even thinking about it, he's looking for those angles of your hips, your knee and your foot, and obviously it's working pretty well for him. So that's just second nature to him? Yeah. Ronaldo's subconscious ability has come from thousands of hours of practice, which have filled his mind with so many permutations of the game to tap into, that when it comes to match play, he has an uncanny ability to perform without having to think or even look at the ball. He is effectively a scholar of football. It's the same way as studying any other subject, learning a new language, anything like that. You build up experience. You learn the basic rules of grammar in the different words that are available to you. So in football terms, that's going to be the skills, then putting them into a match situation. And so as you become more fluent in the language, you don't need to think about it as much. So Ronaldo's vast experience gives him the ability to intuitively read the game under normal conditions. But what if the conditions are very far from normal? Can Ronaldo still hit the back of the net if all the lights are turned off and he's in complete darkness? Okay, what we're going to do, we're going to have Andy feeding the balls in as if it's a cross. And then sometime in the ball flight, the lights are going to go black. So you won't be able to see anything at all. We're expecting you to be able to put the ball in the goal. That's what we're hoping will happen. We're hoping that you'll have picked up some advanced cues from Andy's body position, the shapes, the positioning of his feet and his hips. And therefore we'll be able to tell exactly where the ball is going to go and get yourself in the right position, even though you can't see it. Okay. Taking Ronaldo on in the seemingly impossible test is an amateur footballer called Ronald. Come and join me, Ronald. Ronald, Ronaldo. So we've got Ronald in here, same age as you, roughly the same height. We're going to use Ronald as a comparison and see how he reacts doing this same test. Ronald is going first. Dark. Light. So what does the night vision reveal? Ronald misses the ball by quite a way. Perhaps not that surprising. But can Ronaldo do any better? I hope to do it once. Alright, that's one straight in the bag. The night vision replay shows how differently Ronaldo performs. To confirm that wasn't just luck, another attempt. Dark. Light. Love that. Be careful. And the replay? How hard is that? It's difficult because it changes a lot. Yeah. Because you're focusing on the ball and after the light you have to try to memorise the ball. Human reaction time is about 200 milliseconds. And by 500 milliseconds, Ronaldo's subconscious has interpreted Andy's body language worked out which direction the ball will go in calculated its speed and trajectory and then programmed his body to reach it at the optimum moment. It's almost as if they're doing maths in their head even though they wouldn't be able to describe it to you. You could see from their performance that Ronaldo saw the first part of the ball flight information he picked up information from Andy kicking the ball and was able to move his body into the correct position. This is because he's processed the information he has experience of where the ball is likely to go he's able to analyse all that as it's coming towards him and therefore connect successfully with the ball. Love that. Ronald on the other hand doesn't have this same level of experience. He would have watched the ball flight it's likely that he will just have had his eyes on the ball instead of picking up any information from Andy himself. And then when the lights go down and it's black he's kind of stranded in no man's land a little bit and just has to do his best to react but is naturally going to struggle with that. So far, the lights have been shut off when the ball is in mid-air but now the lights will be turned off just at the moment Andy kicks it. Can Ronaldo score with only Andy's body language to go on? Here we go, we'll get one. We good? Yeah, good. Okay, Ronaldo. Dark. Light. Ronaldo, quality. What was that, a shoulder? Back. Great finish, great finish. That was a great finish. This is great because I imagine the ball is coming I'm scared to go with the face so I go with half chest, half shoulder and I put the ball inside. Quality, great finish. So Zoe, tell me, how difficult is that? I mean the last one when we adjusted the time of the lighting. Yeah, it's so difficult. They've done studies like this using computer simulations so you watch it on a computer and just have to say where the ball's going and from then they can see that elite athletes can tell much earlier where the ball's coming from but to have to actually produce a physical response when a ball is flying at you, then it's really good skills, amazing. Top man, that's legend. Thank you. I was dreading I was going to hit you in your face with one of them balls. That was my worst fear. The test proves that Ronaldo can perform an almost impossible task. He can make decisions this quickly and with such little information to go on because in his subconscious he's an expert in the science involved. Ronaldo can tap into that knowledge, tap into his memory banks and he can then use that to help him. So what you're saying despite the location because it's the first time being here he's still recalling the pictures what he's done previous before and on other locations maybe in matches and in training and he's recalling all those messages and then his brain's saying this is the execution. Exactly and that's kind of the whole point of people training even though they can't train in a match environment they can still take their experiences from the training ground put it into practice in the match take things from one match and utilise it in another and even utilise things in a really strange situation like we've got here. In terms of the match this means that instead of having to track the ball completely onto his foot he could be scanning to see where the goalkeeper is if there's any movement there so he can then place his shot past where the goalkeeper might be. Well it's the base of my success is to improve myself all the time so this is why I'm one of the best players in the world. Next Ronaldo's technique is tested as scientists dissect his most formidable weapon the one that goalkeepers fear most his free kick. Scientists are taking apart Cristiano Ronaldo's body to discover what makes him one of the world's most valuable footballers. So far his body strength and extraordinary mental ability have been examined. The next set of tests will investigate his amazing technique. Is it this that gives him the edge? Ronaldo's free kicks are as famous as they are effective. Fast, accurate and unpredictable his success rate is three times the average. No one else in the world has mastered his technique so the question is how does he do it? It's a Portugal-Brazilian free kick because this ball goes up and down and that makes it extraordinarily difficult for the goalkeepers. It's really dangerous when you shoot the free kicks. Cristiano Ronaldo's style is like a punch on the ball. Ronaldo has probably got one of the most efficient power application models of kicking that there is in terms of the amount of effort that he puts in and the return he gets on the ball speed. To find out how he does this the scientists are going to analyse his free kick in minute detail. What we're going to do now is put reflective markers all over your body so the cameras can pick up all your movement and in 3D we can see all your movement how you move, how your technique is when you strike a ball. So let's apply the markers on him now. We're going to go for a full body marker set here. Essentially what we're looking for is we've got ten infrared cameras that are going to sample 300 times a second and hopefully what we get then is a three-dimensional reconstruction of exactly what happens during your kick. This process is called 3D motion capture. It's what video game animators use but this is the first time it's been used to analyse Ronaldo's free kick. The most important bits of course are going to be on the leg so we can then identify just how fast his leg is travelling. So we put these clusters on this part here. Stick this down. So that's for the joint? Yeah. How often will you do free kick practices in terms of practising your technique? Depends. One time per week. Once a week? You'll just do it after training? Just repeat it? 25 balls, 30. 20, 35 balls? Do you generally do it with a goalkeeper in there? Yeah, with goalkeepers, yeah. There we go, beautiful. So now we're going to do your free kicks but I'm not getting any goal. We've got your former team-mate, Jose Derde. Hello. How are we doing? I'm good, nice to meet you. Good man. Let's get set. Andy has set up the lab with the goal 20 metres away. To begin, Ronaldo will take a free kick employing the technique he uses to bend the ball over a defensive wall. OK, Ronaldo, and play. It may be over in the blink of an eye or 900 milliseconds to be precise but what happens during this time is fascinating. To get the ball to curve, Ronaldo must strike it in exactly the right place. This is something that is achieved by hitting the ball off the centre of mass. So we're hitting it almost to the side of the ball and using the inside of our foot to wrap around that ball and generate spin. Once we've generated the spin, this creates a difference in pressure between the inside of the ball and the outside of the ball and will tend to push the ball towards the direction of low pressure. Hopefully then this curves over the top of the wall and the keeper won't see the ball until the last minute. The precision is extraordinary. He sends the ball spinning round a perfectly vertical axis veering off its normal straight trajectory by more than three metres. But perhaps what Ronaldo's most famous for is his devastating power kick or knuckleball. If we then take a look at the way Cristiano hits his knuckleball, this is a free kick where very little spin is imparted to the ball. Play. What we then get is a contact more towards the ankle joint centre. This, of course, is going to generate less spin to the ball. Striking the ball right in the middle and giving it virtually no spin sends it off in a dead straight trajectory. But at the last second, the ball unexpectedly deviates off course. It's really dangerous for the keepers because it's impossible to understand the trajectory of the ball. He hits it with the laces and the ball floats as well. So it has a double effect. It comes down very late, but during the whole move of the kick, it moves sideways. If the ball's spinning, it's easier. Difficult to catch, but easier to understand the trajectory. It's all down to aerodynamics and the secret of Ronaldo's knuckleball is in the seams. When the ball's spinning fast, the seams have no effect. But when the ball isn't spinning, the seams can catch in the wind on one side and not the other. It's just enough to make the ball deviate. The slight movement of the ball in the air can generate the movement of the seams to generate turbulence that varies from one side to the other side of the ball, makes it almost impossible for the keeper to react into which way it's going to move first. How does it feel being a goalkeeper when he strikes the ball straight on? This strike is very hard to read, obviously. The ball flies like a balloon. It goes left, right, up and down. Because the ball moves around, they can't, you know, save the ball or the finger. It's difficult because the ball moves a lot. I think sometimes it makes the goalkeeper scared when you see Cristiano coming. Brilliant. Well done. Well done, Jose. This is what Dudek would have seen in goal. This is perhaps the cues that he might get to pick up on. The amount of weight and pressure on the standing foot before he strikes with his right foot, that's got to be huge. It's fairly large. We're talking around about 30 stone going through his foot there. So how come the bones don't break? As you saw before as well, very, very strong musculature. He flexes that leg slightly on impact. As we then come towards this point here, all the energy that we've stored in this segment around the pelvis and around the thigh then gets translated through the knee. That power flows through the knee to whip through to the ball. Very much, if you imagine, like a cowboy with a whip. He moves his arm and then stops it. The end of the whip goes so fast. Ronaldo moves his thigh very fast, then stops it, and the end of the foot comes through so quick. Looking at the kick from the front, it's clear that Ronaldo's posture is also a factor. I have a phrase that I call the pillar, which is basically the crutch to the top of your head. If that pillar is straight, and it is with Ronaldo, particularly on his spot kicking, and his legs are an extension of that line, even though you might tilt it on its side, OK, there is still that flexion type of movement. Coupled that with the fact that his body moves through the ball, you've got a pretty potent power model there. But just how much speed does this power generate? Andy has designed an unusual test to find out. Inspired by an event in Ronaldo's childhood, six sheets of glass are arranged around a speed monitor. Ronaldo will fire the ball at this glass target. What was it like as a kid smashing windows? Well, when I'm a kid, I think I break just one glass of one neighbour. It was a very, very big problem because when I'm arriving home, my mum kicks my a**. So this is the perfect situation where you can smash glass and everyone's happy. No, it's OK. No, it's not a problem. Nobody's going to kick my a**. I'm happy. As much power as possible so he can smash them glasses. Ronaldo, this is your chance to take your free kick with no restrictions. Nothing at all is going to hold you back. Ooh, that's mad. Look at that. How many did it take? Three. Three taken out. So what speed has been recorded? What we wanted to do was see just how fast that ball speed actually was. This is pure, unadulterated maximum speed. And we can see, we took our readings from the ball here and we're hitting round about 35 metres a second, or that will translate into 80 miles an hour. 80 miles an hour? 80 miles an hour, yeah. That's ferocious. Ronaldo's free kick is one of the fastest in the world. It's a match winner and one of his key strengths, a trademark that involves a unique and unconventional technique. The wrist. Can I do the wrist? Let's take the wrist out. Hey, Ronaldo. It's better. That felt better, huh? Yeah. Look at the damage here. Just here. Look at the damage down there. Straight through. Let's clear this area. Let's clear this. Do you need tools? That's the only time you don't get in trouble for smashing glass. In the final challenge, Ronaldo will need to use all his fine-tuned abilities in one amazing test of skill. Like never before, Cristiano Ronaldo's talent is being put under the microscope. So far, his body strength, mental ability and technique have been dissected. But there's one aspect of Ronaldo's game still to test. His breathtaking skill. One of Cristiano Ronaldo's biggest strengths is how quickly he's able to move his feet. The laboratory has been reconfigured as a 25-metre course with a finish at the far end. The challenge is for Ronaldo to run with the ball from one end to the other. But lined up against him is a team of weapons-trained snipers armed with laser-sighted guns. They will try to shoot the ball. The course is divided into three sections and as Ronaldo makes it from one section to the next, the number of snipers increases. Final test, sniper's alley. This is how it's going to work. When they hit the ball, it will make this noise. You're going to hear that. OK. When they miss, you'll hear this. I fully expect you to make it from the beginning to the end without a sniper getting you. OK. OK, let's give it a go. To get through the course without the lasers getting a lock on the reflective ball is an incredibly tough challenge. Ronaldo will have to perform skills not just at speed but in ways that the snipers can't predict. Will he be able to dance his way through the beams? OK, Ronaldo, the final test. Three, two, one. Section one. Keep it, keep it, keep it, keep it, keep it. Good, good, good. Keep going, keep going. Good, good. I hit. Go on, go on, go, go, go, go. Keep going, keep going. Good, keep going, keep going. Good, good, good. Now section two. Go. Keep going, keep going. Good, good, good, good, good, good, good. Section three. Good, good, good. I finished. Quality. How hard is that? Difficult. One shot. Only one got you then. One. One rabbit. Tremendous. What's the hardest thing? It's just not standing still. Yes, most of the times I dribble and I go forward. But here you have to stay around, which is more difficult. It's a lot more difficult. And I think it's more easy for them. Usually you'd move a lot quicker. Yeah, of course. You don't have to go away. No, it's just for, I give opportunity to them to give a shot. You're being fair, playing it fair. Yeah. Perfect. So how did he manage to get through the course virtually unscathed? When Cristiano was doing the test with the snipers, you see a lot of very good, very impressive close work with the ball. A lot of skills on show. He manages to combine a Cruyff turn with rolling the outside of his foot over the top of the ball, swivelling back round, then drops his centre of gravity, knocks the ball from his feet and accelerates away, leaving his opponent for dead. If we watch something such as the stepover, we see that the timing of the stepover occurs at just the right time to make the opponent think that he's going to move one way before offering them the signal to move the other. But the key is that fast foot movement, lots of little touches and keeping the ball moving. It was really amazing to see that he managed to perform so well in a situation that he wouldn't necessarily have been in ever before, but he could still keep control, keep his beliefs nice and positive. There will have been no thoughts of failure, no thoughts of what happens if I lose control. That just wouldn't even enter his head at all. It's complete belief in what he's going to do, remaining positive the whole time. Some people dance over the ball, but they don't move the ball. He moves the ball and he dances over the ball. It's difficult for the opponent to stop him. The ball is like a rabbit. It's impossible to shoot the ball. Amazing, Ronaldo. How you found the test today? For me, it's a fantastic day to see how my body works. We did the tests, what we did. I think it's amazing. It's great for me. Thank you for the opportunity. I'll try to improve much better. There's not much more you can improve on. It's been a great day of tests. Thank you very much. Good man. Cristiano Ronaldo's footwork is perhaps the most influential factor in his rise to become one of the most successful goal-scoring machines in history. But today's tests have revealed how his body plays a crucial role in his effectiveness on the pitch. One of the most impressive things about him was his strength and his power. I think this is what sets him apart. Alongside that high, high level of skill he has, and something that other players find it very, very hard to replicate. His body strength contributes significantly in all areas of his performance. But his technique enables him to generate maximum power. It's the mental strength that he shows to be able to perform in front of huge crowds under massive amounts of pressure, but also the decision-making processes that he has to make constantly while he's on the pitch. We often forget how big an athlete Ronaldo is. And we often forget that this guy delivers between 50 and 65 games per season. And that's in an offensive position as a striker. That's absolutely exceptional. Some players can do it in training but cannot deliver it in the big games. Ronaldo can. And that's why he goes in the category of the great players. What gives Ronaldo the edge over so many other players is that he's strong in every single aspect of his game. And that's the secret to his winning performance. My strength is to do the right things. To eat good, to sleep well, to train well, and to improve myself in football. I do all those things to focus for the football.