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ISS astronauts take part in space Olympics

Media caption,

ISS astronauts take part in space Olympics

The Tokyo Olympics have ended, but the astronauts aboard the International Space Station have decided to have their own special Olympic Games - space style!

Two crews - or should that be two teams - competed in zero gravity.

Competitors included American astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Katherine McArthur, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet and Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide.

The teams were called Dragon and Soyuz - which are also the names of the spacecraft that carried astronauts to the ISS. The four-person Dragon crew travelled to the station aboard SpaceX's Capsule back in March.

Meanwhile team Soyuz included Russian cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Oleg Novitskiy as well as American astronaut, Mark T. Vande Hei who travelled to the station aboard the Russian craft in April.

Image source, NASA
Image caption,

No handball involved astronauts and cosmonauts blowing a ping-pong ball through hatches in zero-gravity

The two teams took part in events such as "lack of floor routine" gymnastics spinning in mid-air, "no-handball" where the teams had to blow a ping-pong ball through a hatch and "synchronized space swimming" using zero gravity to do floating flips at the same time.

We're not sure who won, but they look as if they all had a lot of fun taking part!