“I played around in training, tried different jumps. We had quite a lot of time to train during the pandemic because we couldn’t travel to any competitions. I’ve started incorporating them into my practice. It was clear that at some point I would submit a gymnastic jump as a new element. It was rejected. But I thought: This is my thing; if I give up now, it feels like a defeat. I love doing them, it makes my exercise original and I love that there are a lot of people waiting in the hall for it.”
Australian gymnast Heath Thorpe performed a series of gymnastic jumps in his floor routine at the World Championships in Liverpool last November. Jumps that seem worthless because they don’t exist for judges. In gymnastics, only those elements that are listed in the scoring regulations and, depending on the degree of difficulty, correspond to a certain number of points count.
