The anxiety is just crippling.
I guess it’s just trying to get on top of your nerves.
Or just managing those emotions and those feelings before you step on the floor.
I think with skipping you definitely have to see it to believe it.
At such a high level people just don’t really understand the intricacy.
You just say “Oh, yeah, we do skipping”
and they just say “Oh, cool, we did that in Primary School as well.”
Queenslanders Lilly Barker, Jake Eve and Luke Boon
are jump rope skippers, very, very good ones.
I guess as far as results go
our team is No 1 in the world at the moment.
I’ve been Individual World Champion as well as Team World Champion.
I was the first male to break
200 skips in 30 seconds.
So that was sort of my claim to fame in the skipping world.
Back in Primary School you used to just skip at lunchtime
and then I was at a school fete
and that’s where I saw the girl do the backsault,
they were doing these absolutely insane things
that I think my jaw hit the floor.
I guess at the time all my friends were doing
cricket and soccer and football and stuff,
so skipping wasn’t the normal thing for a boy to do.
I had a lot of grief in Primary School with that
and lots of the “Are you gay, cos you skip?” back when I was ten...
You don’t even think of that stuff.
I persevered and I’m so glad I did, and I didn’t listen to them.
And then by the time I was in late High School
I was known as the skipping kid
and everyone thought it was a bit cool.
Perfect. Good job.
For Luke and Jake it was really,
probably really challenging when they first started skipping.
People just didn’t know what it was
but here they were
with international world records and national anthems being played for them
and actually quite famous in the sport of skipping across the world.
Hi, I’m Carolyn Barker and I’m a Year 3 teacher
at Cleveland State Primary School
and I coach the Australian Rope Skipping Team as well.
Ms Barker is the most important person in all of our lives.
The amount of children’s lives she’s touched
in her 20 years as a teacher and a skipping coach
is just phenomenal.
I wouldn’t be where I am right now without her. She’s just...
At a competition, always right there,
she always knows the right things to say before you go up.
Okay, let’s do a couple of 30s.
We’re aiming for consistency, good timing,
and of course for that 30 seconds no mistake.
Skippers ready, set, BEEP!
I’m pretty familiar with her.
She’s actually my mum.
so I think she’s absolutely incredible.
She’s actually the most successful coach of all time in rope skipping.
A lot of people ask “Why skipping?”
I think it’s just, there’s something really fascinating about skipping for me
because it has that demonstration element
where there’s all the acrobatics done to music.
There’s timing and that’s got the gymnastics feel to it
and then there’s the speed element.
Got to be a lot of trust and the best way to breed that trust
is to become really good mates.
You wouldn’t want to do a sport like this with people you didn’t get along with
because you have to spend so much time with them.
We’re around each other pretty much 24/7.
We live at our skipping hall where we train.
It’s like our second home.
We sacrifice a lot but what we’ve gained from that is,
it surpasses anything that we would have missed as a teenager.
I guess I probably see my skipping team more than I see my own family.
But I just can’t imagine my life without these guys in it.
- That we’re all on the same page. - Being in sync.
- With each other. - Yeah.
Internationally, competitive is booming,
the surging interest in Asia driving the sport towards professionalism.
There’s actually skipping schools in China, designed just for rope skipping.
And here, you mention rope skipping and people don’t even know what it is.
Australian Rope Skipping was probably a huge part of setting a benchmark
for international rope skipping.
And it’s really funny now to see that the tables have turned
in terms of, it’s become such a professional sport in all the other countries.
We’ve got all these Asian countries that are training like it’s an Olympic sport.
6 hours a day, 3 or 4 days a week.
But the Chinese revolution of jump rope
has its perks, too.
Luke, Lilly and Jake were this month flown to the country
for an international skipping event to be broadcast on state TV.
They also return next year to the World Championships in Shanghai.
Overseas I think you would be really surprised as to see
how many skippers there really are, Belgium, Canada, Germany.
Literally, name a country, it’s there.
And there are some in the skipping world
who harbour even grander plans for the sport.
Throughout the last few competitions we’ve had people
from the actual Olympic Board watching the competition.
So it’s definitely recognised now.
It’s just getting the sport more exposure.
But hopefully in the next ten years or so it’ll be there.
Any of the times the kids have won individually at World Championships
and they play the national anthem that is just, tear-jerking.
It makes me a bit teary now thinking about it.
How do we get from the Redlands to some huge international platform
and all of a sudden...
It’s just just a really nice feeling
And all that hard work paying off.
I definitely see myself skipping
in the future and four years from now.
It’s such an honour to be there for a sport at the highest level
knowing that you can say you are actually at the World Championships
with your best friends and I think that’s so crazy.