- You might think this is gymnastics or breakdancing
or maybe even some form of martial arts.
But it's actually a sport called tricking.
And even if you've never heard of it,
there is a good chance you've seen it.
Over the past 10 years or so, social video platforms
like YouTube and Instagram have boosted tricking's fan base
while fostering a global community of trickers
who are constantly one-upping each other.
And if there's one trick that best reflects
the sport's rapid evolution, it's the corkscrew.
It's a one-footed tilted backflip
combined with at least one 360 degree twist.
Even a single corkscrew is tough to pull off,
so tough that, as recently as a few years ago,
a double cork, where the tricker
rotates 720 degrees in the air,
was considered the physical limit of the sport.
But pretty soon expert trickers
were landing double corks like they were nothing.
Then came the triple corks.
And finally, in 2016, the world's first quad cork.
But since then, only two other people
have landed a quad cork on camera.
So is four rotations the limit?
Today, we're going to look at why a quintuple cork,
that's five full spins combined
with a tilted backflip, is almost impossible.
To find out what it takes,
I got a crash course in tricking fundamentals.
- All in one motion, exactly.
- Spoke with some of the best trickers on Earth.
Do you wanna be the first person to do a quint?
- If I had time to like, train for it, yeah, for sure.
- [Robbie] And talk with a physicist about
what separates tricking from other acrobatic feats.
- It's not your typical gymnastics kind of movement.
It's not symmetric.
- Tricking has its roots in martial arts,
which people have obviously been practicing
for thousands of years.
But tricking as it's known today has really only been around
since the turn of the millennium.
Competitions work like breakdance battles,
which means that athletes are judged
not only on their ability
to string together tricks but also their style.
- There's just so many different elements
that compose and make tricking what it is.
- [Robbie] That's professional tricker Michael Guthrie.
He was the first American to land a triple cork,
and in 2016, the first person in the world
to land a quad cork, a trick that is so hard to pull off
he hasn't landed one since.
- As far as power or difficulty goes,
this is the pinnacle of tricking right now, the quad cork.
- Even the setup is tough.
It requires a series of precisely timed rotations
that help the athlete build the momentum they need
to launch into the air and perform
an off-axis backflip plus as many twists
as they can manage all in less than a second.
You need strength to maximize your height,
you need coordination to maximize the speed of your spin,
and, depending on the setting,
you might also have a spring floor
which buys you a few extra inches of height.
And then, of course, you have to land the thing,
which, honestly, looks pretty painful.
- Step back, step back.
We're gonna use our arms, step forward.
- [Robbie] To get a better sense
of just how difficult this trick is,
Guthrie met me at a gym in Redwood City, California,
to teach me some fundamentals.
Before we started, he asked me
if I had ever done a backflip before,
like that is a reasonable starting point.
But no, I've never done a backflip.
So instead, Guthrie decided to start me out
with something a little easier.
It's called the scoot.
- The scoot itself is, it's a setup for a trick.
It's a setup to help us get more power.
Relax, let those legs go over the head here,
and keep that right foot off the ground just until the end.
Try to keep a little more control before setting it down.
- Okay, so.
- [Michael] Yes, there you go.
- And that left foot.
- There you go, yeah, exactly.
- Now, the scoot might not look
that impressive, especially when I do it,
but that's because it's more of a foundational move.
It teaches novice trickers the importance of being precise
with the timing of their movements,
and it helps advance trickers build momentum
for more complicated tricks.
The scoot is actually what Australian tricker
Scott Skelton used as his setup
when he performed the world's first triple cork.
But for the quad cork,
Guthrie needed something more powerful.
What was missing for you that was separating
your three or three and a half cork from a quad?
- Finding the right setup.
So, when we were going through this episode,
we had that move, the scoot,
which is not necessarily the most powerful setup.
No one has ever done a quad cork from scoot.
So it had to be found.
- [Robbie] In other words, Guthrie had to find
something more powerful than the scoot.
His search led him to a more advanced setup move
called the touchdown raise.
Here's what it looks like.
So what makes the touchdown raise such an outstanding setup?
To help answer that question, we called up
physicist John Di Bartolo.
- There's a couple of things that are at play here.
You exert large enough forces on your body
while your feet are in contact with the ground
to produce a large torque
and to give you a large angular momentum.
And then, when you're in the air,
you decrease your moment of inertia by a significant amount,
and that will further boost your rate of spin.
- All right, let's break those terms down one by one.
Torque is just twisting force.
Guthrie produces it when his feet and hands
are in contact with the ground.
The more torque he applies,
the greater his angular momentum.
Angular momentum depends on how fast a tricker spins
and something that physicists call their moment of inertia,
which is related to the way they position their bodies
around the axis on which they're spinning.
Now, these concepts can be tough to visualize on a tricker,
at least at first, so let's start
with a more traditional example, a figure skater.
When he draws his arms, hands, feet, and legs
in towards his axis of rotation,
it decreases his moment of inertia
and increases his rate of spin.
Now let's go back to Guthrie.
What makes the touchdown raise so powerful
is the way it allows Guthrie to first sweep his limbs
far from his body, and then pull them in close,
right as he's launching into the air.
It's a little like the figure skater
except sideways, and without the skates.
Plus, Guthrie is actually rotating around two axes,
one for the off-kilter backflip, here,
and another for the spins, here.
And when you think of it that way,
tricking sounds a bit like gymnastics.
Which, it is.
But there are some important distinctions as well.
What is it that differentiates a move like the corkscrew
which is a pretty typical move in tricking
from similar maneuvers in a discipline like gymnastics?
- My impression seems to be that gymnastics
is more about symmetry of movement.
Tricking seems to create the illusion
that the laws of physics are being bent
by using things like asymmetric movement
and just really nonconventional ways of moving the body.
- Remember how the touchdown raise
lets Guthrie gather angular momentum?
It also allows him to start twisting
before initiating the cork, which means
that when he does take off, he's already spinning.
Compare that to a similar maneuver in gymnastics.
The quad twist.
Here's footage of the first one
ever recorded in competition.
Now, the setup for this trick
is a series of symmetrical back handsprings.
But here's the catch.
Those handsprings?
Totally linear.
Unlike with the touchdown raise,
there is no rotation around the axis
running through this gymnast's head and feet,
so he doesn't start spinning
until right as he leaves the ground.
Only once he's airborne does he really start to twist.
And then there's the landing.
Gymnasts lose points if they don't stick their landing
in a square stable position on both feet.
But trickers?
Trickers can land any number of ways.
In other words, there is a flexibility in tricking
that allows athletes to explore more dynamic movements
than you would find in a sport like gymnastics.
And that flexibility could be what enables a tricker
to graduate from a quad cork to a quint.
And that tricker might just be this guy.
- My name is Alexander Anderson,
and I'm the most consistent quad corker in the game.
- [Robbie] Remember, only three people on Earth
have landed a quad cork on film.
The first was Michael Guthrie, and he's only landed it once.
The second is Japanese tricker Shosei Iwamoto.
He's landed it a few times.
And then there's Anderson.
How many quad corks have you landed?
- I think I've landed like,
maybe a little over 10 or something.
What sets you apart?
Why can you land it so much more consistently?
I go two twists on the way up.
- [Robbie] Okay.
- And then I use the two twists coming up,
and then once I reach the top,
I start twisting for two more coming down.
- It happens so quickly it's hard to say
whether Anderson is spinning faster,
jumping higher, or both.
But either way, he's pulled this off
more times than anyone else on the planet.
Do you have any goals in terms of trying to hit a quint?
- Yeah, of course.
I do think it is a possibility,
but I just don't think it's a possibility yet.
- When do you think a quint will happen?
- I think in between like five,
and like, six, seven years, maybe.
- To be honest, it might take even longer than that.
It took Guthrie almost eight years
to graduate from the triple cork to the quad,
and every tricker we spoke to said that going
from the quad to the quint would be significantly harder.
But if someone is going to pull it off,
it's clear what they'll need to work on.
The first thing is more height,
which is the kind of thing
an even bouncier spring floor could help with.
But even more important might be
increasing their rate of spin.
- There are two ways that the tricker
can hopefully achieve this.
One by providing more torque on the body during the moment
when the feet are in contact with the ground
and by providing more of a dramatic
larger before, smaller afterwards
change in moment of inertia.
- In other words, trickers are gonna need to find a way
to squeeze even more power out of their setup move.
For something like the touchdown raise,
that means starting with their limbs even farther out,
and retracting them even tighter
around their axis of rotation.
Another possibility is that no matter
how they move their bodies, the touchdown raise
just won't be powerful enough.
Maybe, like with the quad, trickers training for the quint
will have to develop an entirely new setup move.
But until they do, remember that what trickers
like Guthrie and Anderson are doing
is already almost impossible.