How Ultra-Flexible Teens Turned ‘Tricking’ Into a Sport

The floor inside All Star Karate Center has a subtle spring to it. The bounce is stiff and reactive—not sluggish, like a backyard trampoline—and originates a few inches below the padding under my bare feet. It feels … good, if that makes sense? Reassuring, almost. As though, on this floor, I could run a bit faster or leap a hair higher than I would on solid ground. I smile, sigh, and think to myself: I’ve got this.

But I have not got this. “Let’s start simple,” says Michael Guthrie, who is standing beside me, also barefoot. “Have you ever done a backflip?” I stop smiling and shake my head. A somersault, sure. A backflip, no. “Really? OK. No, no, that’s OK,” he says. “Let’s try something easier.”

Guthrie has met me at this gym in Redwood City, California, to teach me the fundamentals of tricking. If you’ve never heard of it, there’s a good chance you’re old enough to rent a car. Tricking is a young sport favored by young people, especially ones whose tendons and ligaments do not wither vicariously at the sight of hard-landing flips, kicks, and spins. Its origins are in martial arts, but shortly after the turn of the millennium, social video platforms like YouTube catalyzed its growth and evolution by enabling practitioners (aka “trickers”) around the world to swap footage of their increasingly impressive feats. The internet being the remix-happy crucible that it is, trickers were quick to incorporate elements of gymnastics, breakdancing, parkour, and capoeira into their repertoires. Today, the sport is both a mixture of those disciplines and none of them at all: Tricking, most trickers will tell you, is its own thing.

“It leaves a bad taste in my mouth when people call it a blend of other disciplines,” Guthrie says. He prefers to characterize tricking as “emotion and personality, expressed with flips.”

It would sound corny if Guthrie weren’t such an authority on these matters. At 25, he’s on the older side for a tricker, but he’s dominated the sport for more than a decade by repeatedly pushing the limits of what his peers believe is possible. His crowning feat came on October 31, 2016, when he became the first person to successfully land a quadruple corkscrew: an off-axis backflip combined with four in-air twists. In tricking circles, it was like the moon landing, the four-minute mile, and the Fosbury flop spun into one. As one fan wrote on the heels of Guthrie’s achievement, “Michael Guthrie has set records for records that we didn’t even know could be set, and then broke them himself … I mean, they don’t even show this kind of stuff in movies.”

All of which reads like hyperbole if you haven’t seen what Guthrie can do. But it’s true: He can maneuver his body in counterintuitive ways. Spiraling through the air along multiple axes, Guthrie’s head, hands, feet, and torso can appear, by turns, to move contrary not just to gravity but his own momentum, sweeping through space along paths you don’t usually see in, say, gymnastics. His list of tricking-firsts is, without exaggeration, innumerable. Even the movie thing is accurate. Tron: Legacy, the visually gobsmacking sci-fi action flick, featured tricking in some of its fight scenes, but the sport has advanced so dramatically since the film’s 2010 release that the CGI-boosted stunts manage to look more believable than Guthrie’s.

Consider the quad cork, for example. When Guthrie pulled it off in 2016, the most rotations anyone had managed to execute previously was three. To add that extra twist, Guthrie needed to find a way to spin faster than any tricker before him. He found the oomph he needed in a move called the touchdown raiz. It’s a setup maneuver that trickers use to line up their bodies for more ambitious tricks, the way a gymnast might use handsprings. Except, unlike a handspring, the touchdown raiz enables an athlete to gather rotational momentum about the axis that runs between their head and their feet.

That momentum is crucial to performing a trick like the quad cork, because it allows the athlete to start spinning before they leave the ground and twist faster once they’re in the air. “It’s all about the change in moment of inertia,” says John Di Bartolo, an applied physicist at New York University Tandon School of Engineering. Moment of inertia is a term physicists use to describe a body’s tendency to resist rotation; the smaller it is, the easier an object spins. Guthrie reduces his moment of inertia (and increases his spin rate) by sweeping his arms and legs far from his body throughout the touchdown raiz, then drawing them sharply inward as he leaves the ground and initiates the quad cork.

Performing that series of moves is so exacting that Guthrie has only managed to do it once. His successful quad cork attempt in 2016? That was it. Since then, only two other people have landed a quad cork on camera: Shosei Iwamoto, a 14-year-old phenom from Kobe, Japan, and Alexander Andersen, a 21-year-old tricker from Bergen, Norway.

Of the three, Andersen has completed the most quads. “I think I’ve landed a little over 10,” he tells me over video chat. His secret, he says, is that he spins faster, sooner.

Verifying that claim proved to be surprisingly difficult, but past research suggests it’s a good working theory. Tricking is such a young and unconventional pursuit that researchers have yet to investigate it with force-sensing equipment or motion trackers, the way they have with other sports. But scientists who study figure skating jumps have found that, while many skaters leap high enough and with enough angular momentum to perform four spins, most of them fail to adopt a tight enough body configuration in the air, causing them to rotate later and slower than the small handful of athletes who can successfully complete a quad. It’s reasonable to assume that Andersen has found a body position that favors the faster rotational velocities necessary to consistently land the quad cork.

The question now is: Can anyone land a quint? “I do think it is a possibility,” Andersen says. “I just don’t think it’s a possibility yet.”

It’s clear what it would take, though: “more power, more hang time, more spin,” Guthrie figures. A spring floor, he says, gesturing to the one we’re standing on, can help with all three, but anything much bouncier would diminish the significance of a milestone like the quintuple corkscrew. Instead, he adds, trickers will probably need to find a way to spin even faster in the air by squeezing more power out of their setup.

Or by creating a new setup altogether. After learning I’ve never done a backflip, Guthrie decides to teach me “the scoot,” a beginner-level maneuver that many trickers use to gather momentum for single, double, and triple corks. “But the scoot isn’t very powerful,” Guthrie says, which is why when he was training to perform the first quad cork, he had to find and master the more complex touchdown raiz.

It’s possible, Guthrie says, that the ideal setup for the quintuple cork has yet to be discovered. Perhaps someone in the next generation of trickers will find it. “Someone young,” he suggests, “with joints and bones and tendons more flexy and bendy than mine.”