Why are backflips so overhyped? | Page 4 | Golden Skate

Why are backflips so overhyped?

I meant counting only as a choreographic move inside a Choreographic Sequence, not separately as an Element.

By the way, I did like Rika Kihira's cartwheel in The Fire Within. It must have taken her tremendous work to make it so soft and natural.
And she didn’t overuse that element, because everything else in the program was memorable, and that movement actually matched the music. But now everyone does cartwheels for everything.
 
Wait, wait. You're blaming Ilia for skating his program in the Team Event while France put Kevin Aymose in the team SP and they didn't make the final, thus putting Adam's 2026 Olympic debut back a few days?

By the way, for me the only current skater whose backflip looks cool is Keegan Messing. :)
Everything Keegan does is cool😎
 

I hope this is not geoblocked for you.
When a backflip is done this way, and the one-foot landing is clearly on one foot, I think it is an okay choreo move. Not a favorite move of mine by a long shot, but decent enough to be allowed to be legal. Only someone with proper gymnastics training should even attempt it.

For that matter, I do love the non-horizontally-rotated aerial jumps--all of them, really; the one-foot landed backflip would be my least favorite of those various jumps, though.
 
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Regarding Cartwheels, Kazuki Tomono's Short Program to That's It! I'm Crazy has one AND a Split Jump, which aren't always well integrated, we may forget it out of the habit of seeing this signature jump of Jason Brown's fitting so well in his programs; here with Kazuki Tomono they both fit perfectly in the Step Sequence and that's a thing to behold, there are things of the kind happening nowadays in Figure Skating, and WITH quality and meaning and really skating:


But well, there's no way JSF would score their skaters fairly and let Yuma Kagiyama to his place, and so on, so Kazuki Tomono had no chance of becoming an Olympian...
 
The other video posted above is unavailable to me, geoblocked maybe or taken down, but here someone posted an interesting comparison of Ilia and Jun which I thought might be a nice addition to this discussion.
BTW, with the close-up on their feet for most of the time, you can see clearly the backflip has a two-footed landing coming to a short halt and no running edge. Anyone can see anything different here?

 
When a backflip is done this way, and the one-foot landing is clearly on one foot, I think it is an okay choreo move. Not a favorite move of mine by a long shot, but decent enough to be allowed to be legal. Only someone with proper gymnastics training should even attempt it.

For that matter, I do love the non-horizontally-rotated aerial jumps--all of them, really; the one-foot landed backflip would be my least favorite of those various jumps, though.
Robert Wagenhoffer, singles and pairs competitor for the US in my era (late 1970s/early 1980s), made a bit of a specialty of those kind of jumps. I think he only did the backflip and his signature "side cartwheel" in competition, but I saw him do a variety of others in gala programs.
 
When Keegan did it it was cool because it fit his special kind if rougher style. When Adam did it it was cool because he did it to defy the judges and ate the penalties.

Ilia is a poser.

I bet if Adam does a backflip at the Olympics, the casuals will accuse him of copying Ilia.
 
When Keegan did it it was cool because it fit his special kind if rougher style. When Adam did it it was cool because he did it to defy the judges and ate the penalties.

Ilia is a poser.

I bet if Adam does a backflip at the Olympics, the casuals will accuse him of copying Ilia.
On the social medias they’re all being accused of copying Surya Bonaly.
 
On the social medias they’re all being accused of copying Surya Bonaly.
After seeing the American Terry Kubicka doing it in the 1976 Olympics, my partner and several other teenage boys in our Canadian club were landing it for fun in practice sessions, until the head coach forbade it. What a pity our generation didn't film every minute of our lives in those days. They could have proved how far back the stunt actually goes. ;)
 
After seeing the American Terry Kubicka doing it in the 1976 Olympics, my partner and several other teenage boys in our Canadian club were landing it for fun in practice sessions, until the head coach forbade it.
Good for the coach. I dare say that a many of these backflips were without supervision. It would be bad publicity for a skating rink if someone actually broke his neck fooling around.

When I was 12 I invented a trick on a bicycle that was so cool I couldn't wait to rush out and try it. I sailed over a cliff and landed headfirst thirty feet below. I was doubly lucky. First, I only broke my collar bone, nor my neck. And secondly, a motorist was passing by along the road at the bottom of the cliff and he jumped out of his car, grabbed me up, and rushed me to the hospital -- I suppose if this happened nowadays the witnesses would be too busy fecording the accident with their cellphones to play good Samaritan. ;)
 
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My 2 cents. I didn't feel like the mens backflips added much to their programs, especially since Surya's was so much better. There was no question that she landed on 1 foot, whereas many of the men barely avoided putting both feet on the ice.
 
To tell the truth, I think that the solid two-footed landing looks better than the off-balance contortions that guys go through to avoid it.
 
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