Our Blog - Paris Olympics - Mens Trampoline Gymnastics

I have to admit, I had never seen competitive trampoline before. It became an Olympic sport in 2000 although there were World Championships back in 1964. I was quite happy that they explained the competition beforehand, including the different scores. TOF is Time of Flight, which is literally the time spent in the air and is electronically calculated, as is the Horizontal Displacement, which is how far outside of the center box on the trampoline the competitor bounces. Similar to diving and other gymnastics competitions, there are also scores for degree of difficulty and execution of the skills.

I thought we had better seats than we did for the men's gymnastics all-around competition but this solidified my need for a better phone camera. It is in the same arena as the men's gymnastics and the 2 trampolines are placed in the area where the floor exercise was done (you can tell the other areas including the long runway to the right, which was used for the vault). It is well padded, which came in handy quite a few times as you will see in pictures and videos below.

There were 16 athletes, divided initially into 2 groups. They introduced the first group, and they got to warm up on the 2 trampolines. They went through once, then the other 8 came out, did a warmup, then competed. They then went back through group 1 and group 2 for a 2nd time. It would seem that they could choose which trampoline they liked better as it didn't seem that they were required to use each of them (but I didn't keep track, in fact). Each athlete kept their highest score, which really helped a couple of them that fell during one of their exercises. The top 8 then went to a 1-time final for the medals.

Before starting, they had been trying to make ballet seem more interesting by combining it with modern music/dance (still by ballerinas) and sometimes adding in a more modern dancer. In this case, an internet sensation who seemed to do a bit of moonwalking. It was on the other side of the arena so the video of the screen seemed to look better.

I took both videos of a couple of the exercises and then some pictures. I think the videos are better to show the overall competition but sometimes the pictures are interesting as well. I don't have pictures of each athlete because in some of the pictures, you can't really make out the athlete from the people in the stands behind them due to the placement and color.

Here is a set of pictures that show one of the falls ... he starts okay, does a few somersaults, moving ever so slightly to the edge until the last one, his left foot hits the padding on the side and down he goes.

Here are a couple more with the top competitors, the first one is the eventual winner (competing for "AIN" which is the neutral/no country designation) and the second athlete was from China.

More of attempting to get a couple nice still pictures in various positions.