Gymnastics are cool because it is a sport that prominently features people doing stuff that most humans can’t even dream of doing. Watch gymnastics for 20 minutes and you can see acts of speed, strength, flexibility, and agility that you rarely (if ever) see in other sports.
Every once in a while, you’ll see something in gymnastics that leaves you speechless. The Chinese men’s team did one of those things on Wednesday during the gala, which is essentially an exhibition that goes unjudged and lets athletes do whatever they want. China’s team decided to do something completely insane when it executed a human jump rope.
After essentially making a tower upon which one member of the team balanced on another member’s head with one hand, the team moved into the jump rope portion of the routine. One dude laid down and had teammates grab his wrists and ankles. They swung him around while another teammates hopped in and started jumping rope, and once they were done with that, the two dudes on the ends threw their teammate into the air. The now airborne human jump rope went out of frame, spun around a bunch, and eventually fell into the careful arms of his countrymen.
It’s unfortunate that we didn’t see anything like this while the events mattered. Can this become an Olympic sport? We know that the International Olympic Committee has already added a number of events to the 2020 Games in Tokyo, it should absolutely re-visit the idea of adding more events and make human jump rope one of them. And 3-on-3. That should absolutely be in the Olympics, too.