Word: somersaulted
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...down and saw the floor did I know that we had done the trick." Actually, what the Flying Vazquezes accomplished together on July 10 in Tucson was much more than a trick. It was an athletic feat equivalent to the breaking of the 4-min. mile: the first quadruple somersault performed before a regular circus audience...
Acrobats have been trying to catch the quad since 1897, when, according to many accounts, European Aerialist Lena Jordan first did the triple somersault. The triple is now performed regularly, but it is still an accomplishment reserved for the very best aerialists. Yet Miguel, 17, who represents the fifth generation of a family of Mexican circus performers, was able to do the triple when he was 13. He spun so fast and flew so high that he was urged to go for four...
...there is more to a quad than another flipflop. When a flyer is traveling through the air at 80 m.p.h., reaction time is measured in milli seconds. "If it's a triple somersault, Mi guel can feel if he's going too fast," explains Juan, 32. "He can relax and slow down. If he's going too slowly, he can tuck up tighter and complete the third somer sault faster." The quadruple, by contrast, allows no such mid-course adjustment; once the flyer has released the bar and tucked himself up for the first of four turns...
What comes next? Probably the quad and a half. The quintuple somersault, Juan believes, is at least 15 years away. Since a flyer does not usually retire until he is 40, Miguel might be the man to do it. But before that happens, he may leave the field, and the air, to other daring young men on flying trapezes. He says he has another ambition: to come down to earth and play drums and guitar in a rock band...
...HAVE INHERITED THE EARTH . So proclaims the spray-painted graffito on a truck sprawled by a desolate stretch of road in this low-budget Australian thriller. At first horrified glance, moviegoers may be convinced that the vermin have also inherited the movie industry. In The Road Warrior, cars crash, somersault, explode, get squashed under the wheels of semis. Skinless bug-eyed corpses hurtle toward the screen. A mangy dog sups at a coyote carcass. A deadly boomerang shears off fingertips, creases a man's skull. That's entertainment? As a series of isolated incidents, no; our nerve endings...