Jensen Kimmitt 1st Place 1A World Yo-Yo Contest 2010 Video
Jensen Kimmitt dominated this year’s World Yo-Yo Contest. This year was particularly brutal for 1A so he should feel very proud. Hiroyuki Suzuki (aka Mickey) from Japan took second and Christopher Chia from Singapore took third. Almost all of the 25 contestants in the finals performed tight, well choreographed, and unique freestyles. Yuuki Spencer, Mateusz Ganc, Takahiro Iizuka, Anthony Rojas, Paul Kerbel, and Chris Fraser (who ranked in descending order starting with Yuuki) all gave top-three-worthy performances.
Even the semi-final contestants delivered. Paul Han (below Jensen’s video) packed so much style and energy into his preliminary that no player should ever have an excuse for not making a one minute freestyle fun and high-scoring. The turnout for 1A was so high this year that the competition’s organizers introduced a two tier semi-final. In other words, if you were skilled enough to make it through the first preliminary freestyle, you had to do it just as well for the second preliminary to make it to finals.
In short, the bar has been raised. Every player’s routine was difficult, clean, and fun. Usually only a few players were either fun or clean or difficult and even fewer could combine two or all three. Competitors have discovered the importance of a well rounded freestyle–one that is agreeable to the judges, impresses the audience, and, perhaps most importantly, impresses their competition. Creativity and talent is at an all time high in the competitive yoyo community.
I’ll end this unexpected article (or babbling) with this: if you’re reading this now and thinking “I would like to compete but there’s no way I could learn those tricks, or I’m afraid of crowds, or I think the judging is flawed, or I just don’t have the time,” then I urge you to reconsider, especially if you’re young and just getting into yoyo play. These same questions plague the minds of all the top level competitors. They deal with the same anxieties and life-troubles as anyone else. But their satisfaction from confronting these challenges, successfully or not, is unique and rewarding. No one is naturally a winning competitor. They practice and, more importantly, they think. They think about what it takes to overcome obstacles. Such is the mindset of a competitor for anything.
