The competitive world of jump rope has some talented Canberra kids who recently won gold and intend on taking their sport to the Olympics.
Anabelle Julias, 15, Grace Bucklar, 14, Phoebe Bruhn, 15, Tilly Whyte, 13, and Mav Larkin, 13, found out their double dutch pairs freestyle won gold in the junior world championships with the International Jump Rope Union.
The group have been invested in skipping for about nine years, with future hopes the sport gets recognised by the Olympics to then compete for Australia in either the Los Angeles 2028 or Brisbane 2032 Games.
The competition was originally meant to be hosted in-person at Orlando back in 2020, yet COVID continued to create delays until the committee decided to make it virtual.
"I started skipping because both my older sisters started when it was just a lunchtime club at the school they were at and then it finally became a bigger club," Grace said.
"Similar for me, I did my first year when I was at pre-school, dropped it briefly and picked then it up again when I was 11," Tilly said.
While the team had years of experience under their belt, the pandemic made their most recent competition even more challenging.
"There was a lot more effort that needed to be put in because as it turned virtual, we had to put in hours and hours of filming for the competition because it was then all just based on submitting a video," Mav said.
"We were doing like 10 takes for one event, and we were all submitting around six to 12 events so I think we almost put more pressure on ourselves to get it perfect because we had the chance to where in-person competitions you just get one chance and it's over."
The winning routine is much more complex than every day playground skipping, as judges look at technique, tricks and teamwork.
"So double dutch pair, you basically have four people, so two people are spinning and then two people are skipping in the ropes and you like switch around and you do all the different types of tricks," Anabelle said.
"But as for the five of us, so there's multiple different events and then some of us only competed in certain ones and then that all added up as a team total."
To keep up with motivation during COVID lockdowns, the group relied a lot on their head coach. "Our head coach set up Google classrooms for us and she posted lots of training things for us to do to keep us motivated and to keep our fitness up as well during all the lockdowns," Phoebe said.
The group is also heavily motivated by the possibility of their sport being recognised in the Olympics, with all five collectively saying "definitely yes" to that being their ultimate goal.
"I think that everyone sees the Olympics as the dream, like even people that don't even do any sport, they always see the Olympics as being the best of the best, so I feel like getting our sport to the Olympics would help people recognise it more and understand that skipping is the real deal," Anabelle said.
"It's not just something you do on the playground for fun, you can actually get really into it and it's actually pretty hard to do."
Skipping Australia treasurer and Jazzy Jumpers president Kirralee Larkin said the campaign for skipping to be a part of the Olympics is well on the way.
"We are trying to get enough countries on board to recognise the sport and we're working very closely with the Global Association of International Sports Federations which are the people that the Olympic Committee is part of to decide who goes to the games," Ms Larkin said.
"We are not far off to getting this to be the case which is a close dream for these kids."
While for some this sport may be unknown, Ms Larkin says Australia performs extremely well, with teams in Brisbane being "very well renowned in the sport across the world."
"There is one club in Canberra which is the Jazzy Jumpers and we're one of the bigger clubs in Australia with around 100 to 120 athletes prior to COVID. That consists of around 50 to 60 recreational skippers for people wanting a bit of fun to start with and from there we invite them into our competition team," she explained.
