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Trampolining Clubs

Every sport has its ups and downs, but trampolining is totally made up of them, competitors reaching dizzying heights as they spring from the bed of the trampoline, performing graceful movements in the air that can sometimes seem almost to be in slow motion.
The origins of this relatively recent sport can perhaps be guessed at with a little imagination: the founder of the sport, George Nissen, was taken by the way circus trapeze artists would drop to their safety net and use its springiness to effect somersaults and similar graceful moves. In the decade before WWII he developed a still springier contraption, which he named the trampoline (trampoline is Spanish for diving board), and as a gifted gymnast and acrobat was able to demonstrate it to audiences himself.
Long a school gym standby, the sport developed over the years since Nissen’s brainwave, until finally in 2000 it entered the Olympics. Not everyone aspires to Olympic glory of course, and for some joining a trampolining club will be for the sheer joy of flight, or as near as we can come without winged equipment: “You’ll believe a man can fly,” said the ads for the first modern Superman movie. And for a few moments springing free of gravity on a trampoline you feel it too.

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