Benjamin Robinson, or Ben to his friends, is an incredible gymnast.  At the astounding age of just six-years-old, he was rolling and doing flips on the furniture all over his house.

When asked why he started doing gymnastics he said, “My mother said that I had too much energy and could not sit still. She saw me rolling and doing flips off the couch, so she threw me into some gymnastic lessons.” 

At the age of nine, he entered his first competition. In the types of competition he took part in, there were two ways of dividing the participants. One was by age and the other was by rank. The ranks were determined by the skill of the participant and how long they’d been doing gymnastics. With this system, you’d have people of similar skill levels and ages competing against one another instead of having an eleven-year-old compared to a grown adult. Ben managed to win his first competition because there weren’t very many people who were nine-years-old and of a high enough rank to compete with him. 

Ben would go on to participate in so many different competitions that he eventually lost count. He won many of these competitions because of how skilled he was for his age. He eventually lost interest in gymnastics, so he stopped going to competitions about two years ago. He wanted to get back into it but unfortunately, COVID hit and he was not able to take part in as many competitions as he used to.

This did not affect his skills, however. In the first week of his sophomore year of high school, he was asked by a classmate to do a flip. He checked with the teacher, made sure it was okay for him to do so, and she gave him the green light. He proceeded to successfully do a backflip in the middle of the classroom, just like old times. Then he sat down, and class continued as normal. When I asked him if he wanted to do gymnastics professionally, he said “I’m not sure.” Personally, I think he should.