As the thread’s title says, I’m curious about the origins of horizontal play. Were there any pioneers or did it just suddenly happen?
you were seeing some horizontal basics work there way into freestyles beginning in the mid-2000’s.
first i remember them as a contest banger was mickey’s 45-degree eli hop combos. that was a trick that everyone just had to learn.
1:38 in this vid.
then yuuki brought some more complicated combos in his legendary 2007 freestyle which felt more like what horizontal play has become lately.
and by 2009, shinya kido was doing roughly half of his combos in kind of a 45 to 75-degree diagonal. some people kind of derided it as not being true horizontal, but after he won with it, you really saw it become a ubiquitous part of competitive routines. almost to the point that it’s the “braintwister combo” of today - just a tool that every top-tier competitor has in their bag.
obviously, this trend wasn’t just happening at worlds - that’s just an easy way to watch it happen.
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gyroflop variations are at least as old as the freehand series. I remember in 2005 everyone around me was constantly showing off their gyroflop-to-revolutions, and i was the only one who couldnt.
The Arizona ProYo guys were the first I saw doing horizontal stuff. Ben McPhee did a horizontal Braintwister in his 5th Place Worlds freestyle in 1998.
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