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It climbs stiff as a stick, just moving its arms from bottom to top. Now two meters, now four, now five and so on until it reaches seven or eight meters. Then the show begins. In the same flight, three mortals. The next, two more. For several minutes, Robert Vilarasau strung together pirouettes and pirouettes with the only help of a trampoline. A fabric four metres long by two metres wide that, thanks to the strength of more than 100 steel springs, makes it fly and fly and fly again at the High Performance Centre (CAR) in Sant Cugat, where he lives and attends EL MUNDO.

Its specialty, trampoline gymnastics, is one of the most spectacular of the Olympic Games due to the heights reached by the jumpers - up to 10 meters - although for the untrained eye it is very difficult to enjoy. In fact, watching him train, there is a concern that skyrockets when his exercises grow in complexity.

Never lands outside? Yes, yes, quite a few times, but I've always known how to like me. When I see that I'm going to get out, that I'm shocked, I concentrate on positioning my body well, on protecting my back. I've ended up with a neck brace before, but nothing serious. Shall I explain one thing to you? At the last World Championships, in Birmingham, I warmed up and on the second jump I fell out of bed. Nothing happened to me because I hadn't picked up altitude yet, but I was embarrassed... The whole world stared at me, going to the ground is a package. Luckily it went well for me.

And so good. Team silver for Spain, the best historical result of the national team. A success for Vilarasau after the most complicated months of his life. At the beginning of 2022 he was the gymnast of the moment: he chained three consecutive quadruples, something never seen before, and even performed one of them in a tented position. At 20 years old – he's 22 now – he was the sensation, everyone was talking about. And suddenly... "I suffered a patellar tendon injury and it slowed me down. I'd try to jump, I'd infiltrate, and the pain would come back. In the end I had to stop. Now I've changed the way I jump because all the weight was going to that patellar tendon," he explains with the Paris 2024 Games as his goal.

Pedro Salado / Araba Press

Spain has never had a representative - male or female - in trampoline gymnastics and in order to be the first Vilarasau needs to finish in the top 10 in the two remaining World Cup events that will be held in March and July in Alkmaar (Netherlands) and Coimbra (Portugal).

Those quadruples will shine. I'd love to! All my friends tell me that, but I can't do them in competition. The current rules reward execution more than difficulty and it doesn't pay me to do quadruples. I get more points if I make perfect easy moves than if I make some small mistake in a quadruple. Someday I'll make them, I'll give them to myself, but when I've achieved my goals.

Contrary to what you might think, Vilarasau didn't start at a fair and end up at a gym. In fact, she didn't know trampoline competition existed until her grandmother introduced it to her. His grandmother?

Pedro Salado / Araba Press

"My grandmother was always afraid because I spent the day doing stunts in the street. When he came to pick me up from school, he kept shouting: 'Stop, stop!' One day some parents recommended that I sign up for gymnastics and she signed up both of us, her and me, for the Gimbe de Manresa. She had been told that trampoline gymnastics was less hard and nothing, that's how I started," recalls Vilarasau, who now does physical training every morning and dedicates every afternoon to specific acrobatics sessions on the bed.

And after all these years, if you go to a fair, do you want to show off on the mats? [Laughs] Oh, no. Now I don't get on because I don't, man, it's not my turn anymore. But when I was younger, at 12, 13 or 14, I did. I went with friends, started normal and warmed up. That was starting to fill up, people were freaking out... It was fun. Equally, our bed is very different from those at the fairs. The canvas is more elastic, the springs are much more powerful, the lifts make it not brake... It's not the same, although it's not bad to begin with.

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