After the few hours sleep I managed to scrape, I set down to the event venue for final checks! The athletes had one final training session on the course, then a brief show-rundown and rehearsal where each athlete was able to plan out their run a little better took place. The atmosphere in the National Theatre was of nervous anticipation, with the magnitude of the upcoming event becoming more and more apparent by the second! As the event drew nearer and the skies darker, the crowds began to assemble, and oh dear did they assemble. There were thousands of people, lining the Southbank, some resorting to sitting on the bus-stop for a decent view.
There were four judges for the event, Diddy, Filip, Blue and Patrick. Each judge marked their own category out of 100 (Execution, Creativity, Flow & Difficulty). Each judge also marked an ‘Overall Impression’ of which the two highest and lowest scores would be eliminated, leaving the middle two 100 point scores to result in a final mark out of 600 for each athlete. This judging system works much better than previous events, as each judge has less power (as they only mark one category) and favoritism is also virtually impossible, due to the score averaging system, a single judge cant try to deliberately over or under-mark a competitor as the top and bottom score is removed.
The first set of runs all went well, with a fantastic display of humor, technical ability and showmanship from each athlete. The great thing about AoM, and why it is so much fun is because its hardly a competition at all in the minds of the practitioners taking part, Art of Motion is about going out and representing your movement, putting on a good show and enjoying the company of the other athletes. Anyone who has ever experienced an AoM will attest to this. After the last run, the crowd were treated during the breaks in the competition to a performance in the vein of Romeo & Juliet, but with Ballet & BMX flatlanding, as well as a Danny Macaskill display of two runs own the course, which was really inspiring to see someone move on a Parkour-designed course on a bike as effortlessly as Traceurs do.
The twelve finalists to have a second run were
1 – Erik Mukhametshin (Russia)
2 – Tim Shieff (UK)
3 – Marcus Gustafsson (Sweden)
4 – Kie Willis (UK)
5 – Jason Paul (Germany)
6 – Ryan Doyle (UK)
7 – Luci Romberg (USA)
8 – Phil Doyle (UK)
9 – Cato Aspmo (Sweden)
10 – Pip Andersen (UK)
11 – Delyan Dimitrov (Bulgaria)
12 – Will Sutton (UK)
Each athlete definitely felt the effects of competition, exhaustion and adrenaline can have the potential for disaster, and whilst the final runs did have a few minor injuries, slips and tumbles, nobody was seriously injured and the standard of the performances remained high. Once the twelve athletes had run, the arena went silent as the winner was announced.
The final results are!
1 – Tim Shieff
2 – Marcus Gustafsson
3 – Ryan Doyle
Best Trick – Erik Mukhametshin
Best Female – Luci Romberg
A massive thankyou goes to RedBull for making the event fantastic, Nico Wcleck and everyone who came for the event, it was easily the best one yet!
