At a recent NCAA college gymnastics match, a 21-year-old UCLA gymnast mesmerized every single attendee for approximately one minute and 30 seconds with a genuinely stunning floor routine, which achieved two high markers of success for an athlete in 2019: She received a perfect score, and also she went viral.
On Saturday night, Katelyn Ohashi took the floor at Anaheim Arena to perform her incredibly difficult routine, during which she flipped and leaped and twisted extremely high in the air, and somehow managed to stay very light on her feet and stick all her landings. “A 10 isn’t enough for this floor routine by @katelyn_ohashi,” the UCLA Gymnastics official Twitter account tweeted alongside a video on Sunday, which wasn’t an exaggeration. As of early Monday afternoon, the video has been viewed more than 18 million times, and has elicited praise from senator Kamala Harris, Atlantic writer Jemele Hill, and MSNBC’s Katy Turr.
And, per UCLA coach Valerie Kondos Field, we’re all right to be impressed.
“Her whole floor routine is ridiculously hard,” Field told UCLA student newspaper Daily Bruin. “Every single thing about it including the backward split that she does after her leap pass — it’s insane.”
Just watch it for yourself.
Apparently, this isn’t the first time Ohashi has gone viral. Per the Washington Post, her floor routine at the 2018 Pac-12 gymnastics championships landed her first place, and the video of that routine has gotten more than 4 million views on YouTube; in short, she’s extremely talented! And though she left the world of elite gymnastics around five years ago after facing intense criticism — meaning she won’t be performing in the Olympics any time soon — she’s clearly much happier today, which is what makes her routine so much fun to watch.
