‘Sport stacking’ record breaker Laura (14) is a real cup winner
IT’S a quirky talent that has put a Northern Ireland schoolgirl into the record books.
Laura Beacom (14), from Holywood, is set to be announced as the Guinness World Record holder for sport stacking.
She put 30 sets of cups up into pyramids and took them down again in 1 minute, 36.781 seconds, beating the old record by two seconds.
Laura took three attempts to break the record in Rome on November 15 after she dropped cups in her first and second goes.
She said: “I was a bit nervous but quite often in practice I would mess up early on and then do a good one right after, so I just kind of knew that would happen.
“When I got the record I just felt really happy.”
Sport stacking, also known as speed or cup stacking, sees competitors make three pyramids out of nine or 12 cups in a sequence as fast as they can.
There are three categories, with Laura setting the record for ‘3-6-3’ — referring to the number of cups in each pyramid she had to make in a set.
The event began in 1981 in California when Wayne Godinet got children he was working with and who were bored by traditional sports to put cups into pyramids as fast as they could.
He set up Karango Cupstack Co to market them, and by the end of the decade he claimed to have sold 25,000 sets.
The sport featured on The Tonight Show in 1990 and gained popularity when Colorado PE teacher Bob Fox travelled across the US to promote it in 2000. He set up the World Cup Stacking Association in 2001, but changed its name to the World Sport Stacking Association in 2005.
Before sport stacking, Laura used to solve Rubik’s cube puzzles under timed conditions.
But when she was 12 she saw an advert for sport stacking on YouTube and found some cups at home she could try it with.
She explained: “I just kept practising and we decided because there was a tournament in Scotland which wasn’t too hard to get to, we thought we would go to that and I got first place female there. I hope to try to get all the individual UK records because I don’t hold all of them yet.” She has been trying to promote the sport in Northern Ireland, but warned: “I think you need a bit of patience because you are going to be slow at first. “Everyone’s slow at first, but you just need to know that you will get faster eventually.
“I was pretty slow when I started but I don’t know, I just practised a lot in the beginning and also got better cups as I went along. I usually practise every day, more on the weekends than on school days, but it depends on how much free time I have during the day.
“I invest a lot of time in it but I do it because it’s fun, not to the point where it’s not fun any more.”
Her father Andrew competes with her for the UK team and plans to join her and five others from Northern Ireland for the world championships in Spain next year.
He said: “It feels really good to compete for the UK together as I like to support her.”
They are the UK record holders in the parent/child discipline, in addition to Laura’s individual success in achieving 15 bronze, 20 silver and 20 gold medals in sport stacking competitions.