Soccer freestyle star from Weston gets airtime for toilet paper juggling
Weston’s Laura Biondo played soccer professionally in Italy, traveled all over North America as a Cirque du Soleil artist for four years and holds 11 Guinness World Records.
Yeah, that’s right: 11 Guinness World Records.
But it’s a spur-of-the-moment viral video of her juggling a roll of toilet paper and a volleyball that will get her a spot on the CBS television show “The Greatest #AtHome Videos” on Friday, August 7 at 8 p.m. (WFOR-Ch. 4, WPEC-Ch. 12)
“It’s crazy how the world turns around,” Biondo says, recalling how she first decided to do a video during the coronavirus lockdown. “There was a toilet paper challenge and people tagged me aboout it. I decided to mix it up with a volleyball.”
So far, the 30-second video at Instagram.com/laurabiondo has gotten 94,642 views since she posted it on March 17. Biondo says it’s been shared over 1,000 times and had “a reach of 150,000 people just from my page. Other pages might have shared it too.”
Her mother and younger brother emigrated from Venezuela to South Florida in 1999 where she attended Tequesta Trace Middle School and Cypress Bay High School. Now 31, she started to play soccer when she was 10.
“I was terrible at juggling and ball control,” she recalls. “But through my brother I discovered freestyle and I started practicing and practicing so I [could] get better and better.”
For the uninitiated, freestyle is the athletic equivalent of a rap battle or a dance-off, with a young fandom around the world. Red Bull is a big sponsor of freestyle (or streetstyle) competitions.
“It’s actually a different sport,” Biondo explains. “It’s juggling a soccer ball, doing tricks with the soccer ball with any part of the body except your hands. It’s about becoming really, really creative. There’s basically no rules, so you can basically invent anything you want.”
Biondo’s invention landed her a gig with the Cirque du Soleil show “Luzia” for the past four years performing those freestyle tricks on tour all over the United States, Canada and Mexico.
Before that she added more international status to her resume — she speaks fluent Italian, Spanish, English and French — when she played in Serie A Femminile, the top-flight women’s soccer league in Italy.
That was also when she started breaking records and got her first real taste of being on TV in 2011 when a few programs decided to chronicle people attempting to get into the Guinness World Records. Now the Guinness people just call her directly, wanting to know if she wants to attempt a new record or break one of her old ones such as:
■ Most ‘‘around the world’’ ball control tricks in one minute.
■ Most soccer ball touches with the head in one minute
■ Most touches of a soccer ball with the shin in one minute
■ Most touches of a soccer ball with the sole in one minute
“The last one was on June 19 at the Paramount Miami Worldcenter condominium,” Biondo says. “It was something new Guinness came up with showing skills on the treadmill. It was hard to find a place to practice because of the quarantine. My best friend has a gym in her complex that was open, so I could practice for 10 days. But she lives up in Boca, so I would drive up and practice. The record was 120 and I did 170.”
She has plenty of time, having decided to take a sabbatical after four years of being on the road with Cirque du Soleil.
“This was even before the pandemic, so — in a way — I wasn’t that badly affected,” she says. “I’m going to keep on pushing the limits with my sport and go for more world records. I want to open doors for other girls to follow their dreams. I want to show them that if you put a lot of work into something, you can achieve anything. You have to study to be good at something. You have to practice to be good at something.”