The ‘Triff’ that almost

This story was originally published on Locker Room at Newsroom.co.nz, and is republished with permission.

For almost five years, Maddie Davidson could not beat her nemesis, the Triffus. The Triff, as the talented young trampolinist calls it, hung over her day in, day out. It messed with her head, as both her body and her brain fought to conquer it.

So what is this relentless monster?

Well, the Triffus is a difficult move in trampolining – a triple somersault with a half twist in the air. Davidson wanted to master a Triffus pike to begin the routine she’d perform on trampoline’s world stage.

‘‘The Triff is a skill I’ve had a lot of problems with; I’ve been trying to learn it for four or five years. My brain didn’t like it, it just wouldn’t co-operate,’’ Davidson explains.

‘‘That’s the hard thing about trampolining. Before you do [a skill], you’re so sure that you’ve got it, then when you do it wrong, it’s hard to understand why your brain isn’t responding the way it should.’’

But her coach, former Uzbekistan trampolinist Alex Nilov, wouldn’t give up on her and the Triff.

‘‘Alex is very good at thinking outside the box. He’s always looking at different ways of learning things, because everyone is different,’’ Davidson says.

At times, it was painful. ‘‘Once you get into those bigger flips, you fall a little bit harder,’’ she says. ‘‘So, he was a bit reluctant to push me to learn it in the normal ways.’’

But then this January came ‘‘the light bulb moment’’.

‘‘We found a new technique that worked really well for my brain. Finally, I understood how to do it. We tried it into the foam pit one day and it actually worked,’’ she says.

So Davidson, in her typically determined way, spent three weeks tumbling into the foam pit at her Olympia Gymnastics Sports club in Christchurch, testing the Triff over and over, before she took it to the tramp.

‘‘I was so excited, I really thought I’d never do it,’’ the 20-year-old says.

Davidson then added the Triffus pike to the individual trampoline routine she’d take to this year’s World Cup events dotted around the globe, and the world championships in Tokyo, which start this week.

It meant that her routine improved ‘‘tremendously’’ – lifting the difficulty in her routine by 1.5 points, and in her second routine by 2.5 points. (Trampolinists are scored on difficulty, execution, horizontal displacement and time of flight. The difficulty score starts at 0.0 and increases with every difficult skill).

‘‘It’s a massive difference, and it’s helped me to be more competitive for a spot at the Olympics,’’ Davidson says.

And that’s what Davidson is aiming for.

At this week’s world championships in Tokyo, Davidson is aiming for the finals of the women’s trampoline, and to secure New Zealand a quota spot at the 2020 Olympics.

She also knows she has to lift her world ranking to No 16 or higher to assuage New Zealand’s Olympic selectors. Right now, she’s 20th on the rankings ladder, but she’s proven she can spring much higher.

At last year’s world champs she finished 13th. In September, at the World Cup event in Khabarovsk, Russia, she was 10th, scoring a personal best.

‘‘The World Cups at the start of the year weren’t as good as I wanted,’’ she admits. ‘‘So for three months, I put in the really hard yards and changed other things in my life – what I was doing in the gym; my diet, to make sure I was getting leaner and stronger, and helping my body recover better.’’

If she can bounce her way back to Tokyo next year, she will be New Zealand’s first female trampolinist to compete at an Olympics.

Tony Compier, the chief executive of Gymnastics NZ, says it would be a ‘‘truly historic moment’’ in New Zealand women’s sport.

‘‘As the old adage goes, it’s one thing to have talent, and another to be able to convert that into success,’’ he says.

‘‘Maddie has been building many milestones of success over the last few years, so what a deserved reward it would be –