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  • Did you miss that?

  • Here it is again.

  • And again.

  • A little slower.

  • It’s probably still not slow enough.

  • This is sport stacking, or maybe you call it speed stacking, or cup stacking.

  • But whatever you call it, it has become a huge sport.

  • It’s in the Junior Olympics.

  • Versions are taught in PE classes, and show up on

  • The Tonight Show and Ellen.

  • Last year, more than 600,0000 people set a world record for stacking at the same time

  • around the world.

  • This is a lot more than a hobby.

  • Sport stacking’s basically a combination of formations

  • in which stackers upstack (stack up cups) or downstack (bring them down again).

  • It’s all a race against the clock, for new, mind-bendingly fast times.

  • The most common patterns are 3 cups, 3 cups, and 3 cups,

  • 3 cups, 6 cups, and 3 cupsor a 3-6-3 — and then the cycle, which has you do a 3-6-3,

  • followed by a 6-6 and then a 1-10-1, which top stackers can do

  • ...like this.

  • My name is Melissa Gomez.

  • I won the the 2014 and 2016 U.S. Nationals for women.

  • And I won the Junior Olympics in 2015 for women.”

  • The guy next to her is Mark Sykes.

  • He’s a former high school football and baseball player who is coach of the U.S. Sport Stacking

  • team.

  • He’s a Masters level competitor too.

  • (Masters basically means that he’s a grown up, since a lot of stackers are teens or younger).

  • He holds occasional practices in his church’s basement, and those practices attract some

  • of the best in the region.

  • Once I went to that first competition, then I was kinda hooked.

  • And then I kept going with the kids and kept competing.”

  • Amazing stackers like Melissaand Markhave put in hours and hours of practice.

  • Their goal is to break personal and world records, but you can see their skill when

  • they aren’t even trying.

  • This is Melissa just practicing.

  • Look at how quickly she does a slow set, just to clear her mind.

  • Or look at this.

  • She’s setting up a 1-10-1.

  • Notice where her eyes are looking.

  • She’s not showing off.

  • She just doesn’t need to look anymore.

  • Here’s a newbie stacking and here’s Melissa.

  • The point is not that Ellen is bad.

  • The point is that people like Melissa have gotten so, so good they can do it all on autopilot.

  • And then when they really try?

  • But at the same time, stacking is not just raw talent, or even practice alone.

  • The best stackers have to develop highly advanced tactics.

  • When you become a speed stacking pro, you need to optimize for the milliseconds.

  • Like Zhewei Wu does.

  • “I started stacking when I was in 6th grade, so I was 12 at that time,

  • and I was introduced in PE class, and weve been practicing since then.”

  • That means breaking down the quirks of the timer,

  • cups, and different competition formats to get record-breaking times.

  • This is a stacking mat and timer.

  • It starts when your hands leave the timer and stops when they return.

  • In that space in between, there’s room for tactics to shave off crucial fractions of

  • a second.

  • Most recently it’s the way that people start the timer.

  • So in the past people put their hands on the timer flat, like this.

  • But now people will cup their hands around the cup and they have their hands on the timer

  • like this.

  • It’s not the conventional way to do it, but doing so enhances the time it takes for

  • you to get on the first cup.

  • And having just those little differences makes a huge difference on your time.”

  • Playing to the timer is crucial.

  • Here’s Melissa completing an amazing cycle, but because the stack falls after she hits

  • the timer too hard— “6.17 - scratch.”

  • it’s what’s called “a scratch.”

  • The time doesn’t count.

  • You have to be sure you don’t miss the timer, too.

  • When that happened to me, I touched the timer and started celebrating,

  • and just going back to my friends, but the timer never stopped.

  • That took another 2.1 seconds added to my time, otherwise it would have been my fastest

  • time ever.”

  • To top stackers, the right cups are just as important.

  • You can see that on the pro cups, the holes in the top are wider than the ones on my cups.

  • That allows more air to get through.

  • Different stackers like different cups (these are just a few of the sets Zhewei’s owned).

  • These inks, you can really feel them.”

  • And that knowledge, along with different grip styles and all sorts of other adjustments,

  • gets used in all different events.

  • It even works in the truly mesmerizing doubles event.

  • “I’ll take that.”

  • Because this sport is for a YouTube generation, new strategies travel almost instantly.

  • That keeps the competition really fierce.

  • That’s led to blazingly fastand closeworld record times, as well as

  • some growing pains for the sport.

  • Stacking started in a California Boys and Girls Club in the early 80s.

  • This is patent number 4,586,709, for the original cup holding device.

  • But kids and PE teachers embraced it far beyond Oceanside, California.

  • You get a wide range.

  • You get some kids who really really enjoy it and they enjoy the competitive side of

  • it.

  • Some kids like the idea that you don’t have to compete at it.

  • Theyll build pyramids, theyll build towers, theyll try to stack the cups and

  • balance them in different ways.

  • So it really brings in so many things other than the stacking just as a sport.”

  • The sport quickly professionalized, both as a business and in the intensity of the competitions.

  • This is the patent for that stack mat, which is sold to stackers and, yes, speed

  • Rubik’s cube competitors.

  • Naturally, there’s a lot of other merch you can buy as well.

  • Because speed stacking is a pretty young sport, the sport and the brand are kind of inseparable.

  • Here’s the address for the people who make speed stack cups.

  • And here’s the address for the World Sports Stacking Association, which runs the competitions.

  • You get the idea.

  • That may be a problem, it may not, as the sport tries to mature.

  • But those business concerns don’t really affect why people stack.

  • “I think for every stacker it’s different, what attracts them.

  • I have always been involved in sports.

  • I’m very competitive.

  • When I’m stacking the cups, I’m listening for little things that make me feel good,

  • like the rhythm, the sound.

  • Sometimes youll get a really good time, but you don’t feel like the stack was clean,

  • for me, that’s what pulls me in.”

  • “I want to better myself.

  • I like seeing improvement in what you do.”

  • And that drive, that's always there: when the stacks are loud

  • and the crowds are rapt, but it’s also there in

  • dorm rooms and bed rooms, and in the quiet moments in basements, too.

  • So, after an embarrassing number of attempts, I was able to get my 3-6-3 just under 5.3

  • seconds.

  • So you have some context as to how old and slow I am, the world record for that event

  • is 1.786 seconds.

Did you miss that?

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