Show Business: They Caught the Quad!

The Flying Vazquezes achieve an astounding four flip-flops

Even when their outstretched hands connected, Miguel and Juan Vazquez were not quite sure they had done it. "I didn't believe it," says Juan. "And I asked myself, 'Did I catch him?' " Miguel, his younger brother, was also uncertain. Says he: "It all happened so fast that only when I looked down and saw the floor did I know that we had done the trick." Actually, what the Flying Vazquezes accomplished together on July 10 in Tucson was much more than a trick. It was an athletic feat equivalent to the breaking of the 4-min. mile: the first quadruple somersault performed before a regular circus audience.

The brothers had managed the nearly impossible stunt ten times in practice sessions over the past year, and they had tried doing it at every performance since Dec. 29, when the Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey Circus opened its 112th season. Charley Baumann, the circus' performance director, had seen them fail so many times that he too was stunned when they finally succeeded. He ran to the phone and called the show's producers, Irvin and Kenneth Feld, in Washington. "They asked me why the hell I was calling after midnight," he told TIME's Paul Krueger. "And all I could say was, 'They caught the quad! They caught the quad!' "

Acrobats have been trying to catch the quad since 1897, when, according to many accounts, European Aerialist Lena Jordan first did the triple somersault. The triple is now performed regularly, but it is still an accomplishment reserved for the very best aerialists. Yet Miguel, 17, who represents the fifth generation of a family of Mexican circus performers, was able to do the triple when he was 13. He spun so fast and flew so high that he was urged to go for four.

But there is more to a quad than another flipflop. When a flyer is traveling through the air at 80 m.p.h., reaction time is measured in milli seconds. "If it's a triple somersault, Mi guel can feel if he's going too fast," explains Juan, 32. "He can relax and slow down. If he's going too slowly, he can tuck up tighter and complete the third somer sault faster." The quadruple, by contrast, allows no such mid-course adjustment; once the flyer has released the bar and tucked himself up for the first of four turns, he is spinning too fast to correct himself. The burden of timing rests with the catcher. If any changes are to be made, he must make them, matching his swing to the human projectile hurtling toward him.