Thirteen years ago, as the unprecedented trail Beth Tweddle blazed led back home for the World Gymnastics Championships in London, she arrived as one of the uneven bars favourites. But Tweddle did not even make it out of qualifying, instead falling from the high bar attempting her new eponymous element.
Her failure underscored the boldness of even trying such a skill. Thirteen years on, the Tweddle has become a symbol of her enduring influence.
Its emergence dates back to 2007 when she left the world championships disappointed after a fourth-place finish on uneven bars. “We thought: ‘Right, we need to do something different.’ she says. “That’s when the Tweddle was invented.”
She decided on a complex skill that demanded ultimate timing and concentration. From the top bar, she would swing under the bar and then leap into the air as she rose up the other side. Rather than catching the bar conventionally, she crossed one arm over the other, executing a half twist, and then regrasped with her back to the bars.
Having learned the move, she opted to thread her routine together by immediately connecting a second skill – the Ezhova. After catching the bar, Tweddle flew towards the lower bar, executing a half-turn in the air to catch the bar face-on.
“A lot of trial and error, a lot of fun,” she says. “Just playing into the [foam] pits, gauging the reaction from the judges. ‘Was it a routine that was going to score?’ We soon realised that it was.”
Despite a second world title on the bars in 2010 and a 2012 Olympic bronze that followed, few initially attempted Tweddle’s move. But gymnastics is a sport of trends and as some began to succeed with her trademark combination, many followed.
In 2017, Britain’s Georgia-Mae Fenton and Nina Derwael of Belgium executed a variation of the Tweddle and the new skill was named the Derwael-Fenton. The same year, Fenton’s compatriot Becky Downie began to try the Tweddle-Ezhova.
“I never, ever thought I could do it,” Downie said in 2019. “When I first thought: ‘Can I do it?’ I was thinking: ‘Hmmm. Are you prepared to have bad shoulders?’”
Downie’s new bar routine resulted in a world championship silver medal that year. Derwael is now an Olympic champion and double world champion.
Last year, Derwael pulled off the move in the layout [straight body] position, which is the most difficult uneven bars skill. The Tweddle has become so popular that the FIG opted to downgrade it this year.
Tweddle’s general approach to the uneven bars has perhaps left an even greater mark on the sport. At a time when many other routines were long, gruelling and inefficient, she was one of the first to build towards a streamlined bar routine threaded together by complex connections. By 2012, her routine lasted 28 seconds, 15 seconds shorter than she had taken in the 2008 final.
“The thinking was that the longer you’re on the bar, the more deductions there are available to be taken,” she says.
“Not only that, the fewer connections you do, the more upstart handstands you have to do, you become more tired.”
The 2012 Olympic uneven bars final contained another supremely influential competitor, the two-time Olympic gold medallist Aliya Mustafina. Both understood that a quick but difficult transition from the low to high bar was essential for an efficient routine so they use the Shaposhnikova [AKA Shaposh] half.
The Shaposh-half is a skill that sees a gymnast catapult from low to high bar, executing a half-turn mid‑flight to face the high bar as they catch it.
While Tweddle became one of the first to connect before and after of the skill in 2011, Mustafina had already mastered the Shaposh-half when she emerged as a prodigious teenager in 2010. “Now, almost everyone does that skill, but before, it was worth a lot because no one else really did it,” says Madison Kocian, the 2016 Olympic silver medallist on the bars.
Complex connections, Shaposh transitions and numerous release skills are now the currency of most successful modern uneven bar routines. Derwael qualified for Saturday’s uneven bars final at the world championships in Liverpool with a routine that opens with six skills connected in succession, while Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade strings together five.
Connections are extremely rewarding, but they are also so challenging. With every skill, gymnasts have to assess whether they are in position to continue flowing through. “It’s the brainpower of bars that is so hard,” Downie says. “The skills are so technical and you don’t have any time to process between one and the next.”
Kocian concurs: “You have a split second to decide where you’re catching the bar, how close you are to the bar, if you can connect to the next skill.” Tweddle says:
“I would know, usually, mid-air of my Ezhova or even the Tweddle, what was gonna be the swing out from the Ezhova, so I could make the decision before my hands had even touched the bar most of the time.”
While big releases and bigger connections rule today, trends can quickly die out based on the whims of the International Gymnastics Federation and its ever-changing code of points.
Referencing the powerful routine by America’s Sunisa Lee, Kocian says: “People that have no idea about gymnastics and then they see that, they’re like: ‘Whoa, this is out of this world.’ It’s like men’s high bar with how many releases they do.
“If we can keep the releases for women’s uneven bars it will make it look cooler, too.”
