How To Value A Handspring Triple Front

The Olympics is around the corner and Igor Radividilov has submitted the new vault of a handspring triple front. This is a huge jump in vault difficulty and the FIG has decided to value it at 7.0. I am going to tell you why that is both correct and incorrect.

The code of points tries to follow some logic to how skills are upgraded with varying consistency. I have graphed below the values of handspring skills against the subsequent number of rotations.

It’s quite apparent the Men’s technical committee has decided on a linear trend to land (pun intended) the value of a handspring triple front at 7.0. I would however argue that a triple front vs double front is exponentially harder.

The exponential trend, to the naked eye, fits much better and the R squared (statistical term for whether the trend line fits the data) is also closer to one (meaning better). On these grounds I’ll argue the the value of handspring triple front should in fact be 8.8.