Tina Aeberli Biography: Footbag freestyle’s four times world champion
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Exuberance and energy
Footbag has long made the jump from an urban pastime to an official sport discipline.
And Tina Aeberli from Switzerland is footbag freestyle’s unrivalled female champion.
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For such a small country, it’s surprising how many outstanding sportspeople Switzer-land has produced. Joining the illustrious ranks of Roger Federer and Simon Amman comes 20-year-old Tina Aeberli: the Zurich native already has four consecutive years as a world champion and five victories at European championships to her name – and her stellar run shows no signs of stalling.
Tina excels at footbag, an urban sport originated in America in the early 1970’s that has since achieved world-wide popularity. The player performs a series of intricate tricks using a crocheted cloth bag that (depending on your level of proficiency) con-tains plastic or metal pellets or sand and weighs between 40 and 65 grams. The sport has spawned a global community whose members meet in parks and on beaches to either compete against each other or play as teams.
Footbag has long made the transition from a trendy pastime to an official sport disci-pline: footbag freestyle. In footbag freestyle tournaments, competitors choreograph and perform two-minute routines of tricks to music that are then judged on their ar-tistic and technical merit. Tina usually works with rhythm-based music such as big beat, hip-hop or electronica, but she is also known to use classical pieces in her demanding routines that combine the exuberance of figure skating with the energy of break-dance.
There are about 30 000 different moves in the footbag vocabulary, a number no one athlete can hope to master. So serious players like Tina Aeberli have to work hard to stay on top of their game. Tina practices every day and also trains twice a week with her footbag club Sole Rebels (www.solerebels.ch).
Tina first came into contact with footbag at a sports camp in 2003 and in 2004 began training with German champion Jan Zimmermann. In 2005, she won both the Swiss and European championships, going on to her first triumph as world champion in 2006. Since then, Tina has remained unbeaten, but she is well aware of the tough competition, always adding new moves to her already full box of tricks, kicks and turns.
As a serious athlete, Tina Aeberli doesn’t leave anything to chance. She even sews her own bags, sometimes also selling them to fellow players, and the so-called “Tina-Bag” has become a sought-after commodity in footbag circles. As befits a champion, Tina Aeberli now moves in the highest echelons of the sport: she is the second-ever woman to be admitted to the “Big Add Posse”, the Round Table of footbag. An accolade she truly deserves, as anyone who has seen her perform will agree.
April 2010