Event
Balance beam

Skill type
Dance

Known as
Sheep jump
Sheep

Value
C
(downgraded from D to C in 2017)

Named after
That thing where a sheep is a…circle? Y’all, I got nothing

About
In 2017, a sheep was murdered.

The sheep jump spent a number of years as a very popular D (0.4) dance element on beam, until 2017 when the women’s technical committee downgraded it from D to C. It immediately became a missing person, offering very little composition incentive to bother trying it. Bending into a circle and losing sight of the beam for only a C? No thank you.

The downgrade of the sheep jump was a catalyst for discussion of whether there is…any objective logic at all to the difficulty valuations in the code of points. Is “some people do it ugly and I don’t like it” sufficient reason to downgrade a difficult element? Because the sheep jump is certainly difficult enough to warrant D, but when it was popular, about 20% of them were very nice, and about 80% of them looked more like this.