The number came first, before the applause caught up. On 5 July 2026, at the FIG Trampoline & Tumbling World Cup in Coimbra, Ruben Padilla threw a triple-twisting, triple-somersault dismount and the panel returned a difficulty of 14.0. No gymnast had reached that figure in Double Mini-Trampoline. World Gymnastics marked it plainly on its own broadcast: a new world difficulty record. Padilla took the gold with 32.000 points.
How the final was decided
Double Mini rewards nerve over volume. Two passes, each a short run, a hurdle, a mounter and a dismount, and no margin for a soft landing. Padilla built his win on ambition, carrying the highest difficulty into the final and then holding the execution together long enough to make it count. The 14.0 dismount lifted him beyond the reach of the field. Gavin Dodd of Canada finished second on 29.400. Portugal's José Francisco took bronze on 29.300, a home result to satisfy the arena. The gap at the top was not close. A margin of more than two and a half points in a discipline measured in tenths tells its own story.
What made the pass notable was not only its scale but its ownership. Padilla did not chase someone else's record. He broke his own. The mark he surpassed, 13.9, had been set on the same Portuguese floor a year earlier, when he cleared a triple pike and a quadruple back tuck to move the ceiling of the sport upward for the first time.
A record, then the next record
Ruben Padilla, 25, has spent the past decade making Double Mini his own event. He first reached a senior world podium in 2018 with silver, then turned silver into gold and gold into habit. He is a three-time world champion in the discipline, defending the title through 2022, 2023 and again in 2025 at Pamplona. He was named alternate to the men's trampoline competition at the 2024 Olympic Games. Through the 2025 World Cup season he won in Riccione and again in Coimbra, and took the series title in Double Mini.
The Coimbra floor has become a kind of workshop for him. The 13.9 was set there. The 14.0 followed there. Each time the venue is the same and the difficulty is higher. For an athlete who trains and coaches at Wasatch Trampoline and Tumbling in Utah, the progression reads less like a leap than a plan carried out in public, one tenth at a time.
Records in this sport tend to be quiet things, a figure on a screen before anyone quite understands it. Padilla has now set two of them on the same floor. The next one, should it come, will have his name to beat again.
