When Kingsley Just took his children to an after-school circus class in a studio in Melbourne’s north, they looked like they were having a lot of fun.

“I thought, ‘I wish they had adult classes’,” Just says.

As if on cue, a group of grown-ups entered the studio and started hanging and spinning from hoops suspended from the ceiling. “They looked so elegant and strong,” he says.

Just, an air traffic controller, signed up, and finds the sport, which he trains in several times a week at Circus Nexus in Preston, a challenging, social and creative hobby that keeps him fit.

While he didn’t run away to join the circus, he got so “into it” that he has set a world record.

In the 2026 edition of the fabled Guinness World Records, he is named for achieving “the most aerial hoop somersaults in one

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