General Information
When acrobatics became a world championship sport in 1993, there were seven disciplines: Men's and women's tumbling; men's, women's, and mixed pairs, women's trio, and men's fours. The tumbling disciplines were dropped as world championship events in 1999. However, tumbling is often included in other acrobatics competition, and it's also often conducted along with trampolining.
Tumbling is performed on a sprung track 25 meters long, with an approach run at least 10 meters long and a 5-meter landing zone. The pair and group routines are performed in a gymnastics area 12 meters square.
Tumbling
Each competitor performs three tumbling runs: straight, twisting, and combined.
The straight run must include at least three somersaults, with no twists of more than 180 degrees. The twisting run must include at least one somersault with a twist of at least 360 degrees. The combined run must include at least two somersaults, one without a twist and one incorporating a twist of at least 360 degrees.
Judges score tumbling runs based on difficult, composition, execution, and overall impression.
Pair & Group Routines
Each pair or group performs three routines: balance, tempo, and combined. There's a time limit of 2 minutes, 30 seconds for each routine.
The balance routine is made up of handstands, pyramids and other balances, individual elements, and combination movements, No flight is allowed. The women's trio and men's four performance must incorporate at least two separate pyramids.
The tempo routine includes elements with a flight phase, as well as turns, somersaults, and a tumbling series. There must be at least two elements in which a member of the team is caught after flight.
The combined routine must contain at least six pair or group elements, including at least three balance elements and at least three tempo elements. At least three individual elements must also be included.
Judging
The judges' panel is made up of an arbiter, a difficulty judge, one to four execution judges, and one to four artistry judges.
The arbiter oversees the panel and the timekeeper, scores exercises both for execution and for artistry, checks the other judges' scores to ensure they are within certain tolerances, and takes arbiter deductions from the total score for various violations.
Working with diagrams submitted by competitors, the difficulty judge determines the difficulty score of each exercise before it's performed and makes deductions from that exercise, based on the elements actually performed.
An execution judge determines specific execution faults and subtracts them from the perfect score of 10.0. An artistry judge deducts artistry faults from the perfect score of 5.0. The execution and artistry scores are averaged and added to the difficulty score to determine the raw score. If appropriate, the arbiter makes additional deductions to determine the final score. For example, the arbiter may deduct points for an overtime exercise, missed requirements, or stepping outside the competition area.