As the foam pit swallowed me up, I could only think about how it hadn’t looked so deep from my phone screen.
It wasn’t the first time I had seen the interior of the Newt Loken Gymnastics Training Center. The foam pit I fell into appears as the backdrop to many of senior Fred Richard’s videos. The adjacent Park Family Wall of Fame, however, only became discernible to me when I stepped onto the mats, showcasing a long list of names from Michigan men’s gymnastics history. Richard himself appears on those banners more than once, as part of the 2024 Olympic bronze-winning team, a member of the 2025 NCAA Championship-winning Wolverines team and with three NCAA All-Around titles to his name.
None of the background noise, even his achievements, is typically addressed in Richard’s videos, though. His most popular short-form content, peaking at 52.9 million views on a single post, includes a series where he teaches non-gymnasts how to backflip. There, he stars influencers and other Michigan athletes in the name of showcasing men’s gymnastics to new audiences.
It was my turn to learn to backflip from FrederickFlips himself — and I left the training center with many other lessons than that.
***
The setup was simpler than a full-fledged lesson. Richard had thirty minutes before the Wolverines began practice, and his backflip workshops typically take at least two hours. My lesson wouldn’t become a video for Richard’s social media; otherwise, he would’ve hired a videographer, usually a student from Michigan’s film program.
We started by testing my standing vertical jump height. According to Richard, the most successful of his students get over a foot and a half off the floor. I passed, so Richard moved me to a block of mats about as high as my waist. To prepare for the tucked form of a backflip, I jumped and curled up while falling backward onto the stacked mats.
I received the green light on the general form of a backflip with the jump and tuck exercises, which covered the positions that I’d take midair. The final drill tested my ability to roll backwards on the floor from standing and complete the backflip motion. But somewhere between Richard’s initial explanation and my first attempt, I confused the drills we’d done and jumped to a tuck position, falling backward not onto the pile of mats, but instead on the spring-loaded floor.
On the same floor, redshirt junior Landen Blixt was stretching, and he could barely contain his amusement.
“That was not the drill,” Richard said to him, laughing. “I did not tell her to do that.”
My fall was impressive enough that it broke through Blixt’s focus — he hadn’t looked up at us from the moment I walked in. He and the other Wolverines are more than used to Richard’s content creation in the gym, and the team often features in Richard’s videos.
“You’re aiming for this big goal of the NCAAs,” Richard told The Michigan Daily. “But to make fun content outside of it, to stay an extra hour after practice and have fun together making a video brings you closer.”
The closeness of the team was palpable as we moved to the foam pit, where Richard told me to let myself fall in to acquaint myself with the landing. As I clawed myself out of the soft blocks, my instructor ran off to a TV monitor mounted on an adjacent wall.
“Did he just do it?” Richard says. “Hold on, I gotta see this.”
I couldn’t bring myself to be mad at Richard for leaving me in the pit as he replayed a recording of senior Robert Noll hitting a triple backflip just moments before, while Richard spotted me for my single backflip. The two gymnasts troubleshot the landing and rotation, trying to find the right amount of power to put into the jump. I watched their back-and-forth not through the lens of a gymnastics writer — but with the awe of someone who just flailed through a single backflip. When Richard tells Noll that there’s no time in a triple back, I laugh to myself. There’s hardly any time in a single back, either.
Single backflips — or backward tucked saltos, in the verbiage used by the Code of Points — don’t typically feature in college gymnastics routines, but star in Richard’s social media. Although they’re not as complex as other elements in Richard’s repertoire, single backflips earned a spot in his content for a reason. They’re nowhere as difficult as the triple-rotated backflip Noll was practicing, so Richard can realistically teach someone to do a backflip in a single session. And they’re a cool party trick: Richard even landed a backflip when walking the stage at graduation.
As a bonus, they’re flashy enough to capture viewers’ and the algorithm’s attention — one of Richard’s priorities for putting eyes on men’s gymnastics.
“(Social media) is a game, and kind of like gymnastics, there’s a code book,” Richard said. “The algorithm is the code book. You do have to follow the rules, you do have to hook people within the first couple seconds. You do want to use the right songs or trends. And just like gymnastics, you have the freedom to do whatever you want within those rules.”
For Richard, freedom within the rules means featuring other athletes and influencers in his challenges. Special guests in Richard’s backflip lessons include the likes of Michigan’s freshman quarterback Bryce Underwood and online streamer Darren Watkins Jr., commonly known as IShowSpeed. But his self-professed favorite student was Southern California track and field athlete Ezra Frech, a two-time Paralympic champion who was born with one leg. In just a few hours in the gym at the 2026 Winter Olympics, Frech successfully landed a backflip under Richard’s guidance.
It’s these guests who haunt the periphery of my mind as I line up by the foam pit for my first official backflip attempt. Richard reassures me that he’ll spot me, or support my rotation to ensure I land safely. With that, I count down to signal my start and jump.
I see Wolverines coach Yuan Xiao wander closer as I leave the pit. He greets me, then asks if Richard is trying to get me injured. Gymnastics is as demanding physically as it is mentally, Xiao reminds me, as if he’d told me during practice all year. He smiles as he tells me about IShowSpeed — Xiao calls him Speed — and his almost unnatural knack for the sport when he visited Michigan.
After just 20 minutes, I’m ready for a break. It’s not the physical battle of flying upside-down, although that was one of the reasons I quit gymnastics at the age of 5. Instead, my perfectionism is getting to me. Richard overhears me saying this will ruin my credibility as a gymnastics sports writer, but he won’t have it.
“Honestly, I believe if we did this for an hour, you’d get it,” Richard says. “That’s our sport. It’s not easy. I see you’re a great student.”
I thank him for his optimism and kindness.
***
Richard is always transparent about the effort that gymnastics takes. While Xiao lauded Speed for his talent and athleticism, even Richard himself needed time, practice and resources to get his first flips.
Before Richard became the Olympic-sized giant that intimidated students like me, he found his own competition. The older kids at his childhood gym — around 8 to 10 years old, by Richard’s estimates — could do back handsprings. Naturally, 4-year-old Richard went back home and threw back handsprings in his parents’ beds. He’d fall on his head, but it was almost as soft as the foam pit I fell into.
Soon, his parents’ furniture couldn’t support his dreams in the sport. If he wanted to progress as a gymnast, he’d have to find a gym with the right equipment to support him.
“(Coach Tom Fontecchio) used to take me on the weekends to gyms with better equipment and better resources in order for me to get better,” Richard said. “We’d drive one hour to that training gym and drive an hour back. He never asked for anything, he just wanted me to reach my full potential. He’s made gymnastics so fun for me, and now I just want to give back and get other kids those experiences.”
When the social media platform TikTok gained recognition during the COVID-19 pandemic, Richard, then 16 years old, jumped at the opportunity to represent men’s gymnastics on the Internet. Two posts in, he logged 5,000 views. Richard’s virality only bloomed from there. Now, he has over 912,400 followers and 41 million likes on TikTok — along with another 835,000 followers on Instagram and 424,000 subscribers on YouTube.
“His concern (entering college) was, ‘I’m going to continue TikTok,’ ” Xiao told The Daily. “I told him, ‘Yeah, I’m supporting you.’ That’s the big part. I’m 100% supporting you to make your own story and to share it with people.”
A desire to write and share his own story drives Richard’s brand. Like many sports, men’s gymnastics is historically white-dominated. Richard, of Haitian and Dominican descent, published a children’s book in 2025 tackling his struggles with racism and bullying as a Black male gymnast. His philosophy of representation in the sport diffuses into his content, where he stars athletes of all builds and backgrounds. It shows when the Newt Loken Gymnastics Training Center hosts Asian-American sports writers and Ghanaian-American streamers alike — and all of us learn to backflip with Richard’s help.
“My goal is having an impact that grows the sport and gets more kids into the sport,” Richard said Feb. 22. “I want to dominate, but that’s so this sport can change. … People are noticing. That’s the most powerful thing. From testing out things with the uniform to raising money and giving kids opportunities in the sport to just doing so much on social media to get the sport seen, I’m going in the right direction.”
Richard’s most direct impact on the next generation of athletes can be found halfway across the world, in a corner of Uganda that likely wouldn’t have connected with men’s artistic gymnastics otherwise. On May 2, 2025, Richard completed a world-record 1,111 backflips to put eyes on his campaign to bring newer, safer equipment to orphans and street children performing with Clon Circus Uganda. When he visited Kampala, Richard immediately noticed the impact their improvised gym had on his tendons and knees. Nearly 20 years after his drives with Fontecchio, Richard paid it forward. He raised around $60,000 for equipment and, after a year, recently completed work on a full-on gym, with the equipment to match.
It’s still a far cry from the Wolverines’ former facilities at the Newt Loken Gymnastics Training Center and likely their newly-approved training center. But those humble beginnings are not unlike where Richard began.
Today, though, Richard still trains with Michigan, the epicenter of his impact on gymnastics. Like he did for Noll, Richard concludes our lesson by reviewing footage of my attempts. It’s not hard to notice my major error — I piked during the flip instead of pressing my knees to my chest in a tuck. That’s up to a half-point deduction in competition.
Some rules can’t be broken.
Still, getting creative with the rules defines Richard’s legacy. It’s why he succeeds in men’s artistic gymnastics and why he stays viral. Where he refuses to bend, however, is with his driving mission — to make someone like him feel not just seen, but supported. It’s a topical theme when he patiently teaches famous athletes, influencers or even me how to backflip. It’s unmistakable when he publishes his story for kids like him. And it’s tangible a world away in Kampala, where kids like him now flip more safely than ever — where Richard paid Fontecchio’s work forward to let backflips off mattresses reach new heights.
