🇷🇴 Bianca Ciocirlan

Ciocirlan's route into sport began in front of a television. At around five she watched the Olympic figure skating with her grandmother and fell in love with it, and asked her mother to take her to a rink. She started skating properly at seven, and by her own account was good at it.

The accident came at ten, in training, and the injury to her knee was serious enough to force a break of about eighteen months. For a child whose identity had been built around a single sport, the timing was brutal — old enough to understand what she was losing, too young to have anything to replace it with.

The hoverboard was not a plan. It was a birthday request roughly two months after the injury, made by a bored child. 'I realized that I could do much more than moving with it,' she said. 'I could spin, I could get creative. And I also realized that my knee didn't hurt while doing it.'

That last detail is the pivot of the whole story. A seated pirouette on a hoverboard keeps the body low and the weight distributed differently from a skating spin; the rotation her damaged knee could not tolerate on ice, it would tolerate on a self-balancing board. Years of skating training in rotational control, spotting and core stability transferred almost directly.

Her mother suggested she audition for Romania's Got Talent. By her account, 'it went great.' The record attempt followed on 13 February 2023, on the set of Lo Show dei Record in Milan, the Italian television programme that has hosted Guinness attempts for years. The category is precisely defined: full 360-degree rotations, seated on a hoverboard, with one leg held fully extended above the head. She completed 45 of them in thirty seconds — a rotation every two-thirds of a second, held in a position that would defeat most gymnasts on solid ground.

'Breaking a world record at 13 was UNBELIEVABLE,' she told Guinness World Records. 'It's a day I'll never forget.'

In May 2024 Guinness published her hoverboarding tutorial for its junior audience, and she appeared in the record-keeper's television series The One Thing with an episode of her own. In September 2025 she was named a Young Achiever in the Guinness World Records 2026 book, her story drawn as a comic strip by the illustrator Pan Cooke.

What she has said about the injury is more useful than the record itself. 'Hoverboarding taught me that even when one door closes, there's always another way to pursue your passion.' Asked what she would say to another young athlete facing a long layoff, she was specific rather than motivational: 'Stay strong and never give up hope, because in the end everything will be great. Personally, it helped me to find a different passion and realize that the world didn't end and that I can still go on and do what I love.'

She has said she intends to continue both hoverboarding and figure skating. The two disciplines, in her case, are not alternatives — the second was rebuilt out of the first.

The record Ciocirlan holds is more demanding than its name suggests. Guinness defines the category tightly: each pirouette must be a complete 360-degree rotation, performed seated on a self-balancing hoverboard, with one leg held fully extended above the head throughout. Any break in the leg position, any incomplete rotation and any loss of balance invalidates the attempt. Forty-five in thirty seconds means one and a half full turns per second while holding a position most adults cannot hold at rest.

The physical demand is largely core and hip. On ice, a skater generates rotation by pulling the arms and free leg tight to the axis; on a hoverboard the board itself does the driving, but the rider must keep the centre of mass perfectly stable or the self-balancing motor will correct in the wrong direction and throw her off. It is a different problem with the same solution — years of trained rotational control.

Guinness attempts of this kind are typically filmed for television, and Lo Show dei Record in Milan has become one of the principal venues for record attempts requiring live adjudication. Ciocirlan travelled from Romania to set hers on that stage, with an adjudicator counting rotations in real time, which is why the figure is exact rather than approximate.

The wider point is about how young athletes are handled after injury. A serious knee injury at ten is, in most sporting systems, the beginning of a quiet exit; the child is told to rest, the training group moves on, and the identity built around the sport dissolves. Ciocirlan's family, on the evidence of a birthday hoverboard and a talent-show audition, took a different approach and looked for a place the same skills could still be used.

She has continued in both. The girl who was told she could not skate for eighteen months now describes hoverboarding and figure skating as two things she intends to keep doing — which is a better ending than the one the injury seemed to be writing.