He took his kids to circus class. Now he’s a world record holder

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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 minute (male)” both online, and in the book released by Pan Macmillan Australia on Tuesday.

Kingsley Just demonstrates the strength needed to do 57 aerial hoop somersaults in a minute.

He set the record on June 16 last year at Circus Nexus.

Just’s wife, Elaine, and sons Sullivan, 15, and Kaelan, 17, were among 50 people who watched him swing by both elbows through a suspended hoop, 57 times.

Just says circus performer Charli Meath inspired him by achieving the female equivalent record, with 53 somersaults, in Geelong two weeks earlier.

Just says now, “I’m waiting for the million dollar cheque to come in,” but he is “chuffed” at the results, which followed six months of intense training.

Kingsley Just setting the world record at Circus Nexus in Preston on June 16, 2024.

“It’s the feeling that you’ve done something that no one else in the world has done.”

Circus Nexus chief executive Jeremy Davies says it is “an incredible feat” and a tribute to Just’s hard work.

Davies believes it is the first world record set at Circus Nexus in its 25-year history. He says there was a grand final atmosphere.

“We’re a non-competitive circus, but we love to break records anyway,” Davies says.

And it was not the first world record by Kingsley Just. In 2014, over Lethbridge, 95 kilometres west of Melbourne, Just piloted a Pitts Special S1S biplane to execute the most consecutive rolls by an aircraft — 987, beating the previous record of 408.

Both records required good spatial awareness but Just says while he felt a little dizzy after the circus record, he didn’t after the aeroplane record.

The records gave him “a warm, fuzzy feeling inside, to know that you’ve done something that’s hard”.

Nose camera view of Kingsley Just setting the Guinness world record for most consecutive rolls by an aircraft, 987, at Lethbridge on March 1, 2014.

Just is now asked “what will your next record be”?

He muses that having rolled a plane sideways, and having flipped multiple times through the circus hoop, he should now spin in a plane while diving on a vertical axis, going for the “most inverted spins” record, which would involve descending from 30,000 feet to 3000 feet.

That record is 87 spins. But Just would need $200,000 to buy the right plane and modify it.

It would be a tad expensive but, he says, “if you know anyone who has that money, let me know”.

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