Not the first. That was Timmy Curran back in 2005, at Rocky Point. Then a few years later Hawaiian Flynn Novak started landing them. “Everything has to come together for you to actually complete this manoeuvre,” said Flynn of the air he likes to call the Flynnstone Flip. “It’s been eight years in the making basically, of just attempt after attempt after attempt”.

Medina landed his first one – his first to be captured on film at any rate – in mid-November 2012, just down the road from Rocky Point at Off-The-Wall, where a fair few of Novak’s failed attempts had probably occurred. And what did Gabes have to say about it? “It was hard at first, but they are getting easier now that I have pulled a few.”

Just a few days after we had seen his first backflip, another clip would surface, taken from perhaps the same session, of an even better one (this is the clip shown above). The video below was the first one to emerge:

The airs themselves were ridiculous, of course, and the rotation, particularly in the case of the second one, was perhaps straighter and more perfect than Flynn’s. (Novak, in fairness, looks like he has an extra six inches or so of height to get round.) But equally impressive was the way he’d only even been in Hawaii for a day or two, and appeared to have added this most difficult of manoeuvres to his bag of tricks with such a minimum of effort, slinging them out almost on cue for the benefit of the recently-arrived photographers lining the beach.

It was also the second time in the space of a month he’d sent the internet into overdrive. In October he released footage from Portugal of this unfeasibly high air in waist-high waves.