Portlander Aliyah Tan recently won first place at the National Yo-Yo Contest in Las Vegas. It was the first time Tan took the top spot since she started competing at nationals in 2014.
Tan’s winning routine, set to music by the British rock band The Last Dinner Party, featured three minutes of elaborate string tricks between two yo-yos.
She now heads to the World Yo-Yo Contest in Himeji, Japan, next month.
Tan joins us in the studio to talk about her elaborate yo-yo routines and what she loves about it.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed using AI tools and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Portland has a new national champion. Aliyah Tan recently won first place in her division at the National Yo-Yo contest in Las Vegas. It was the first time Tan took the top spot since she started competing at nationals in 2014. Her winning routine featured three minutes of elaborate string tricks with not one, but two yo-yos. Now she heads to the World Yo-Yo Contest in Japan next month, but she joins us first. It’s great to have you on the show, and congratulations.
Aliyah Tan: Thank you so much, and thanks for having me.
Miller: How did you first get into yo-yoing?
Tan: I first started yo-yoing around 2012 when I was in middle school. I didn’t want to do my homework, like any middle schooler, and I found a new way to procrastinate. There was a cheap yo-yo laying around the house that my grandpa had given me, and I looked up some tricks on YouTube and found this whole crazy world where people are on stage competing, and I thought I wanted to do that one day, and here I am now.
Miller: When you first got that yo-yo and you saw folks online doing amazing things, and it was immediate? You said I wanna do this, I wanna be up there?
Tan: It was pretty much right away. I saw it happen and I was like, I need to do that.
Miller: Did you have natural talent at the time?
Tan: It definitely took me a lot of up and down, back and forth, you know. It took a while. It took a while.
Miller: Was there a point, though, when you said, oh, actually, I could get good at this?
Tan: I think around a couple of years in I realized that I had potential to do well in the competition sphere, not that I started it for the purpose of competing and being the best, I just wanted to be able to do it. So the fact that I was able to do well was really cool.
Miller: OK, but that was a couple of years in.
Tan: Yeah.
Miller: Before that, were you just always walking around with a yo-yo? Were you like, the kid in middle school or freshman year of high school with a yo-yo always?
Tan: Yep, always. Everyone that knew me growing up knew I had a yo-yo with me.
Miller: Was yo-yoing cool as a middle schooler?
Tan: It definitely wasn’t when I was in middle school, but I think as high school went on and the more I started competing, the cooler it got.
Miller: The cooler it got or the cooler you got?
Tan: I think maybe the cooler I got.
Miller: Were you able to find community at the time?
Tan: There were a few people in Portland that I knew yo-yoed. I would be reaching out on message boards online to see if there’s anyone in the area that wanted to get together. I’d be lucky if there were two or three people that would hang out with me on the weekends to yo-yo.
Miller: But you’re a member of a group. Let me see if I got this right, it’s Portland’s Shrimp Gang Skill Toy Club.
Tan: That is correct.
Miller: What is that?
Tan: It’s just a group of people that meet up once a month to play yo-yo. There’s some kendama players that come and hang out.
Miller: What is that?
Tan: Kendama is a Japanese skill toy. It’s like a ball in the cup.
Miller: OK, and that’s a place where people just trade secrets and skills, or just you are together doing something you love?
Tan: Yeah, with yo-yoers it’s like we share a language and it’s a form of expression that you can immediately see and understand the way a person thinks. So you kind of have this deeper layer of context when you meet someone else that yo-yos. So when we get together as a group like this, it’s just sharing tricks, it’s making jokes about the yo-yo world. It’s a lot of fun.
Miller: When you see someone who’s really good at yo-yo, you can see how they think based on the tricks they’re doing or the way they handle the yo-yo and the string?
Tan: Yeah, it’s similar to the way that people dress. It’s a way of self-expression, so you can see the ways that they put effort into different aspects of their yo-yoing, the different things that they value and the way that they move.There’s a lot of complexities, and it’s cool.
Miller: All right, I want to hear more about that and what you think you’re telling the world about your values and what you think, but how do competitions work? Because I mean, for me, and probably for many people listening, they do a couple of very basic things.They realize that it’s harder than they thought, it gets tangled and they stop and they pick it up maybe six months later and then 30 years go by and then that’s about that’s their… I’m just describing my yo-yo experience.
But what I saw you do, and we can get to your actual routine, it’s like a different world of complexity, it’s mind boggling. So how do competitions work?
Tan: Yeah, it’s a pretty intricate world. The way that competitions are set up, there’s regional, national, and world-level events, and at every event there’s a preliminary round and then a final round. At the world stage, there’s a wild card, preliminary, semi-final, and then a final round. So there’s a lot more rounds to get through.
The preliminary round is one minute, and your tricks are 60% of your score, and your performance is the other 40%. There’s a panel of judges that are in front of you and the ones that are scoring your tricks have clickers in their hands, so they’re giving you a positive click for every time you do an element of a certain difficulty, and then a negative click anytime you lose control of the yo-yo, and then those scores are added up and normalized to everyone else’s scores.
Then there’s performance judges, who are scoring how well you’re performing, how well you’re using the music, how well you’re interacting with the crowd on a scale of 1 to 10, and those are all averaged out. So your final score is that added up, minus any major deductions that you might have – a major deduction being you have to restart the yo-yo, you have to switch out a yo-yo, say a string breaks – those would all be subtracted from your final score.
So the way that it’s set up, all of your mistakes are weighed a lot higher than anything that you can do that’s good, so you have to make sure to go really clean when you’re competing.
Miller: What you’re describing sounds a little bit like figure skating judging or gymnastics, where you’re being graded on style and execution of complex things.
Tan: Yeah, definitely, it’s very similar to those. It just has a little bit more variety in it. I know that with those sort of competitions they have to submit the tricks they’re doing to the judges beforehand, but with yo-yo you can be stepping on stage and the judges could have no idea what you’re doing.
Miller: And you might be doing tricks that they’ve never seen before, that no one has seen before?
Tan: Absolutely, yeah, a lot of the tricks that I do are tricks that I come up with and things that I think no one else in the world has really seen before.
Miller: So there’s an element of secrecy here as well. When you practice, right before you go on, are you doing it in a way that nobody can see you?
Tan: Sometimes there are elements that I’ll hide from the general crowd of people, but I like to share my tricks online because then it gives the judges time to digest them and understand them a little bit more. That way they’re able to score them properly, because in the past when I’ve competed, I’ve used tricks that no one else has seen before and I feel like they don’t get judged as properly as they could be.
Miller: Am I understanding you correctly? Basically, there have been tricks you developed that you can do so well that the judges, in the moment, don’t actually understand how complex and impressive they are, but if you show them ahead of time, then the world can see this is actually pretty amazing, give Aliyah a better score?
Tan: Yeah, definitely.
Miller: I mentioned that you took the national championship in a particular category. It’s called “3A.” What does that mean?
Tan: In competitive yo-yoing there are five main categories of competing. There’s 1A through 5A, 1A being the style that everyone starts when you start yo-yoing. It’s string tricks with a single yo-yo. You’ll land the yo-yo on the string and fling it around.
Then there’s 2A, where you have two what are called “responsive” yo-yos. So they go up and down, they’re the typical yo-yos you would find in a store, and people are doing regenerative loops with them and swinging them around similar to “around the world,” if you know that yo-yo trick. It’s a lot of tricks like that where they wrap them around each other.
Then there’s 3A, which is the division I compete in, where you use two 1A yo-yos and you twist them around, wind them together, and do really intricate double yo-yo string tricks. And 4A is a really flashy division. It’s called “off string,” where the yo-yo’s not attached to the string and it flies up and people throw it around their body. And 5A, which is called “counterweight,” where it’s not attached to your hand but rather around a dice or a ball of some sort, and you do nunchuck-style tricks with it.
Miller: I’ve seen that 3A, your division, has been described as the hardest. Do you think that’s right? I mean, have you sought out the hardest of all the five divisions?
Tan: I think 3A is up there with the hardest, simply because of how much patience it requires to get good at it, but I think 2A is also really difficult because of the amount of repetitive motions you have to do.
Miller: At one point in the middle of your championship winning routine, somebody in the audience yells out, “What!?” But like, the kind of what, like, “Oh my gosh, what did they just do?” Like they couldn’t believe what you had done. How many of the tricks that you’re doing are ones that nobody else is doing, even if you’ve shared them on YouTube?
Tan: Yeah, I think around a good 50% of the tricks that I’m using to compete with are tricks that I developed myself, and maybe some people have learned them and used them in competitions, but they’re tricks that I made and I’m really proud of.
Miller: What’s going through your mind in the middle of a competition? You’re up there on stage. You’re doing these unbelievably elaborate sets of routines where the yo-yos are swinging around each other and then coming back and doing things in unison or in counterpoint and just nonstop action. What’s in your brain?
Tan: I’m trying really hard to breathe and be in the moment, because anytime I think about anything that isn’t what’s right in front of me, that’s when the mistakes start happening. So I try really hard to just focus on what’s happening and trust the muscle memory that I know I have.
Miller: And when you say muscle memory, at this point, it’s practice enough that any particular routine, you could do it with your eyes closed, or you could just know exactly what to do without really thinking about it?
Tan: Ideally, that’s the point of months of practice beforehand. When I’m practicing, anytime there’s a trick that is newer or it’s a little more difficult for me, I’ll do it over and over and over again to the point where it’s like I’ve solved the crux of the problem and I can do it without thinking about it, and that’s the perfect stage to be at to compete.
Miller: There was actually a moment near the end of the routine, and I should say, we have a link to the routine on YouTube on our website so folks can see it, and I highly recommend watching it, because if you think you know what yo-yo is, but you haven’t seen the highest level competition, you probably don’t actually really have a sense for how complex it is.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but when I watched near the end of your routine, it seemed like there’s a moment when the strings got tangled or something happened that was not supposed to happen and you took a couple seconds, it seemed, to unwind them. So what happened?
Tan: Yeah, so during that moment, you know, no one’s perfect, and the yo-yos, one of them responded in the middle of the trick, it came back up when I didn’t want it to, and it was in this really intricate mount, so I had to stop the yo-yos and unwind them and get them back to my hands and then finish the routine.
Miller: What was going through your mind at that moment? You’ve done all this prep, and then a little tiny thing goes wrong and everyone there knows what’s happening. What was in your brain?
Tan: It’s like an, “Oh, shoot!” moment, like, “Here we go,” because my hands are shaking at this point, it’s a lot of adrenaline. It’s all of my peers that I’ve known for around 15 years watching me on stage. I just have to remain calm and get them out as fast as possible.
Miller: I watched this a couple of times because, looking at your face, I couldn’t tell that anything was wrong. I could only tell because your hands are doing something different, and it wasn’t quite the same smooth sort of choreographed hand movements you’ve been doing before, but looking at your face, it looked like just smooth sailing, like everything was fine. In that moment, were you thinking, “This might mean that I’m not gonna win the championship?”
Tan: It was more a hit on my ego. It’s always disappointing when you spend so many hours practicing for something and then you can’t execute the way you want to. And so that’s just a moment that I’m carrying with me as a mistake that I made, and something I have to live with and heal from and work towards being better the next time.
Miller: When you finally did finish though, did you feel like you had a good chance to win? That all the other amazing things you’ve done would push you through, even despite that one flub?
Tan: I had a good feeling about it this year. This was the very first time competing when I had any sort of anxiety during the routine. I think a lot of the other times it’s just been a very clear head, but I was kind of having a panic attack on stage and I was having to manually breathe.
And after the routine, a lot of people swarm you to congratulate you, but I had to immediately run out of the venue and get space and be able to breathe. So there was a lot going on in my head, and I was just trying to focus on staying alive and breathing.
Miller: Wow, I had no idea that was happening. I mean, the sense I got from watching the performance, as an outsider, was that you just seemed quietly confident, nonchalant, in control, but inside you were fending off a panic attack.
Tan: Yeah, absolutely, and that’s just years of practice and being on stage and performing in front of people at work.
Miller: Has that carried through to other parts of your life? Has the confidence that you’ve seemingly achieved, or at least the ability to calmly carry out what you need to do, even if inside you’re struggling, has that affected the way you live the rest of your life?
Tan: I think the rest of my life is being funneled through that sort of experience. I’ve spent a lot of time working on meditation and being present in the moment throughout my daily life. I think that it really shows in moments like that when I’m struggling in front of a large group of people, but to the outsider it can be presented as just another peaceful moment within the routine.
Miller: Like right now, how do you feel right now?
Tan: Like right now, my heart’s racing a little bit more, but I’m just trying to be here talking to you now, just like people do.
Miller: Yeah, you seem very “here” right now.
Tan: I appreciate that. It’s a cool space to be in.
Miller: So they announced your name that you’d won. What was that moment like?
Tan: It was surreal. I had been trying to win this contest for a really long time and I was just trying to process it all as it was happening. It was a really cool moment. It was really special. A lot of people afterwards came up to me and told me it was a long time coming, which is a great feeling. I didn’t realize there would be so much press involved after the fact, which has been a fun journey on its own.
Miller: So when you say that there are people in the audience who’ve been cheering for you for 15 years, which added its own layer of tension, I suppose, how supportive would you say other competitors are? I mean, were you getting congratulations from people who you beat?
Tan: Yeah, absolutely. Everyone in the yo-yo world just wants everyone else to do as good as they possibly can. Like, me doing good doesn’t mean the other person didn’t do good to their extent, too, so everyone was as excited for me as I was excited for them.
Miller: I mentioned that in just a couple of weeks it’s the world championships in Japan. How do you prepare for the world championships?
Tan: Well, because I won the National Yo-Yo Contest, I have a seed to the semifinal round at World. So the semifinals are a minute and a half long routine, and I’ve been practicing for that, the same way I would for any competition, where I have the tricks that I know I will mess up sometimes, and I’ll work on those over and over again until they become that muscle memory feeling. I’ll have my headphones in. I’ll go through run after run of the routine. Sometimes I’ll have my fiancée sit in front and watch and have a little clicker in her hand and count the mistakes I make.
Miller: Is she a good judge?
Tan: She does good work.
Miller: Yeah, tough.
Tan: It’s difficult, and I know that she doesn’t like listening to the music over and over again, so she really puts up with a lot for me.
Miller: That is real love. And then if you make it past that, then it’s the longer routine again?
Tan: Yes, then it’s the three-minute final routine. I would do the same one I did at Nationals this year, because I spent a lot of time developing it.
Miller: You have the two yo-yo’s that you used to win the National Championship. In an interview with The Oregonian, I saw you describe them as, “Turning Point Yo-Yo Hades in my signature colorway, shiny pink with blue rims, Zipline ZS Air string, Crucial grooved bearings and Hollywood Modern black response pads.”
It’s like you’re talking about a sports car or something. I mean, it’s serious geeky lingo. How important are these specifications for yo-yoing at your level?
Tan: I think everyone that yo-yo’s at my level has their own preferred setup for competing, but if you’re just doing any sort of casual offstage play, it doesn’t matter as much, but these are the things that I found help me perform the best when I’m competing.
Miller: What are your hopes for the future of your own yo-yoing? You finally won this national championship. You’re going to world next. What are your hopes going forward?
Tan: My goals this year for World are to make finals, because I’ve never made finals at the World’s level before; but beyond that, I’ve found that, through winning this competition, this thing that I’ve worked for a really long time, that it’s really the journey, which sounds really corny, but it’s the journey that has been really special.
Throughout the past couple of years, as I’ve been getting a lot more creative and innovative with my tricks, there have been people all across the world that have been messaging me and commenting on my tricks on Instagram and saying how much they really like them.
And these are all people I’ve been looking up to since I was a teenager, so it’s really special to be able to have people that I look up to also look up to me, and I think yo-yo is really special in that way because it creates this community where people are able to interact with their heroes as just normal people and become friends with them. I’m very proud of myself for the ways that the community is able to interact with me and I’m able to share this part of myself with them.
Miller: You were talking there about some of the people who you looked up to when you were just starting. Has the opposite happened? I mean, have there been, I don’t know, 12, 13-year-olds, middle schoolers like you, 15 years ago, who have reached out to you saying, “Hey, you’re my hero?”
Tan: I definitely have signed plenty of yo-yos in my day and have taken plenty of photos with people. There have definitely been people that have come up to me at contests and told me they looked up to me, and I think it’s really beautiful that people are able to share that with each other in yo-yo.
Miller: Aliyah, thanks very much and congratulations and good luck.
Tan: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thanks for
having me.
Miller: Aliyah Tan is a Portlander and National Yo-Yo Champion, heading to the World Yo-Yo Contest in Japan in just a couple weeks.
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