Up In the Air

By Lev Grossman / Agoura Hills

The world record for two people juggling 10 clubs between them is 378 catches. It is currently held by two Russian siblings living in the U.S. named Vova and Olga Galchenko. The Galchenkos also hold the world record for 11 clubs (152 catches) and 12 clubs (54 catches). The ability to juggle at this level is highly unusual, especially at their ages--Vova is 18, Olga 15. But then again, the Galchenkos are very unusual people.

Vova (short for Vladimir) is shaggy haired and soft spoken. Olga has big eyes and a big smile and is a little hyperactive--she sometimes breaks into a soft-shoe dance routine to keep herself entertained. They're an unlikely duo to be at the center of a controversy that has divided the passionate, arcane and exclusive community of high-level professional juggling, the kind most people rarely see outside of Cirque du Soleil.

Growing up poor in the small industrial city of Penza, about 400 miles outside Moscow, Vova and Olga started juggling for fun in an after-school program. Pretty soon it got to be more than a hobby. The Galchenkos are easygoing and tons of fun to be around, but when it's time to work, something shifts behind their eyes and they get weirdly intense and laser-focused. "They have personalities that are very, very unpleasantly obsessive," says magician and juggler Penn Jillette (he means that with nothing but affection). "When I was around them practicing, they would do stuff that no one had ever done and then say, 'That sucks.'"

The obsessiveness paid off. "If you're talking about club passing, the two of them together are the best in the world," Jillette says. "Not just the best in the world. The best there has ever been." Standing up close to the Galchenkos when they juggle is like watching gravity get turned off. There's a moment of stillness, and then, with no obvious cue from either of them, the air is full of flying clubs, spinning in intricate orbits. The Galchenkos' juggling is beautiful--a kind of kinetic sculpture, a bravura display of human determination bringing order to the chaotic physical world. (For video footage of the Galchenkos' juggling, visit time.com/juggling.

The rest of the Galchenkos' world has been plenty chaotic. In 2003, thinking they would have more juggling opportunities in the U.S., they moved to New Hampshire, staying with a circus artist they had met while performing in Russia. They came alone: no mother, no father, just the two of them. Vova was 15, and Olga was 12. Neither spoke English.

Since then they have performed around the world and won major competitions. They have learned near perfect English. After some bouncing around, they now live with a generous juggling aficionado in a mansion about an hour outside Los Angeles. And they have acquired a mentor, a brilliant, bombastic, shaven-headed, muscle-bound juggler named Jason Garfield.

This brings us to the controversy. The world of elite juggling can be a political and even somewhat catty place. For decades the primary juggling organization has been the International Juggling Association (IJA). The IJA is committed to juggling as a form of entertainment: juggling with friends for fun, juggling to music, juggling by clowns. If you have ever seen juggler-comedian Chris Bliss's epic three-ball interpretation of the Beatles' Carry That Weight, you get the idea.

In 2003, Garfield, 31, a world-class juggler himself, founded a rival organization called the World Juggling Federation (WJF), dedicated to promoting juggling as a sport, not a sideshow. There are no clowns in the WJF. In WJF events, contestants are judged on the difficulty of their routines and the technical skill with which they execute them, and nothing else. The object is not to entertain but to win. "I wanted to see people competing like athletes," Garfield says. "Kind of like an X Games for juggling."

Feelings between the two camps, the entertainers and the sport jugglers, can run a little high. ("They all get really crazy about it," says Olga, rolling her eyes. "It's insane.") The entertainers call Garfield a dictator who's crushing the creativity out of juggling. He calls them hippies and hacks. "Both can coexist, I think, very easily," says Kim Laird, an IJA board member. "The WJF right now is the new kid on the block, and some people feel their territory's being invaded." Garfield too is a little befuddled by the ire, though he doesn't seem to mind the attention. "It's just juggling. It's surprising to me that people get so mad about it."

His dream is for juggling to become a big-time professional sport, like ice skating--or at least a lucrative fad, like poker. And he has made a start: ESPN and ESPN2 broadcast the first two WJF championships in 2004 and '05, a first for competitive juggling. The next event is in August. The IJA holds its own festival--the '06 festival is this week in Portland, Ore.--but so far it remains a relatively low-profile affair.

Garfield met the Galchenkos shortly after they arrived in the U.S. and immediately offered to coach them pro bono. They're the perfect poster siblings for the WJF: peerless, purely technical jugglers with little interest in show biz or comedy patter. Moreover, stage juggling is about making tricks look difficult, and the Galchenkos' natural gracefulness makes everything look easy. "We're probably the top team in the world, ever, technically, as far as juggling goes," Vova says and adds ruefully: "But we're probably the bottom team when it comes to presenting it."

The Galchenkos may well be the future of juggling, but right now they have a lot more than clubs to juggle. They have little money. They haven't seen their parents in three years. They have legal troubles too. Olga has successfully filed an Extraordinary Ability petition that will allow her to stay in the country for now, but Vova's hasn't been approved yet. He'll have to go back to Russia in October, at least temporarily.

In the meantime, he sometimes gets his host to drive him out to Venice Beach, where if you're lucky you can see one of the greatest technical jugglers in history performing on a street corner. "It's kind of an entry-level juggling job, I guess," he says. He's even working up a little patter to go with his act. "I mean, I don't make up a story," says Vova. "Most people who perform, they usually make up stories." Then again, most people don't have a story like the Galchenkos.