A variety of different sports and athletic pursuits involve people spinning/twisting/flipping in the air. Off the top of my head:
-gymnastics
-diving
-figure skating
-trapeze
-freestyle ski jumping
-various skateboarding disciplines (such as halfpipe)
-various rollerblade disciplines
-various snowboarding disciplines (at least including halfpipe and slopestyle)
-trampoline
I’m sure I’m missing one or two.
Does anyone know in which context the most spins/flips/twists happen? To the extent that I watch any of these events, it seems like a lot of them cap out somewhere slightly more than three spins/flips. In figure skating, a triple is a very good jump, a quad is rare, I’ve never heard of a quint. In various of the “extreme” sports, you hear a lot about 720s or even 1080s (1080 being 3 full rotations), and sometimes 1260, but again, things seem to max out between 3 and 4 spins. Of course some of them mix in rotations around more than one axis…
As an interesting sidenote, one sport in which flips are banned is Long Jump.
When you take off from the board in a long jump, your natural body action is to rotate forward. As a result, several techniques have been developed to prevent over-rotation - hitch-kicks (the ‘running in mid-air’ some jumpers use) and the ‘hang’ variations.
Some athletes (certainly in the 70s but some probably tried it earlier) decided to just ‘go with the flow’ - and complete a full forward flip in mid-air before landing. Some studies have suggested that if world-class athletes adopted this, it would almost certainly result in a longer jump than is produced with the anti-rotation techniques.
So why is it banned? Well, if long jump consisted of running at your top speed and forward flipping into a sandpit off one foot, and EVERBODY was doing it - there would quickly be several deaths and paralysis injuries, before the entire sport was banned.
U.S. Olympic ski halfpiper Torin Yater-Wallace did a quintuple spin at the end of a slopestyle course a couple of years ago – at age 16. I couldn’t find another example of it being done, though, so that might not qualify as “people” doing 1800s.