Greg Wakefield, Lego champ
At age 10, Pueblo West fifth-grade student Greg Wakefield already is a recognized entrepreneur and a national Lego champion who competed this weekend against 37 other international winners in Billund, Denmark.
Greg’s futuristic model of a 2-foot-high robot designed to turn trash into treats won the U.S. competition in Lego’s 50th-anniversary challenge to build a hot new gadget that will be essential in 2048.
Greg’s TRTF (Trash Recycler To Food) is hollow, with a crystal-powered engine designed to convert garbage into pepperoni pizza and chicken drumsticks — a mission that nutritionists might consider already accomplished.
He presented his proposed design as simultaneously ending world hunger and eliminating pollution.
“My first idea was to build a robot that picked cherries and does your homework,” he said, but then he had the trash-into-pizza brainstorm.
Alhough he’s in Billund this weekend for the Lego international competition, he already is thinking about Halloween. He plans to resurrect the costume he used 2 years ago.
“Back then, I was a black Lego brick,” he said. “This year, I’ll paint it gold, and be a gold Lego.”
Tyler Weaver, martial artist
Born with a rare illness that can cause cardiovascular damage in very young children, Tyler Weaver Jr. went on to become a world-ranked martial-arts champion by age 12. Being the son of a martial-arts expert helps — his dad, Tyler Weaver Sr., is a master karate instructor who owns Sensei Championship Karate in Highlands Ranch.
“I was kinda born into karate,” Tyler Jr. says.
He learned the karate basics when he was 2 years old, an age when other children wrestle with potty training.
He shied away from competition until seeing Taylor Lautner’s winning performance at the International Sport Karate Association’s 2003 U.S. Open tournament. Tyler Jr. seized upon the new format known as “extreme martial arts,” combining traditional karate with aerobics, gymnastics and music. He was 9 years old.
“The first favorite move I learned was a corkscrew,” he said.
“You do a backflip — sling your leg up into a backflip, and spin halfway across, and then you just land on your feet.”
It took 6 months of practicing 60 to 90 minutes a day to master the tricks he saw Lautner perform, and then Tyler Jr. began choreographing his own routines. He disciplined himself to practice gymnastics, running, karate moves and form.
By 2006, he won his age division in the ISKA world musical forms competition — the gymnastic martial arts that first caught his interest. The next year, he won the competition’s World Weapons title. In the 2008 competition, he won the young world title for black belt advanced skills (another extreme-tricks display) and hopes to defend that title in 2009, the last year before he moves on to the 14-17 age division.
