The world record for fastest time to solve 3 cubes while juggling them first gained significant attention back in 2018 when Que Jianya from Fujian, China set a world record of 5 minutes and 6 seconds, this was viewed over 112 million times after it was reposted on Facebook from the Chinese talent show it was originally done on at the end of 2017.
Since then, this world record has seen significant progress, the record was initially beaten in November 2018 by Que Jianya himself but only by 4 seconds. Angel Alvarado from Colombia then beat the record in 2021 with a time of 4:52 which he then lowered to 4:31 the next year but these times seem really slow in comparison with what ZhiHao Li has done now. In 2023, he first broke the world record with a time of 3:29, before lowering it to 3:16, however, on July 11th 2024, ZhiHao Li achieved a time of 1 minute and 59 seconds which absolutely smashed his own world record.
It is worth noting that even ZhiHao Li is only actually solving one cube at a time and juggling the other two, I think he has a technique which ensures the cube he is solving be caught on the right part of his hand so that he can make the correct move that he wants to make and then throw the cube up again to keep juggling them, I wonder if anyone will ever make a decent attempt at actually trying to solve all 3 cubes simultaneously while juggling, I think the concentration required to even just keep juggling and solving one cube at a time is immense though.
It is interesting to note that ZhiHao Li used a Gan Mini M Pro for this attempt, this cube is only 53mm which is a bit smaller than most cubes and is also designed so that it is only the outside layers that are actually thinner than the regular Gan 11M Pro. I suspect the reality is that solving 3 cubes while juggling them is a very specific cubing accomplishment and it isn't worth trying to draw conclusions over what cube is good for anything else, ZhiHao Li probably feels he can control the cube slightly better with a slightly smaller cube and I suspect Gan were very happy to provide 3 of those cubes for him in exchange for a bit of promotion for them!
