Needless to say, the world has changed quite significantly over the last two years; however, the challenges associated with qualifying and then competing in a world championship level event required that the Oakville Gymnastics Club pull off a Herculean feat to send nine athletes to the 2022 World Age Group Competitions for Acrobatic Gymnastics in Baku, Azerbaijan.
The Oakville Gymnastics Club has had a phenomenal record of sending kids to the Worlds in recent years, “we’ve been literally the only club to consistently send athletes to the competition since 2010,” boasts Oakville Gymnastics Club Executive Director Don Holmes.
This year’s event almost didn’t happen due to the Omicron variant of COVID-19 that has spread worldwide.
Last year the event was cancelled altogether, as was the 2020 competition.
“We lost some of our top athletes because of that,” laments Holmes. Many of the group's top performers simply aged out of the program without ever having the chance to showcase the skills built through many years of perfecting their moves.
In preparation for this year’s event, qualifying to represent the national federation was done by judges watching video recordings of performances. Selections were made without judges and gymnasts in the same room.
In Canada and Ontario especially, restrictions on training were, in fact, the harshest in the entire world. “They (the gymnasts) were not permitted to touch each other, and that is the essence of acrobatic gymnastics,” Holmes notes, continuing, “they were not permitted to touch each other from March of 2020 to July of 2021”.
These rules were stricter than Australia or New Zealand, which were the two nations to have had the strongest prevention policies worldwide throughout this pandemic.
“We were the only province in the country that had that type of restriction, and we were the only country that had a province with that type of a restriction.”
Don is quick to emphasize the hard work that these young people have put into perfecting their craft, “it is quite commendable that our coaches and our athletes stuck it out, did all of their online training, did all of their physical preparation, did all of their handstands.”
Luckily, the future is bright for the younger set of kids in this group who will compete for the first time at the World level at 12 years old. They will have many more years to compete, but that’s not to say that their age doesn’t present an entirely new set of problems.
“Their parents are not allowed to travel with them, they are not allowed to stay in their hotel, and only if they acquire COVID do we then pass them off to their parents, to manage their quarantine time to stay there for 14 days before they are allowed back into the country."
Holmes will be the Head of Canada’s delegation at this event, while Oakville coaches Scott Middleton and Greg Boosey will also be making the trip.
The nine acrobatic gymnasts representing Oakville will meet up with the rest of the Canadian delegation in Montreal before embarking on a nearly 9,000 km journey to the edge of the Caspian Sea.
WOMEN’S GROUP 12-18
Juliana Summers, Sasha Pioun, & Ella Fedoration
MEN’S PAIR 12-18
WOMEN’S PAIR 12-18
Maeve Doherty & Chloe Fiore
MIXED PAIR 13-19