At 7.15pm on a Friday in a converted warehouse in north-west Sydney, Lilly-Ann Keating sits on a padded blue box and watches numerous bodies twist in the summer heat.
Girls lift their chins to wooden bars and ignore the calluses on their palms. Others sit in splits with one heel resting on a box so that their hips are stretched more than 180 degrees.
One of them, Elisha Hawker, trains for more than 24 hours across six days every week. She’s 11.
Inside the Sydney Academy of Gymnastics, one of the best women’s artistic gymnastics clubs in the country, young girls train for hours several times a week, though only some of them will ever compete at an elite level.
There are 800,000 gymnasts in Australia and 90 per cent are under the age of 12. Hours of strength, conditioning and flexibility training are the agreed trade-offs for flipping and rotating in the air in ways that can appear to defy gravity.
But now, more than it has ever been in gymnastics, an athlete’s wellbeing is prioritised over medals.
In the past five years, gymnasts in Australia, their parents and coaches have committed to culture changes in the sport following disclosures of abuse prompted by the USA Gymnastics scandal. In May 2021, Gymnastics Australia issued an unreserved apology for the abuse suffered by gymnasts in the sport after an independent review by the Human Rights Commission.
Keating, 24, had retired from gymnastics by the time the news began filtering out of the US. “It’s quite scary to think that what those girls were doing, you know, going to camps and staying in hotels, we were doing those,” she said. “Our setup was exactly the same … we may not have been going to [an isolated] ranch [training facility like the Americans] but we were going to hotels in Canberra.”
“So it was a little bit scary but also made me very grateful for my experience.”
Lilly-Ann Keating, 24, has retired from gymnastics, but remains a huge supporter of the sport.Credit: Wolter Peeters
Keating is an alumna of the Sydney Academy of Gymnastics and is a fierce advocate of the sport she began at four, despite knowing how tough it is.
By seven, her family was driving more than an hour from her home in the Hawkesbury so she could train several times a week. At 13, she had won an all-around title in NSW, making her the best in her level in the state.
“At the time I didn’t think it was that good because I think, personally, I had bigger hopes leading into bigger competitions,” she said.
When she travelled to Canberra that year to compete in the national championships, her life had revolved around gymnastics for almost a decade. During the competition, she tore her hamstring and was forced to take a year off, ending her dream of representing Australia.
“I actually look back on videos and I think I can pinpoint the time when it actually tore,” she said.
“It was so hard, I was grieving for the sport I didn’t want to give up. That was my whole identity. Who was I if I wasn’t doing gymnastics?”
In the corridor, laminated newspaper clippings memorialise Keating’s gymnastics career. Though her Olympic dreams were never fulfilled, she doesn’t regret the years spent in the gym: “I’m a really big advocate for gymnastics.”
“Discipline, confidence, I think everything that I have taken from the sport has nothing to do with doing gymnastics.”
Looking out across the rows of beams amid the chalky, hot air of the Seven Hills gym, she watches proudly as 18-year-old Annabelle Burrows does chin-ups on the uneven bars. Burrows was just a toddler when she started training at the same gym as Keating. Now, she’s their most successful athlete to date.
High up, in the middle of an otherwise barren concrete wall, a small poster boasts that the Sydney Academy of Gymnastics is the “home of Annabelle Burrows 2024 Paris Olympic Reserve”. She was the only gymnast from NSW named on the 2024 women’s artistic gymnastics Olympic team.
“I don’t really like looking at it,” the soft-spoken Burrows said of the poster she trains beneath. She adds, smiling, “I hate looking at myself doing gym.”
Until about four years ago, Burrows didn’t want to go to the Olympics, having thought like so many critics of the sport that the training wouldn’t be worth the reward.
Annabelle Burrows, 18, was on the Australian Women’s Artistic Gymnastics team for the 2024 Paris Olympics.Credit: Wolter Peeters
“As gyms changed a bit from being very demanding, it’s made you realise actually it might be fun to go to the Olympics and not ‘oh my god, that would be so horrible to have to train for that’, which is what I used to think.”
There’s an eight-year plan for Burrows to compete at Los Angeles in 2028 and Brisbane in 2032, though there is an understanding she can leave the sport at any time.
“It’s all I know,” Burrows said. “I like routine. I like the familiarity of gym. I’ve come this far, I don’t see why I would stop this close to getting somewhere. It’s also a very satisfying sport to do. Every day has some kind of win.”
When her coach Skye Benson opened Sydney Academy, she didn’t intend to coach Olympic hopefuls, in part due to the demands placed on gymnasts at that level. As the sport shifted away from an emphasis on success at any cost to prioritising the athlete, and Burrows expressed a desire to represent Australia, Benson agreed to support her.
“We’ve just tried to balance elite gymnastics with being an all-around healthy, happy person and kid, which is always a really tricky balance,” she said, adding, “I think it’s a much healthier balance as a human being to not have your whole world taken up by gymnastics.”
Also navigating that balance is the family of 11-year-old Elisha Hawker.
Elisha Hawker, 11, has Olympic dreams.Credit: Wolter Peeters
Two years ago, Elisha and her mum moved from their farm on the outskirts of Dubbo to Sydney so she could train at Sydney Academy. Already homeschooled, she joined Burrows’ six-day training program at the end of last year.
“What does an eight-year-old, a nine-year-old, a 10-year-old really know what they want in life,” her mum Tamara Williams said, “but you know when you’re little and you have a dream, that’s the most important thing, is having someone support your dream.”
“If she doesn’t want to do it any more she can stop. It’s her choice to do it. But for me, it’s more like I don’t want her to have what-ifs,” Williams said.
Across the floor, Elisha tumbles with mature precision and corrects her own mistakes. Somehow in the midst of twisting and somersaulting in the air, she remembers to point her toes and, occasionally, she sticks the landing. In between turns, she stands with the rest of the girls, giggling as they make fun of each other and talk about TikTok.
Even at 11, Elisha’s dream is both incredible and unsurprising: “I just want to go to the Olympics,” she said.
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