I am writing this purely for the fun of it. I have forgotten the joy of writing, and while my family history findings gave me some of it back for a little bit, I am finding that on-the-whole, I am struggling with writing. I seem to be dodging the very same opportunities to hash an opinion out that I used to love, and so oerhaps this is a passion-bridging exercise by talking about a passion?
But yes, for those who follow me on my now private socials, many have noticed I have a seemingly inexplicable fondness for rhythmic gymnastics. I don't like sport in general, and my version of hell is being stuck in a sports bar that does not have live music playing in the next room that I can escape to. I missed the Australian "sporting gene". I am also clumsy as, and perhaps some of my disdain for sports overall comes from my complete inability in all of them despite the fact that I actually have an ideal build for a lot of sports (between my height, my shoulders, and my natural muscle tone). But when it comes to rhythmic gymnastics, I seem to be all in, and folks go "but why?"
Rhythmic gymnastics is such a fringe sport in Australia. Hell, all gymnastics is, and professional Artistic Gymnasts have a hard time gaining a living wage out of it and finding sponsorship to cover their competition schedules. And despite having world champion tumblers and trampolinists, they barely get a look in either. But rhythmic is different - in many of the Slavic countries for example, and Western Asian countries, it is actually the dominant form of gymnastics with their stars celebrated. Here, no.
I remember a blip in time - 1994 to be precise - where that wasn't the case. Australian rhythmic gymnast Kasumi Takahashi caused a national fever when she managed a clean sweep of gold medals at the Commonwealth Games. Takahashi was brilliant - for her time, she was an incredibly skilled athlete, and so compelling that many Australian eyes were drawn to it for the first time. It didn't last though. Not long after, Takahashi started being the victim of good old-fashioned Australian racism due to her name and Japanese birthplace, and Takahashi herself was forced into retirement a few years later due to stress fractures in her spine. Injuries which, given what the sport was then with its focus on extreme flexibility, not uncommon sadly, and cost many a young career. Indeed, these requirements only became a former part of the sport in 2010.
But yeah, anyway, fun fact: I did rhythmic gymnastics for 6 months when I was 11 years old. I had quit ballet, which I had been doing since I was 4, and cut all my hair off in one of my many early shows of feminist rebellion, and had expressed to mum that I wanted to do gymnastics. I meant Artistic Gymnastics, but my primary school was offering some after school rhythmic classes, and mum pushed me towards them as she loved the sport and considered it more feminine. Unfortunately though, when that six months was up, there was not an awful lot on offer in Canberra when it came to rhythmic gymnastics clubs, and so I got my wish to do Artistic Gymnastics and enrolled at a club in Belconnen.
Did I miss rhythmic then? I can't actually say. I can say that, generally speaking, I was terrible at artistic gymnastics. When I quit that at age 15, I had only reached level 5, and for the time, my height and build were totally inappropriate for the sport. It's a bit wonderful looking at the sport now because there are actually women who are built like me competing at the highest levels. Back then, the top gymnasts were all still just children, and usually children who had been abused by their regimes, and systemically underfed to keep them as lithe as possible. Despite being terrible at the sport though, I often used to ride my bike down to the AIS to watch the gymnasts train, and I loved doing this. On occasion, you would catch rhythmic gymnasts training too, and I thought they were wonderful and admirable.
But the sport itself didn't capture my imagination. You look at the sport of the late-90s and early-2000s, and it appears to be just a series of dance movements and grotesque contortions performed while waving whatever apparatus they were working with at the time. That's actually exactly what I think, for example, when I watch the routines of Putin's mistress Alina Kabaeva. For her time, yes, she was excellent. But her routines are exactly as I mentioned above, and actually, compared to what we see now, almost look like an entirely different sport.
Kabaeva at Athens Olympics
How then did I get back into it? Well, it was the Tokyo Olympics that grabbed my attention. We were all locked up with nothing to do, and suddenly there I was, gripped by the rhythmic gymnastics qualifications, and then its incredibly controversial final. The sport I dismissed as "forced femininity" as a child, and then as a "bit bizarre" as a young adult, had completely transformed. In its place was this highly skilled, and incredibly difficult, display which also allowed for music with lyrics (something else it didn't have back then). Some even used metal music in their routines! Competitors were using their feet to throw hoops and ribbons, and you couldn't blink while watching it because if you did, you'd miss a difficulty element. It was incredible.
Anastasiia Salos at Tokyo doing hoop - a favourite routine of mine
And yes, the fact that the final was controversial made it even more compelling to me. To give a brief overview, the Russians went in completely expecting to with the gold with their lead competitor, Dina Averina. They were pipped at the post though by Israeli gymnast Linoy Ashram who, via the aparatus difficulty she had packed in her routine, managed to outscore Averina despite an apparatus drop during Ashram's ribbon routine. Bedlam followed. Russia challenged the score of Averina's ribbon routine on the spot, and failed. They then issued a complaint about the judging process, and the findings were that no, there hadn't been bias, and the judging was both compliant and fair.
Because the sport was "new" to me, and I was trying to figure out how everything panned out, I cannot tell you how many times I watched that final in a bid to grasp how it had all unfolded. At the end though, it was all quite simple. In the final, Averina had missed one valuable difficulty element - a catch in the ball routine with her knees while performing a roll under the flight path - which she had successfully performed in the qualification round, and which had cost her just enough decimal points to land in silver position. Ashram, meanwhile, had crammed her routines with difficulty elements and had successfully performed most of them, to the point of where one drop in the ribbon routine was inconsequential on her placing. This sport was so intricate and compelling that something as small as this could make all the difference, and I was captivated from that point onwards.
The controversial Tokyo final
But something else also captivated me. The sport had grown more diverse, and was less "girlie", for want of a better term. Remember, as I kid, I had been pushed towards it due to its perceived femininity in comparison to WAG, and therefore I had partly resisted this. What I was now seeing though was a women's sport that showed an abundance of creativity, difficulty and athleticism. It was an absolute smorgasbord for the eyes. And in this form, it appealed to me greatly.
What's more, the more competitions I caught, the more diversity I saw. When it came to race, I was seeing South American and Middle Eastern gymnasts chomping at the heels of the dominant European competitors. When it came to body type, while some countries did seem to prefer sticking to the tall waif-types of yesterday, others had embraced body diversity. Bulgaria, for example, who is a dominant force in the sport had a team which consisted of great diversity in height and build, and every single one of them had been worked with to build routines that worked with, rather than against, this.
As well as metal music in routines, and other such things, another aspect I noticed was the diverse ways gymnasts were working the apparati. Take, for example, the below ribbon routine by my very favourite (now retired) gymnast, Boryana Kaleyn. I loved this routine because ribbon has traditionally been very flowy and "pretty", and Kaleyn instead turned it into a display of strength by using it to tell the story of a folk warrior:
In short, the sport has changed so much. And those changes have been incredible. What I am seeing now is an intricate, and epic sport, where trained bodies are performing the impossible, and pushing new frontiers. And so I sit there, for hours, watching the European, the Asian, and the World Championships. I look at which other countries are challenging the old dynamics and where the next generation of top gymnast may come from. And as a sport loather, I am enthralled.
What else has changed? Well, for starters, I know that men also do rhythmic gymnastics. Japan has an entire men's competition using different apparatuses, and incorporating acrobatic elements which are not a part of mainstream RG. Here's a men's clubs routine from Japan, and it is extraordinary:
In countries like Spain, men also do Rhythmic Gymnastics, though it is more inline with the main competition. To see these men though, really makes me hope that the men's competition does take off and get incorporated into the mainstream world comps, because can we talk about this man's butterfly leap sequence?!
So anyway, that's it. That is why you suddenly see rhythmic gymnastics content making its way into my feed. It is an extraordinary sport, full of art, athleticism, strength, and in my humble opinion, if you are not watching it, you are missing out. I am so glad that it has evolved over time, and is pushing new boundaries. I will say, the group competition still bamboozles me so it's the individual comps that I consume at ridiculous rates, but who knows - maybe one day, I will also understand group too? But yes, thank you, rhythmic gymnastics, for giving me a sport I can actually understand and be interested in. And to my favourite competitors, you are totally incredible.
PS Here's a weird historic twist, incidentally. It turns out that I have a distant cousin who is a rhythmic gymnast, and though living in Canada, she represented Sri Lanka on the world stage because that was where her parents were born. Had I not done family research, I would not have known this fact. So to Anna-Marie Quint Ondaatje, you are a legend!
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