Elisha trains six days every week. She is 11 years old. And has great dreams

At 7.15 pm on a Friday in a warehouse converted in the north-west of Sydney, Lilly-Ann Keating is on a padded blue box and observes numerous bodies around in the summer heat.

The girls raise their chin to the wooden bars and ignore the calls on the palms of the hands. Others sit down with a heel resting on a box so that their hips are stretched more than 180 degrees.

One of these, Elisha Hawker, trains for more than 24 hours in six days every week. She is 11 years old.

Inside the Sydney Academy of Gymnastics, one of the best women’s artistic gymnastics clubs in the country, the girls train for hours several times a week, even if only some of them will ever compete on the level of the elite.

There are 800,000 gymnasts in Australia and 90 % are less than 12 years old. Hours of resistance, conditioning and flexibility formation are the compromises agreed to turn upside down and rotate in the air in ways that may seem to challenge gravity.

But now, more than he has never been to gymnastics, the well -being of an athlete has the priority of the medals.

Over the past five years, the gymnasts in Australia, their parents and coaches have engaged in cultural changes in sport following the dissemination of abuses pushed by US Gymnastics Scandal. In May 2021, Gymnastics Australia issued excuses without reservations for the abuses suffered by gymnasts in sport after a Independent review by the Human Rights Commission.

Keating, 24, had retired from gymnastics when the news started filtering from the United States. “It is quite frightening to think that what those girls were doing, you know, going to the fields and staying at the hotel, we were doing those,” he said. “Our configuration was exactly the same … we may not have gone to (an isolated ranch) (training structure like Americans) but we were going to the hotels in Canberra.”

“So it was a little frightening, but it also made me very grateful for my experience.”

Keating is a Alumna of the Sydney Academy of Gymnastics and is a ferocious supporter of this sport that has started four, despite knowing how difficult it is.

At seven years of age, his family was leading more than an hour from his home to Hawkesbury in order to train several times a week. At 13, he had won an all -round title in the new South Wales, making it the best at his level in the state.

“At the time I didn’t think was so beautiful because I think, personally, I had more hopes that led to greater competitions,” he said.

When he traveled to Canberra that year to compete in the national championships, his life was revolved around gymnastics for almost a decade. During the competition, he torn the knee tendon and was forced to take a year off, ending his dream of representing Australia.

“In reality I think about videos and I think I can identify the time in which he actually torn,” he said.

“It was so difficult that I was suffering from the sport I didn’t want to give up. It was all my identity. Who was I if I was not doing gymnastics?”

In the corridor, the cutout of laminated newspapers commemorate Keating’s gymnastics career. Although his Olympic dreams have never been realized, he does not regret the years spent in the gym: “I am really a great supporter of gymnastics”.

“Discipline, trust, I think everything I have taken from this sport has nothing to do with gymnastics.”

Looking through the rows of beams in the middle of the hot and twin air of the Seven Hills gym, he observes with pride while the eighteen year old Annabelle Burrows makes the chin-ups on irregular bars. Burrows was just a child when he started training in the same Keating gym. Now it is their most successful athlete to date.

At the top, in the middle of an otherwise sterile concrete wall, a small poster boasts that the Sydney Academy of Gymnastics is the “House of Annabelle Burrows 2024 Paris Olympic Reserve”. It was the only gymnast of the new South Wales appointed in the Women’s Artistic Gymnastics Olympic Team of 2024.

“I don’t really like to look at him,” said the Pacific Burrows of the poster who trains underneath. He adds, smiling, “I hate looking at me gym”.

Until about four years ago, Burrows did not want to go to the Olympics, having thought like so many critics of sport that training would not be worth it.

“Since the gyms have changed a bit from being very demanding, it made you understand that it could be fun to go to the Olympics and not” Oh my God, it would be so horrible having to train for that “, which is what I thought.”

There is an eight -year plan for Burrows to compete in Los Angeles in 2028 and Brisbane in 2032, even if there is an understanding that can leave sport at any time.

“It’s all I know,” Burrows said. “I like the routine. I like the familiarity of the gym. I arrived so far away, I don’t see why I would stop so close to getting somewhere. It is also a very satisfactory sport to do. Every day it has a sort of victory.”

When his coach Skye Benson opened the Sydney Academy, he did not intend to train the Olympic hopes, in part due to the requests placed on gymnasts at that level. While sport walked away from the emphasis on success at any cost to give priority to the athlete and Burrows expressed the desire to represent Australia, Benson agreed to support it.

“We have just tried to balance elite gymnastics with being a healthy and happy person and child, who is always a truly complicated balance,” he added, adding, “I think it is a much more healthy balance as a human being for not having the whole world taken from gymnastics”.

The navigation of that balance is also the 11 -year -old Elisha Hawker family.

Two years ago, Elisha and his mother moved from their farm to the outskirts of Dubbo to Sydney so that they can train at the Sydney Academy. Already at home, he joined the six -day training program of Burrows at the end of last year.

“What is an eight -year -old boy, a nine -year -old boy, really knows what they want in life,” said his mother Tamara Williams: “But you know when you are a child and you have a dream, it’s the most important thing, it’s someone who supports your dream”.

“If he doesn’t want to do it anymore, he can stop. It’s his choice to do it. But for me, it’s more as if I don’t want you to have what-IFS,” said Williams.

On the other side of the floor, Elisha falls of mature precision and corrects her mistakes. Somehow in the midst of the twist and the goat in the air, he recalls to point the fingers of the feet and, occasionally, the landing is attacked. In a turn, it is located with the rest of the girls, giving up while making fun of and talk about Tiktok.

Even at 11, Elisha’s dream is incredible and surprising: “I just want to go to the Olympics,” he said.

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