Sports Relief?: Growing up in gymnastics

Melissa at one of her many competitions

Growing up, the hardest decision most of us had to face was what to wear to school the next day and whether to lie to our teacher about why we had not done our homework (we didn't have the excuse of a 6 days a week training regime). Melissa Bennett, speaking from experience, tells us what it is like to be a child in competitive sport.

I first started gymnastics when I was about 6 or 7. I had tried, and already given up, ballet and my parents decided I needed to be doing some form of exercise. Up until I was 10 it was all Kit-Kat badges and basics, but as I progressed through the novice groups I came to a point where I had to be sent into one specific type of gymnastics. After deciding I had too much fear to fly in the air between bars and over beams in artistic gymnastics, and being both too big and too small to be tossed in the air in sports acro, it was decided that since I had a flexible back, I would be sent to try rhythmic.

At first the concept seemed odd to me. Leaping, balancing and pirouetting whilst moving a hoop, ball, ribbon, rope or a pair of clubs around was difficult to coordinate and I wondered whether this was what I really wanted to do. About two years passed and as I improved, ranking better at competitions, and learning more difficult moves, I realised that I really had a talent for the sport. I started to train seriously as an elite gymnast at the end of year 7, at the age of 12. I would be at school until 3.45 then rush to the gym until 8 or 9 every weekday evening and would train 12-5 on Saturdays and 9-5 on Sundays.

I trained with the best gymnasts in the country. Two of the girls that I trained with went on to win the Commonwealth Games and won the British Championships at a senior level (over 14) every year. They competed frequently at the World and European Championships and one girl even went to the Olympic Games in Athens in 2004. I also trained with younger girls who were in the national team and won the British Championships at junior and under 12 level. Sessions were long and tiring, especially after a full day at school, but luckily our coach took frequent cigarette breaks, which gave us some time to relax. A typical training session would involve laps around a field to begin (the equivalent of about 1000/1500m depending on the coach’s mood) and then practicing routines or elements depending on the amount of floor space that we had, before about 20-30 minutes of conditioning at the end.

There were a few particularly horrible training sessions. One year during the Easter holidays our coach decided we would be better in the morning so we started at 7am and were sent on a run. Another session I miss-timed a throw and cut my eyelid open with a ribbon (I still wonder how that was physically possible) and one girl was hit by someone else's clubs, resulting in stitches and a partial and very un-artistic head shave. There was also weekly weigh-ins to look forward to when it got close to major competitions. It was great when you were congratulated on losing weight but you always dreaded the opposite happening. Although I never suffered from an eating disorder a few girls did and would do ridiculous things, such as go on grape diets and wrap their torsos in cling film in order to lose inches from their waists. When a friend and I were deemed to be too heavy, we were sent to run laps indefinitely - we ended up running about 5 miles before being called into training to compete in a practice competition.

It wasn't all work and no play though. Some of my best memories of gymnastics come from our annual 3-week training camps in Bulgaria. Despite training 8 hours a day we were still able to have fun: sneaking out after training to buy sweets and snacks (we couldn't bring them with us in our luggage after a surprise bag search in the first year yielded enough to feed the five thousand), and learning traditional Bulgarian dances from a group of dancers who performed at our hotel. Competitions around the country allowed me to see a lot of places I would never have travelled to, including Cardiff and Edinburgh, and it was always great to stay in lots of different hotels with the people who became my closest friends.

Competitions were a great experience. You would spend hundreds of pounds on leotards (one for each routine) and get your hair and make-up done by the older girls. They were also a great way of meeting new people and forming friendships with girls from all over the country, I am still in touch with a few of them. There was no better feeling than performing a great routine on the floor and placing in the medals, but there was no feeling worse than performing badly, especially when so many other talented gymnasts surrounded me. Some of my best memories come from winning competitions, including the Welsh Championships in 2003 and the British pair’s championships in 2004. If you performed particularly well in a competition season you would be invited to national squad testing where you would perform routines as well as a lot of other exercises to test your strength and fitness. My experiences of squad testing were mixed; although I was happy to find out I could jump the highest of all the Rhythmic gymnasts in Britain, a few nervous mistakes during my ball routine (one involving me having to chase it across the floor before it rolled out of bounds) meant that I was not selected.

I retired from gymnastics at the age of 15 when I began my GCSEs. I would never have been able to perform to my full potential at school if I had carried on training as often as I did: at the age of 13, I was already arranging to miss certain lessons in order to complete homework for the subjects I considered to be more important to my future. I was also getting to an age when having a social life was becoming more important and was becoming tired of missing out on parties and being unable to meet up with my friends outside of gymnastics because I could not miss training. Even when I was too ill for school I would beg my parents to let me go to gymnastics. However, once I quit gymnastics I was able to participate more in school sports (I had always missed PE in order to catch up with my other lessons) and was frequently selected to represent my school at a regional level in athletics as all those pre-training laps had allowed me to develop into a pretty good runner.

Looking back on it all, I would not have changed on minute of it. I made friends for life and developed a work ethic which has proved extremely helpful. It was hard to decide to give up, and I sometimes wish I had continued competing for longer, but since I retired from gymnastics I have had the opportunity to do a lot of amazing things, which gymnastics would definitely not have allowed me the time for.

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