22nd November 2014 – Brooke’s First Competition

At the seasoned age of eight, Brooke has taken part in her first competition with budding gymnasts from all over London heading to the Eastern suburbs for a day of floor exercises and springing over the vault.

Apparently, Brooke was nervous about the vault, having struggled to get it right in training over the last few weeks.  She needn’t have worried because she nailed 2 good vaults scoring 9.850 and 10.050.  It was her floor performance that bolstered her ranking, her mother calling it “amazing”.  The score of 14.400 was right up there as one of the highest in her category of FW8A (don’t ask us what this means).

Overall, Brooke came 5th of the 21 category entrants with a combined score of 24.450, pretty close to all those above her on the leaderboard and just 0.450 behind the leader.  Not bad at all for a first-time competitor.  The score was good enough to get her a “white pin”, which is the first 0f 8 levels in the UK gymnastics competition hierarchy.  This is all explained on a useful document prepared by London Gymnastics, which organised Saturday’s event.  This suggests that Brooke’s performance on Saturday is not too far off the next level.

Well done Brooke.  Plenty to be pleased about, plenty of optimism for the future and plenty of hard work still needed.  Her family are all very proud of Brooke and we hope they don’t mind if we say that all of us at the Foundation are proud as well to be helping Brooke to aspire and achieve.