Sport

For the author, his daughter’s delight at practising her favourite gymnastics feat scores a perfect 10. By Martin McKenzie-Murray.

A budding gymnast’s pursuit of excellence

The author’s daughter practises gymnastics.

Credit: Martin McKenzie-Murray

The gymnast was born in 2019 after a long labour. A variety of gentle inductions were tried, but still she stayed inside and the hours passed for her father as if they were a dream.

There were bright lights and a vacuum at the moment of her birth, and the successive moments are recalled by her father as if experienced through a strobe light. An umbilical cord and scissors were presented to him and received with trepidation. The cord resisted its severance, just as his nervous system resisted wholly accepting this epiphany of love and responsibility.

The gymnast cried as a newborn, excessively it seemed, but her parents had little measure for it. The screaming was often piercing and sustained and, like all new parents, both of them associated this shrillness with mortal threat and often panicked when no obvious danger was found.

Sleep was a problem for her parents for a while. In her first year, her father, having slept for just two hours the previous night, went to the wrong address for a job interview not once but twice. He had never been late for a job interview before, but he was now. He did not get the job.

Her father studied his daughter’s physical progress. There was her first making of a fist; then the first independent rolling over from her back. Nurses encouraged the gymnast’s parents to practise “tummy time” – briefly placing their child on her stomach to help develop her neck muscles.

Her fingers got stronger. They developed an earnest grip on her toys, teething devices, her own parents’ fingers. Still, sleep was a problem. Experts were sought. They took the parents’ money and told them to pat the mattress.

And so they did.

She began crawling. This was succeeded by the gymnast’s ability to smilingly grasp her father’s bookshelf while he played records and, while standing, dance to the music. Her dancing was simple but charming: while holding the shelf, she bounced up and down, using her little legs as springs.

Not all of his music had this effect, however, and her father filtered his collection in search of those gems that might inspire his daughter’s joyous bobbing.

About the age of one, the gymnast began walking. Not long after that, a novel virus emerged of awesome contagiousness and her family were largely condemned to their home. She knew none of this, of course, and her parents were careful – as careful as they could be – to swallow their fears and their frustrations and to appear before their child as they had appeared before.

And so the gymnast kept working on her walking and her parents kept working on keeping the rest of the world outside. Her own world, the one she could see, touch and move toward, was expanding – even as her parents’ world had dramatically shrunk. The gymnast never knew of this strange contrast and her father took her outside on cloudless nights and showed her the stars and the moon.

Her walking improved. So too her talking. She could make jokes now, and giggle and kiss. One line, captured on video, would enter her home’s folklore: “Daddy, naughty possums have been eating fairy lights in the rain!”

Her development happened gradually, of course, and then all at once – or so it seemed to her father.

The gymnast is now almost seven. She has lost several teeth but gained a distinctive vocabulary, a level of independence and, crucially for this profile, an elegant cartwheel.

The gymnast’s father has watched her practise the skill several hundred times – first on the mat at the gym where she was introduced to it, and then in her bedroom, the family room, on the lawn of her school.

The gymnast’s father is thrilled to watch his daughter’s joyously compulsive and unselfconscious practice of this specific skill – as he is proud to report upon its obvious improvement.

The gymnast trains at a gym near a creek and takes counsel from teenage coaches. She is focused and listens attentively. The beams and rings and high climbing ropes don’t intimidate her so much anymore.

They’re hard disciplines, but the gymnast is made gorgeous in her obsession. She practises at home and draws pictures of gymnasts in her notebook. Over and over and over will she practise the cartwheel and ask her father to rate it out of 10.

There are more 10s now. More and more. And while the father admits to their periodic bickering and his occasional astonishment at his own pettiness, he will also say how much his heart is welded to hers and how indescribable the depth of his love.

The gymnast’s school report was flattering. Across behaviour, language, maths. But the gymnast’s father was especially proud to draw a magic line in his head between the tummy time and the praise of her PE teacher.

They’d caught balls together. Kicked them together. Invented their own games together. “Kicky Kicky” was one, played with a balloon, and about which her father is still faintly guilty that he never fulfilled his promise to create special jerseys. He had even bought the singlets and fabric paint, and drafted uniform designs with his daughter. Their team would be called “The Ice-Creams”.

For the gymnast’s father, it depends upon the time of day whether he thinks it either entirely normal or acutely poignant that his daughter might now sit for an interview about her love of gymnastics. First there is tummy time, then crawling, then walking, then… cartwheels.

Sometimes, relative to his daughter’s development, time seems friendly and comprehensible. And sometimes it seems as if the time that’s passed is like a concertina, and moments are either compressed in their proximity or made to seem much further away.

But the gymnast’s father is happy to watch his daughter’s enthusiasm and to hear her speak for this profile. “I think I’d like to do gymnastics for like 15 years,” she says. “It’s really fun.”

There are remote lessons when away from the gym – videos on YouTube – and sometimes her father will watch Olympic highlights with her. She likes to watch Simone Biles. “She’s the best gymnast in the whole world,” she says.

Recently, the gymnast received a “beam” that could be used in her own bedroom – five brightly coloured pieces that can be linked in different configurations. She has quickly mastered them and confidently strides their ridge. “Did you know I can do this?” she asks, before raising one leg and confidently balancing.

The virtue of gymnastics is self-evident to the gymnast and, thus, so it is to her father. He enjoys her enjoyment, even as he mourns the loss of his own flexibility – most acutely felt when tying his shoelaces. He admires his daughter’s ceaseless energy spent on improving one simple action: the cartwheel.

And here, the father feels, is a triumph of sorts. That the gymnast, otherwise known as Possum, Chicken and Pickles, might have grown these arms and these legs and the heart to animate them with such enthusiasm.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on December 18, 2025 as "The gymnast".

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