My daughter Lauren (Lolli as she is known to her friends and on Twitter) is a girl of many talents – she gets amazing school reports, she plays the flute better than anyone should be able to after just 10 months, and no-one is better at driving the wrong way round a Project Gotham Racing 4 circuit to smash head-first into the other drivers. But her real passion is gymnastics.
She came to the sport fairly late and joined a gymnastics club with the aim of getting into the school team – this was quite a challenge as the Marist Preparatory School has a long tradition of doing very well in the national championships. But I’m very proud of my girl because she stuck to it and eventually was accepted into the school team for the final junior year. The team did very well and took bronze in the Southern finals (and two weeks later they pushed the silver medal team into third place and took silver themselves at another competition).
Since then Lolli has been attending a better gymnastics club than the first two she joined, and today was their own club competition. There were three disciplines – floor, vault and trampette – and a record number of children taking part (I think they said two hundred). Lolli was in a group of girls aged 10 on 1st January 2009 – she did a faultless floor routine, a great vault (always her weakest discipline) and an amazing pike somersault off the trampette. The competition was stiff, I noticed a number of other girls of very good ability, but when the award ceremony took place there was a clear winner in her age group. Lolli took the gold for the floor routine. No sooner had she sat down she was called up again to accept the bronze medal for the vault. And then she was back on the #1 podium again for the trampette. After two golds and a bronze there was only going to be one overall winner, and thus she got a third gold and a trophy.
Well done kid, I’m proud of you. All those medals around your neck and you didn’t even walk with a stoop. Thank you to the current Mrs Adams for proof-reading this entry.
Well done Lauren…. the only person I’ve ever seen with a bigger haul of medals is Michael Phelps but then he has webbed feet and hands so he’s cheating.
Keep up the practice… we expect an invitation when you get on the Olympic team.