Run fast, fly high – gymnast Luca Lazarus wows the judges

JULIE LEIBOWITZ

But last week, she beat 36 other contestants for first place in the level 7 group (ages 13-17) at the SA Gym Games, the national championship in Cape Town.

It wasn’t the first time the 13-year-old, who is in Grade 8 at Redhill School in Johannesburg, blew the judges away. She finished second at the provincial championships in August, and in July, travelled to Malta, where she came third in the Malta GymStars International competition, competing against top gymnasts from across the world.

Lazarus competes in artistic gymnastics, including bar, beam, floor, and vault. It’s a demanding set of practices, requiring a great deal of physical strength, agility, and mental toughness. 

To say that gymnastics is a labour of love for her would be an understatement. She started at the age of five. Her mom, Rose, talks about how at a young age, she “spent all day on her hands”.

Lazarus currently trains four hours a day after school, six days a week. She makes one exception to this rigorous schedule – to attend school play rehearsals. Drama is her other love, and she had a leading role in this year’s school play.

Acting helps her to cope with performance anxiety. “Gymnastics can be nerve wracking, what with the judges judging you,” she says. “Drama helps with stage fright.”

She overcomes anxiety by not thinking of it as a competition but about having fun.

Her favourite practices are the vault – where she enjoys the power of sprinting and moving through the air – and the beam, which she describes as the “most scary and mentally challenging” of gymnastics. “But, after I got the back-handspring right [most things on the beam are connected to this], I wasn’t afraid anymore,” she says.

Lazarus says she does currently have some “growth-related challenges”, with fast growth causing pains in her wrists and ankles. “Sometimes I have to take it easy and focus on choreographic dance moves and avoid doing flips,” she says.

To prepare physically, she focuses on eating healthily, with lots of protein-rich foods before training.

She also shows an unusual amount of mental discipline and composure for a person her age. She visualises and focuses on her routines, going through them in her head over and over again all the way to Cape Town recently. By the time she performs, even if she can’t consciously remember the next step, having done the routine mentally and physically thousands of times, the moves come naturally to her.

This self-starter also streams videos of the best gymnasts in the world, learning their skills, do’s and don’ts.

Gymnastics is a technical discipline with a lot of formality and rules. For example, says Lazarus, you have 10 seconds to get off the beam after a performance or you get penalised. “Coaches can be really strict, telling us what to do and not to do every day,” she says. Though this ‘hypercritical’ element isn’t her favourite part of the sport, it helps to “love it and have fun”.

The thing she loves the most about it is “being in the air”, and it isn’t surprising therefore that this athletic teenager also climbs cliffs with her dad in the Magaliesberg when she has any spare time.

Though she says next year “may be her last year of competing” because she has so much else she wants to do – like school and social stuff – she admits that in just one week off gymnastics (she is on a break) she already misses it like crazy.

Ultimately, Lazarus believes she will always be involved in gymnastics, and would like to coach one day because “if you’ve been a gymnast, you’ll understand coaching”.

“My dad always says that the person who has the most fun wins. I live by this,” she says. It seems that doing what you love and loving what you do are certainly paying off for her.