In the early hours of the morning, while girls her age are rugged up in bed dreaming of distant careers and fleeting ambitions; Saskia Broedelet’s calloused feet are pounding the hard, blue rubber of a gymnastics mat in Brisbane’s southern suburbs.
The rhythmic gymnast spends up to seven hours a day on the punitive surface, her own hopes and dreams balancing on the precise angle of her toes, the craning of her neck or the flick of a ribbon.
The number-one ranked junior in Australia, Saskia demands near-perfection from her bruised joints and curved spine, and regularly achieves it. But in a few months, the 15-year-old will be plunged into the fiercely competitive world of senior gymnastics.
A world where the fight for threadbare funding and limited competition places turns friends into enemies, coaches into obstacles and the human body itself into a burdensome means to an end.
It’s a fight that none of her friends at school can comprehend. But Saskia can’t wait.
“Last year, just before I was supposed to trial for the World Championships, I dislocated my knee,” she says.
Saskia’s voice is bright…
