Mía Mainardi, the Argentinian who entered gymnastics as a game at 4 and became world champion at 14

“It’s Today or Never”. Mia Mainardi immediately understood what Mariano Pocini, his coach, had come to tell him. He nodded his head firmly and did somersaults they gave him the gold medal in the Artistic Gymnastics Junior World Championships. “It’s Heavy Enough”tells clarion seven hours after his sporting feat from his hotel room in the Turkish city of Antalya. He still has his racing suit on and hundreds of unanswered WhatsApp messages on his cellphone.

His coach’s message from when he was 7 had a backstory. In the last training session before the vault final, Mainardi and Pochini they had decided not to risk a double pirouettethe jump which they believed could secure her gold after placing third in the standings.

The fear of an injury was well founded: the 14-year-old from Buenos Aires had never competed with that jump and doing it for the first time in a World Cup final was almost crazy.

As if it were a sign, the first gymnast to jump in the final, the Japanese Mika Mizunoshe did a double pirouette but was injured when she fell and was out.

“It was a tense moment, because, as you’ll later deal with, it’s like I feel something strange, even though something like this has never paralyzed me. When you take a leap like that, you have to feel safe to know that you can do it“, bases the athlete who represents the River.

Finally, one and a half pirouettes in the first jump, with legs and feet that seemed to be glued together, and a second jump with half a pirouette less but equally perfectly executed, gave him a total score of 13.383, by which he beat the l ‘Italian July Marano (13,266) and the French Ming van Eijken (13,000).

A podium that did not feature the first classified, the Americans Isabel Stassi – who had injured herself on the ground the day before, which allowed Argentina to face the final “more relaxed, so to speak” – and Jayla Hang, who made a mistake and was sixth.

“I just finished jumping, at that moment I didn’t imagine gold. I thought I won a medal, but not the gold one. And I still believe I don’t fall in love with winning a gold medal in a Junior World Cup. And the truth is, the emotion is huge. A lot of things went through my mind at that moment,” adds who on April 17 he will be 15 years old, although it is difficult for him to list which things. He assumes that “the happiness or the pride of having achieved something so important”.

There is also a lot of sacrifice in Mía’s career, as is the case with any Argentine gymnast. Before this historic performance in THE second edition of the FIG Junior World Cup, where he also played in the uneven bars final (he was sixth) after finishing twelfth in the all around and fifth as a member of the national artistic gymnastics team together with Isabella Ajalla (15) and Emilia Acosta (14), its history goes back a decade.

She was four years old when she accompanied her mother to look for her sister in River and a teacher realized that with these movements she could have a future in artistic gymnastics. “That Mia was very young and she didn’t do it seriously but she did it as a recreational sport,” she recalls now that she’s become a teenager and world youth champion. I never imagined I could be here“.

The results do not say the same thing about this 14-year-old teenager, although it is true that they have been given little by little. After a very good pass through children, in his youth his performance exploded and achieved gigantic results. Last year won three gold medals and one silver at the South American Youth Games in Rosariowhich undoubtedly gave him a huge impetus for this gigantic achievement in Turkey.

Although only she has the medal, she shares it with her coach Mariano, her coach Flor and her family. For this reason, among the many “beautiful messages” full of congratulations that have reached him since the Argentinean anthem sounded on the podium, you know that the most important are the ones that come from home.

“They say they are very proud, very happy, that they are moved. And I’m falling as I tell you. Jumping is the piece of equipment that I like the most and the feeling of accomplishing something I’ve been dreaming of for a long time is beautiful, “she confesses.

The joy also transfers to her colleagues on the Argentine team, because together they have put the national gymnastics team among the powers.

“Having reached fifth place is an enormous emotion, because it has never happened in a World Cup to reach the top five in the world with a team of three gymnasts”, he remarks in a sentence full of pauses because it is difficult to assimilate a historic goal for a country that is in the southernmost corner of the world and of gymnastics, and which in Turkey has left behind China, which has one million federated gymnasts.

After 16 weeks of trainingwith four-hour days and several six-hour days in double rounds, the World Cup event finished with the ultimate reward.

“How do you sleep? We arrived a couple of hours ago and I’m still the same. I’m always dressed in the same leotard,” laughs the junior world champion. And he says with the same conviction with which he saw his coach before making those two jumps that were worth a gold medal: “Let’s go to sleep excited”.

Word of Mariano Pochini, his coach

“I knew Mia could win the gold one. I always knew. I didn’t tell anyone because it would appear that I was crazy to say that an Argentine gymnast would win a gold medal at a World Cup. I never told anyone, but I was totally convinced.”

“In the competition planets aligned. she did a jump and the others made mistakes. The American was wrong. The Japanese made a mistake and got hurt. These are the circumstances of the sport and she did what she was supposed to do, which was to jump well. And he finished third from qualifying; Even there it was not a gift. She was totally a medal candidate. It is the result of years of work.“.

“Mía is a gymnast who has a very good temperament. As an athlete, she has a personality structure based on what a high-performance gymnast needs. She has great work capacity and does things a thousand times over.”

“She’s very methodical and a perfectionist, which are key qualities in gymnastics and help her get where she is, because this sport is about doing things as perfectly as possible. Sometimes she gets a little mean when things don’t work out for They come out perfect, but it’s a point we’re working on.”

“She’s courageous, she’s a great competitor and she handles stressful situations very well. And physically she’s a very strong gymnast, with a lot of physical power.”

“Now you must be very careful that your vision does not blur with the exhibition that is coming. And I must be able to accompany it well.”