For the past 12 years, Georgia-Rose Brown has balanced on the brink of making an Olympic Games – but always landed gracefully on the wrong side.
Reaching the Olympics is a dream the gymnast has harboured since she was a six-year-old; a dream that would dwindle every four years, yet one she could never relinquish.
Now 29, Brown is on the verge of selection for this year’s Olympic Games in Paris – but this time it’s different. If all goes well, she’ll wear the black and silver leotard of New Zealand, not the green and gold in which she’s competed on the world stage in the past.
Queensland-born, Brown represented Australia in gymnastics for 13 years – renowned at the top echelon of the sport for her beautiful body lines, smooth swing and ballet-like movement. She’s also one of the tallest gymnasts in the world.
But in January this year, the three-time Commonwealth Games medallist switched her nationality to New Zealand, thanks to her Kiwi mum.
Since then, she’s competed for her new country at three World Cup events around the globe and achieved what she set out to do – winning New Zealand a place at the Paris Olympics, by topping the World Cup rankings in the uneven bars.
Now her fate lies in the hands of the New Zealand Olympic Committee as to whether she’s handed a ticket to Paris.
“I’m still in disbelief,” Brown says from her home in Melbourne, on a day off from training and between lectures towards her Master’s degree in physiotherapy.
“I’ve come so close to the Olympics quite a few times. If I finally make it, 12 years after the first one [London 2012] where I was the first reserve to now self-qualifying, it would be amazing.”
It would mean so much to the village who’ve supported her through four Olympics cycles, but also to herself for “not giving up”.
“There are plenty of times where I go, ‘I can’t have it. I’m over it. I want to give up’. But there’s a part of me that wants to keep going. Why? To actually make it,” she says.
And Brown quickly stresses how much it means to her to represent her “proud Kiwi mum” and wear the silver fern. Which turns out to be an honour she’s yet to experience.
“Unfortunately, they didn’t the silver fern leotards ready for me to wear at the World Cups,” Brown says. “But I can tell you wearing black and silver already feels like it was meant to be.”
A height advantage
Brown’s recent landing on the New Zealand gymnastics scene is expected to have a positive reverberation throughout the sport.
Former Olympic gymnast David Phillips, now head of gymnastics at Gymnastics New Zealand, says Brown is a great role model for the sport here.
“What’s really quite remarkable is her longevity in the sport, and her dogged determination to chase after the Olympic dream,” says Phillips, who was 23 when he competed at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
“She’s an example of how important the Olympic Games are for athletes who thrive on a challenge. The fact she’s continued at the highest level and is now nearly 30 is really quite unique.
“For gymnastics generally, it’s really wonderful to have athletes like Georgia still competing at the highest level because it changes the tone of the conversation quite dramatically. From little girls in leotards who really don’t have a voice to an adult who’s choosing her path and carving out new ways to train around real life, it’s a really different conversation.”
Brown is embracing her age, too. At the 2018 Commonwealth Games, in her home of the Gold Coast, she was 23, and considered in the older tier of gymnasts.
“Only recently have we got more older athletes in the sport and I love to see it. It’s part of why I’m like, ‘If I can keep going, I will’,” she says. “I like that it’s now becoming a women’s sport, not just a child’s sport.”
At the Tokyo Olympics three years ago, the average age of female gymnastics medallists was 20.6 – the highest since 1968. Through the 1980s and 90s, most of the gymnasts were under 19.
Simone Biles, the most decorated US gymnast in history, will be 26 as she attempts to compete in her third Olympics. But no one will come near Uzbekistan veteran Oksana Chusovitina, who was 46 at her eighth Olympics in Tokyo.
Brown would be one of the tallest gymnasts in Paris, too – at 1.75m (5ft 9in). Height is a trait she’s inherited from both parents, which helps her on some apparatus – particularly her strongest, the uneven bars.
“I think I use my length and my lines to my advantage,” she says. “And in my leaps, and my turns and my presence.”
But as she’s grown, her height has had its drawbacks on the bars too – hitting her head on a bar, or her feet on the floor during routines.
“I had a particularly big growth spurt around the end of 2008 which threw everything out. I was doing the skills I’d been doing fine, then somehow I hit my head on the low bar – my timing was all out, and I struggled with that,” she says.
“I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to get it back. It happened again throughout my career. It got to the point where I actually needed the bars raised 10cm because I was hitting the ground.” The low bar is only 1.7m high.
“In the beginning, it annoyed me a little because special people had to come in and do it, and it would take time away from the team to do their warm-ups. Even now, whenever I go to a competition, I have to hang on the bar and show the officials that I hit the ground to get approval to lift them.”
She’s grateful for her patient coaches, and others who thank her for showing their tall young gymnasts that it’s possible to swing through the bars with long limbs.
‘I owe a lot to this team’
From a family of six siblings, Brown was introduced to gymnastics at six through her eldest brother, Carlin. He was also a talented gymnast, before moving to Auckland to study to become a chiropractor.
“I was always quite flexible – I could always do the splits before I even went to gymnastics,” she says. She also played basketball, touch and did dance before gymnastics took priority at 10.
Her talent was recognised early, and at 14, she left the Gold Coast for Melbourne to train at the Victorian Women’s High Performance Centre. She competed at her first world championships in 2011, and then won team silver at the 2014 Commonwealth Games.
Not content with her performance in Glasgow, she focused on the next Games on the Gold Coast in 2018, moving home to train for two years. She was “over the moon” with her results there – a team bronze, fourth in the individual all-around, fourth on the bars and an unexpected silver on the beam.
She thought about retiring and focusing fully on her physiotherapy studies, but the lure of the Olympics was still strong. She returned to Melbourne during the Covid pandemic, started her Master’s degree, and has successfully managed to juggle her studies and her sport.
When a new quota system for gymnastics was introduced for Paris, allowing athletes to qualify in individual apparatus through the FIG World Cup series, Brown thought about changing her nationality to New Zealand and zeroing in on her strength – the uneven bars.
“I’m not going to lie. I’m at the late end of my career, and I’ve been wanting to go to the Olympics since I started the sport. It’s been a massive goal for me,” she says.
“I’ve had the opportunity to represent my dad’s side, so now I’d like to represent my mum’s side too.”
After Gymnastics NZ welcomed her in, and the International Olympic Committee endorsed the change, Brown started competing with her new Kiwi team-mates.
“They were so welcoming to me from the start,” she says. “The World Cups have always been the highlight of my career, but in particular, with these last ones competing for New Zealand, I’ve had the best time.
“I feel I’ve competed at my best – in terms of nerves and confidence. And like I owe a lot to this team.”
Brown made her debut in February, finishing fourth on the bars at the Cairo World Cup, and was fifth at the next World Cup in Germany. By making the final at the Doha she coasted through to Olympic qualification grabbing the first of two spots on offer in uneven bars, the most competitive apparatus. (She will also compete on the floor, beam and vault in the initial women’s qualification round if she gets to Paris).
Her nomination is now with the NZOC, who consider whether a gymnast is capable of achieving a top 16 placing at the Games.
“She’s put herself in the best possible position to gain selection, winning the Olympic quota and performing at the level she is. She’s definitely a strong nomination,” Phillips says. “So hopefully we get the green light.”
There’s still one quota spot available to another New Zealand women’s artistic gymnast through the Oceania Continental championship qualifier. Australia has already qualified a team for Paris, so they won’t contest that spot.
Three of Brown’s new team-mates – Isabella Brett, Reece Cobb and Madeleine Marshall – will be in the running at the Oceania championships in Auckland at the end of this month. Again, the athlete will have to be considered a top 16 finisher in Paris to get the NZOC nod.
The best-case scenario for Brown would be to have two Kiwi gymnasts heading to the Olympics: “I don’t want to do this alone. I want to do it with a team member.”
She continues to train in Melbourne under a “village” of coaches – Mark Carlton in Melbourne, Mikhail Barabach in Queensland and Darren Webster in Singapore. Then there are New Zealand coaches Rian Reza, Sarah Kelly and Ebony Metenga, “who took me under their wing right from the get-go”.
Brown also trains alongside Australia’s “beam queen” Emma Nedov – who not only coach and support each other, but are business partners , running sports bag enterprise, Artium Sport.
With the Olympics on the near horizon, Brown isn’t thinking about retiring yet. “Everyone comes to me and says, ‘So this is going to be it’, but I’m not saying anything,” she laughs.
“I love the uniqueness of gymnastics – not many people can do it. I think that’s what also makes it the most-watched sport at the Olympics. A lot of people can pick up a racket and learn to hit a ball. But not everyone can learn to do a backflip or swing around a bar.
“I think that’s part of why I keep coming back to it, to keep trying to do new things.”
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