Sometimes you have to take a step back to move forward.
Haley de Jong’s step back broke her foot. But the time she spent away from gymnastics as she recovered allowed her to vault forward into her first senior competition with new strength and renewed passion for her sport. She swept all the events in her first meet back competing as a senior, at the Salamunov Memorial in Maribor, Slovenia, last November.
It was, de Jong said, “probably one of the best competitions I’ve had.”
A month later she earned a fourth place for her floor routine at the Toyota Cup in Japan where she was up against national champions like Mélanie de Jesus Dos Santos of France, and the 2016 Olympic champion in balance beam, Sanne Wevers of the Netherlands. Earlier this month she finished fourth in the all-around, third in the vault and second on the bars at the Elite Canada 2018 meet in Quebec City. And de Jong is hoping those results will leap her into a spot on Canada’s team for the Commonwealth Games in Australia or the Pacific Rim championships in Columbia, later this year. Those placements will be determined at a verification meet March 6-10 in Montreal.
If that goes well, de Jong hopes to compete for Canada at the world artistic gymnastics championships in Doha, Qatar, in October.
For four months de Jong was in constant pain but didn’t know why.
She was practicing a tumbling run during her floor routine at her home club, Flicka Gymnastics in North Vancouver, when she landed with one foot on top of her other foot. She was felled immediately.
de Jong couldn’t walk but doctors couldn’t find anything wrong. They put her injured foot into a protective boot, but the pain persisted.
It was only when de Jong was able to get an MRI, she was diagnosed with a fracture.
Her foot went back into a boot and de Jong was out of the gym for four months.
But the 17-year-old Grade 11 student at Riverside secondary school wasn’t idle.
She used the break to hit the books because studying isn’t easy when you’re at the gym five hours a day, five days a week, then traveling to competitions on weekends. She worked with weights to improve her upper body strength. She attended meets to cheer on her teammates.
“I tried to keep my routine as normal as possible,” de Jong said.
But mostly the former recipient of a Port Coquitlam sports award for junior athlete of the year in 2017 yearned for her chance to compete at the senior level for the first time.
When it came in Slovenia, de Jong said all the time and effort she’d put in to maintain her conditioning and zeal for the sport while she was injured paid off.
“The whole atmosphere was different,” de Jong said of the experience. “Everyone was super professional. It showed me the preparation you need for bigger meets.”
She also gained a new respect for her passion.
“I want to be smart about my gymnastics,” de Jong said. “Every day in the gym is different, and I have to be thankful I can still do gymnastics.”
