BAt the World Championships in London in 2009, a 16-year-old gymnast named Elisabeth Seitz started and placed 35th on parallel bars. This Saturday, the German record champion, three-time Olympic finalist and current European parallel bars champion will start in the World Cup final in Liverpool. Even if things go badly, Elisabeth Seitz will still be among the top eight gymnasts in the world in 2022. You no longer have to prove to anyone that you can do gymnastics, says Seitz. She doesn’t want to “stress” herself anymore, since the European Championship gold in Munich it has been clear that the year 2022 went well in terms of gymnastics. “Whatever comes next, comes on top.”
Elisabeth Seitz, the self-declared “competition sow”, has surprised herself and the observers several times over the past decade when she suddenly got back on the mat after an injury and it looked as if she had come out of an ideal preparation phase. This time, however, it was particularly tight, because in the already short time between the European and World Cups, Seitz fell ill with the corona virus. This time she thought to herself: “It won’t work anymore, even I can’t do it.” She had to cancel the first internal elimination, at the second she showed a less difficult variant of her exercise. In Liverpool, after qualifying successfully, she revealed: “That was a fifty-fifty chance” – since the European Championships she had succeeded in the exercise – the third most difficult of the entire field – exactly once in training. “I know I can count on my head and my experience, but in the end the body has to do the same, and it has taken a lot in the last few weeks.”
At 20 a “gymnastics grandma”
Back then, in 2009, she had no experience, the interaction of head and body was different. After that everything happened quickly: the first World Championship final on parallel bars in 2011, the first Olympic final in 2012, she was sixth. Soon after, Seitz, she says, was suggested by her coach at the time that she had reached the peak of her career. She was only of legal age then.
Good team: Elisabeth Seitz and head coach Gerben Wiersma after the exercise on the uneven bars
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Image: dpa
At that time, it was thought in gymnastics that the best in the world were mostly 16 years young – the international minimum age that still applies today – and a twenty-year-old was referred to as a “gymnastics grandma”. Seitz changed clubs, continued to do gymnastics, got better and won bronze at the 2018 World Cup when he was 24. In Liverpool she is now passing on her experience to the next generation. She is convinced that it is “extremely important to think for yourself”. That starts with the little things. An example from the training: “They say everyone now has ten minutes to do strength. And I notice that the look goes to the coaches: Oh God, what should I do now? Then I try to make them understand that it’s the little things that they have to start thinking about for themselves. Why do we have ten minutes now? Why am I standing in this hall? Why do I do this? What is the goal?”
Elisabeth Seitz has found answers to all these questions over the years: “I do it for myself because I enjoy it and because I would like to achieve something.” he had some new ideas. “I’m now in the mood for a training phase where I can try something again,” says Seitz in Liverpool. Her long-term goal is the Olympic Games in 2024.
