Albion Park's Acromazing leap from tin shed to world stage to represent nation in acrobatic gymnastics

Three teams from Albion Park’s Acromazing will leave the constraints of their little tin cow shed this month to fly to Portugal to represent Australia on the prestigious 2024 Acrobatic Gymnastics World Championships stage.

Two junior teams will leave on Friday (6 September) to compete in the Junior World Age Games, and a senior team the week after for the Acrobatic World Championships.

Coming to the nation’s attention in 2022 when they won the TV variety show Australia’s Got Talent, head coach Kim Lacey said its “little tin shed” hadn’t held them back from achieving success nationally and internationally – or securing three of the group spots in the national team.

Kim said the groups, which were made up of duos or trios, would compete in their age category – sub-junior 12-18 years, junior 13-19 years and senior 15-plus.

She said the biennial World Championships allowed Australia two teams in each age category, which were selected through national qualifying competitions over the two-year period and then a selection trial, which was held in November.

“We’ve actually got one group in each category, which is great,” she said.

Kim said she attributed that to enthusiastic coaches, many of whom had represented Australia, a strong support group, and kids who “train really hard and have a belief in themselves”.

“We really do work out of an old shed,” she said.

“Our kids compete on a 12 by 12-metre floor, but we don’t actually have that in our gym – we have half a floor – so the kids have to pause their music and run back [to resume the routine].

“They don’t use that as an excuse, and they don’t ever say it’s not fair.

“Frankly, we’re competing against groups that have state-of-the-art gyms.”

As she sews Australian badges onto leotards, Kim explains how acrobatic gymnastics doesn’t use bars or beams, but rather is more in the style of Cirque du Soleil, with a balance routine, throws routine including double and triple somersaults, and a routine that combines both.

Kim said the World Championships were originally scheduled to be held in Israel in March, but conflict in Israel saw the competition postponed for six months and moved to Portugal.

She said the delay in the competition came with challenges.

“When you’re working in pairs and trios, and you have what we call a top, who is generally the littler person who gets to do all the balance and all the throws, six months can be quite a long time,” she said.

“When you’re dealing with our tops, who are 12, 13 and 16, they’re growing a lot in that six months.

“It’s been a very long six months, trying to adapt because as soon as they grow, all our timing is out.”

She said the only advantage had been rehabilitation time for one of the bases in the senior trio who dislocated her elbow in a training accident late last year.

“Every single training session we do, we walk out the door and say ‘thank heaven’ because it is such a risky sport that injuries can happen at any time,” she said.

After the senior trio came fourth in their balance routine and sixth overall at the World Championships in Azerbaijan in 2022, Kim is hoping to make the finals again this time around. And she’s confident about the gymnasts, aged from 12 to 24 years, who have been spending 20 hours per week training.

In fact, she’s seen the club achieve much success since she started it in 1983, firstly as a women’s gymnastics club doing artistic gymnastics, which included 14-year-old Kristy Leigh-Brown going to the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.

It then transitioned into focusing on acrobatic gymnastics, which has allowed gymnasts to stay longer in the sport.

“We’ve actually got a 32-year-old who did it years ago and decided she wanted to come back and have another go and made nationals this year,” she said.

Acromazing first competed at the World Championships in 2004 in Paris and has since seen 29 kids compete in the Worlds in 14 groups, with this year being their eighth World Championships.

“In 2022, we’d just come off COVID, and the kids had missed out on Worlds, so we thought we would do Australia’s Got Talent to buck them up a little bit,” she said.

“It was very different to what the kids normally do, but acrobatics is a very big performance sport, so it wasn’t a big stretch to be able to do that.”

They won the competition, taking the $100,000 prize money, which they hope to use for better facilities, but it’s challenging as the pavilion is heritage-listed.

She said she now hoped to see acrobatic gymnastics as part of the Olympics.

Learn more about Acromazing and follow their progress.