A local teenage athlete will soon head to the Netherlands for a gymnastics performance.
Sienna Osborn, 13, will leave for Amsterdam on July 27 with a 17-person team to showcase a performance while representing Canada in the World Gymaestrada Amsterdam 2023.
“I feel super ready and I'm super excited,” said Osborn.
The World Gymaestrada event happens every four years and will draw nearly 19,000 gymnasts from 60 countries from July 30 to Aug. 5. It is a non-competitive event, meaning the goal is to help the performers have fun and do their best.
“All participants practice to perform their routines at the World Gymnaestrada, but that’s not the only goal. It is more about the whole experience, the festivities and a feeling of belonging,” the website reads.
Osborn’s team consists of athletes and gymnasts throughout the Sea to Sky Corridor, but she is the only Squamish member, according to her family.
Osborn said the team started practicing their performance in October 2022, mostly on the weekends. Now that the event is less than two weeks away, she said they’ve been rehearsing almost every day for nearly eight hours.
Osborn said she’s looking forward to performing it in front of a “huge crowd,” as she recently enjoyed performing it for a local group.
“We performed it once in front of a bunch of people,” she said. “And it felt really good.”
Liz Marleau, Osborn’s mother, called it the experience of a lifetime for her daughter and the team to travel and perform.
“It requires an enormous amount of focus and I do admire that in my daughter that she really has that focus and the drive,” Marleau said.
“If she could, she’d just sleep at the gym,” she joked.
Marleau said that she and a few other family members will join Osborn in Amsterdam to watch her perform.
The event website says it is one of the largest gymnastics events worldwide and because it happens only once every four years, it has an Olympic-like atmosphere. Furthermore, the site says participation is for everybody, regardless of “gender, age, race, religion, culture, ability or social standing.”
For more information about the event, visit worldgymnaestrada2023.com.
