By Lerraine Neo (26A01A) and Teo Hui Sian (25S06C)

A handful of chalk. A tensing of her shoulders. A deep exhale. Hannah Quah (25S06P), RI’s sole representative for this year’s Artistic Gymnastics NSG, sets off with a sprint to begin her vault attempt. To her left, a gymnast mounts the balance beam. Further down, another begins her floor routine to the start of her music. 

A snippet from Hannah’s vault during the Artistic Gymnastics NSG.

In Bishan Sports Hall, the four events in Women’s Artistic Gymnastics simultaneously unfold in one open area. Spectators—a handful of gymnasts, parents and coaches—sit quietly in the stands above, their applause scattered but routine. 

Yet, the noise feels almost irrelevant, distant, and the air strangely empty. After all, the crowd is strikingly sparse. With so few people and such a vast, open space, the soft cheers and polite applause become a muted, distant murmur that doesn’t quite reach the athletes below. 

There aren’t many people here who are concerned with Hannah’s performance. Her rivals do not watch her, her teammates are busy with their own warmups, and the school has sent no support for their lone gymnast. It seems the only eyes on her are her coach’s and the judges’. 

Still, none of this is unfamiliar. This is simply how artistic gymnastics competitions are. And at Hannah’s level of gymnastics, she’s walked through it countless times—learning long ago that in this sport, while it may seem lonely, you compete not for the cheers but for something quieter, harder to name.

At the Top of Her Game

For those who haven’t lived it, the life of a student-athlete is likely a story only heard, not a reality truly known. It’s a life measured in routines, sacrifices, and quiet, endless repetition.

As a member of the Womens’ Artistic Gymnastics National Senior Team, Hannah competes at a level that only a handful of student-athletes will reach. Achieving this requires one thing above all: time.

“To reach high levels, you usually have to start younger,” she explains, having started artistic gymnastics at the age of 7. Since then, training has been relentless. Currently, Hannah trains five times a week, four and a half hours each time. This schedule doesn’t fluctuate – it’s not one limited to competition seasons, but one that she’s maintained for months, and one that has had to coexist with JC life. 

“You just get used to it, to the routine of trying to finish schoolwork as fast as possible,” Hannah says.

And when school ends and she steps into the gymnasium, it becomes an exhausting test of her physical and mental endurance. During her routines, she shifts into ‘autopilot’—a state where muscle memory and mental cues kick in to help her execute them to perfection. 

“My head’s empty [during a routine],” she says. “Except for some keywords that I use as mental cues. […] It helps your skills be more consistent, and you don’t have to always think about what comes next.”

At the top of her game, there’s almost no end at all—only the unabating pursuit of excellence. For Hannah, this has been life for more than a decade. 

And when you’ve stayed in this sport this long, another reality sets in—the higher you climb, the fewer gymnasts there are alongside you.  

Does it Get Lonely at the Top?

At eighteen, Hannah is far from old. Yet she’s among the oldest members at her gym, one of only two eighteen year-olds who still train there. Artistic gymnastics may be a sport where one joins young, but it’s also a sport where most leave young. 

Gymnasts leave for two reasons: commitment and burnout. 

“I think [leaving gymnastics] is a combination of wanting to have a vibrant school life and doing gym, because it’s really difficult to do both at the same time,” Hannah explains. 

Competitive gymnastics is quite the time-vacuum, and can easily become a burden once the enjoyment dries up. Commitments like the academic workload and other opportunities constantly compete with it for time. The cumulative stress of injuries, pressure of competing and the exertion of being a high-level athlete for years on end catches up with everyone eventually. 

Hannah herself admits that she doesn’t find as much joy in gymnastics as she did when she was a child. “As the levels progress, the skills get harder and more dangerous, so you can’t afford to just be having fun at training all the time,” she comments, “at lower levels, training was definitely more fun and games.”

Watching her friends quit the sport may be disheartening, but Hannah understands their motivations. At the end of the day, gymnastics is a strikingly individual sport. 

After all, a gymnast is inherently alone when competing. Her coach is limited to the sidelines, her training mates suddenly her rivals. During their routines, it’s every gymnast for herself.

”When you are about to compete, even if your teammate is [competing] before you, you won’t look at them,” a gymnast from Hannah’s club says. 

And unlike other NSGs where student supporters fill the stands, the gymnasium bleachers were conspicuously empty. With the exception of one or two schools, no students had been deployed for match support. Handfuls of spectators loitered around—mostly relatives, friends or fellow gymnasts. 

For Hannah, the lack of attendance doesn’t bother her. 

“Normally, there aren’t that many people watching, even at club competitions. It’ll just be younger gymnasts, or family and friends,” she says. “If we suddenly have the whole school coming [down to support], it would be a big change in atmosphere.” 

Gymnastics, as it may appear, is a sport steeped in loneliness. Gymnasts, it seems, are used to watching their friends quit, to competing alone, to silence instead of cheers or victories celebrated quietly, defeats borne in solitude. 

Though the lowest of the lows, as the gymnasts tell us, are the injuries.

“It’s quite sad to be out for two, three weeks,” a gymnast tells us. “You watch other people doing skills while you physically cannot. Even though you want to.”

Hannah’s had her fair share of injuries, but by far the worst is a back injury from when she was fourteen. The injury, which stemmed largely from overuse, plagued her with constant aches. Simple actions like sitting down were suddenly painful. 

But worse than the pain was the waiting. Recovery took extremely long, and even when Hannah could start training again there were many skills she couldn’t attempt. Most gymnastics skills involve some use of the back, and she struggled with allowing herself to recover when she wanted to push ahead. 

“Sometimes I didn’t know what to do,” she admits. “It really wasn’t getting better for a few months.” Perhaps the loneliness becomes even sharper during recovery—the struggle to heal seems to be something one truly has to face alone.

Despite everything, Hannah remains committed to gymnastics. One of the biggest reasons she has stayed in the sport, curiously, is the unwavering and supportive community around her. 

No One Reaches the Top Alone

Here’s the thing—while artistic gymnasts may take the floor on their own, they don’t get there alone. 

In fact, Hannah is joined by Samantha—the other 18-year-old gymnast from her gym, a friend she’s known for nine years, and today, a fellow competitor in the A Division. 

Though their closeness in age often puts them in direct competition, there’s something stronger that binds them—years of shared blood, sweat and tears. “We’re supportive of each other,” Samantha tells us. “When the coaches are being a bit harsh on some people, we know how that feels and we comfort each other.” 

While the nature of the sport may demand a fierce sense of individuality to succeed, it never gets in the way of the friendships these gymnasts have built. “When you train in a team, you get to know each other better,” Hannah says. “And you can really support each other without feeling too much rivalry between yourselves.”

The pair recount memories made not just in the gym, but because of it – sleepovers on the gym floor and watching live screenings of the Olympics together. 

It’s a lifetime of support and shared history that leads up to that brief, solitary moment during competitions, where everything is back on the individual. Yet, once their routines are over, they immediately shift back into cheering for each other, for the team that has walked this long, difficult road alongside them.

“If you’re finished with your comps and you’re watching other people compete, you definitely focus more on the team,” Hannah says.

And this support never truly fades—especially in the tense moments before a routine, when the mind can so easily spiral. During competitions, “having teammates or people you know and can talk to definitely helps,” Hannah says. “Especially when you’re waiting—it’s easy to get into your own head, like oh, what if I fall or get injured. Having people there helps you relax a bit, so you can perform better.”

Over time, a quiet kind of camaraderie forms—the bond of shared experiences that few others outside the sport will ever truly understand.

And though spectators are few, among them are often younger gymnasts who come to support their seniors. There were several today who weren’t competing, but here to cheer on their schoolmates and club-mates. 

“[Hannah and I] trained in the same group in the past,” one of them tells us. “Not anymore, though.” They aren’t close, is what she means. And yet, she ran over before the event started, worried she’d miss Hannah’s vault attempt.

Here’s the thing: at some point, artistic gymnastics stopped being just a hobby. For athletes like Hannah, it became a way of life. You train five times a week not because it’s easy, but because in this sport, mastery comes from repetition—repeating the same routines until it’s as easy as breathing, until every movement is stitched so deeply into muscle memory that it becomes second nature and you can trust your body to take over.

But getting to that point—and staying there—is difficult. For some, it’s the medals, the rankings, the trophies that keep them going. But for Hannah, and many others like her, it’s the people – the teammates, the club-mates, the friends who understand every triumph and setback without a word needing to be said.

As Samantha puts it simply, “I stayed in the sport mostly because of the community. If I had terrible friends who didn’t support me, I wouldn’t stay—even if I liked the sport.”

A sport of balance

Gymnastics is a sport of balance. The athlete must find a balance between difficulty and execution, technique and artistry, rivalry and camaraderie. And perhaps toughest of all, the balance between gymnastics and the rest of their lives. 

“I can’t really envision myself fully leaving the sport. I’ve already started doing judging and coaching, and plan to continue even after I quit as a way to give back to the sport.” 

For Hannah, balance could mean stepping back from competing, but never from the community. And as we watch her leave the gym, smiling and laughing with her club-mates, it’s clear why.