The return of rhythmic gymnastics: between health protocol and adrenaline

There was a lot of desire and a lack of precision. But the important thing was to turn on the pedana again, no matter if the ball flew to an unwanted place or if the scale indicated grams more. Time will refine the details and they know it. That is why they tried to use it to their advantage in the three months that they could not train at the club due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Sofía Bergliaffa, Celeste D'Arcangelo, Ana Laura Acosta, Camila Arce Rodríguez, Lara Aimeri Vicentin, Macarena Rodríguez, Agostina Vargas Re, Lucía Arrascaeta and Pilar Cattaneo topped the country and were the first Argentine rhythmic gymnasts to return to training.

The nine are representatives of the Municipality club and the Argentine senior team or members of the Dakar project (with a view to the next Youth Olympic Games) and are already going through their second week of work under a strict sanitary protocol.

To the usual sanitization of footwear, temperature taking and disinfection of clothes with alcohol when entering the club, the girls add measures specific to their discipline: each one has her personal hygiene set, her work chair and her identified space to leave your belongings. In the pedana there is a delimited place for each one. To warm up, each gymnast brings their own blanket and every 40 minutes they disinfect the mat.

Vanina Lorefice is the coach and Sandra Re is the discipline coordinator at the club. Both are pleasantly surprised by the way the girls have resumed their jobs.

She had the difficult task of “looking for resources, alternatives and ways to keep them motivated for three months”. Although she confesses: “I had no problems. It's a brilliant group."

With eight gymnasts, the Cordovan club is the one that contributes the most representatives to the national team. Celeste D'Arcangelo is one of them and, at 16 years old, she is a benchmark.

“The day we came back I left home an hour early. I had a lot of anxiety. He wanted to do everything he couldn't. I had a lot of adrenaline. It didn't matter if it didn't come out; I wanted to come back”, the Pan-American representative in Lima 2019 confesses, and puts her hand to her chest to show her emotion, who found in “the possibility of doing new things” a small daily motivation to work at home for three months.

Luckily, “the tedium and stress of the first days of doing things well” is now behind us. "Now each one has the protocol routinized and we get along super well," Vanina points out.

For now, the girls work every other day, next week they will add a new day and the next they will reach five days of training.

“The idea is to progressively add the days and hours. More than anything for a matter of injuries and charges. They come excited, they want to do everything and it's a problem”, acknowledges the trainer, and says that “next week they will start with the routines with music”.

Little by little the girls resume their rhythm. The nutritional aspect is accommodated and the ball falls where it has to fall. For now, they enjoy being back at the club and boast of being "the first in the country to return to training."