From ecstasy to agony for Alice

If you needed a lesson on sport’s frequently cruel nature, you only needed to follow the fortunes of Alice Kinsella this weekend.

Less than 24 hours after helping England see off the challenge of Australia to claim team gold, the Park Wrekin gymnast yesterday saw personal ambitions extinguished in the most dramatic and heartbreaking of fashions.

Leading the all-around final at the halfway stage, Kinsella looked on course to make it a golden double only to take a tumble on the beam, the apparatus on which she is the reigning Commonwealth champion and a former European gold medallist.

It was shocking and unexpected but also a reminder there are few other sports where the margin between success and failure is so painfully thin. When the width of a balance beam is just four inches, anything can and does happen.

Kinsella never recovered from the fall and after another mistake on the floor left her out of the medals, a packed Utilita Arena watched her pain in near silence.

It had all been so different on Saturday. In a team final much closer than anyone expected, it was Kinsella’s confident performances on the floor and the vault which helped her England team-mates hold their nerve and see-off the Australians to the delight of the crowd.

As it transpired, she also played a part in helping England on to the podium on Sunday. Team-mate Ondine Achampong also fell off the beam, as a competition which looked set for a home one-two took a dramatic turn, before regaining her composure to put in a scintillating routine on the floor and claim silver behind Australia’s Georgia Godwin, Canada’s Emma Spence taking the bronze.

Achampong explained how a talk with Kinsella helped her reset.

“I don’t think I could have got through this without Alice. I wouldn’t have been able to do it on my own,” said Achampong.

“Having someone to talk to. After the beam had finished I made sure she was OK. We had a chat and made sure everything was OK and we could move on to the next piece. I could not ask for a better team-mate than Alice.

“What happened to Alice does take the shine off (my medal) a little bit. I would have loved to share it with her.”

The comfort for Kinsella is the fact her Games is far from over. Tomorrow she will participate in the floor and beam individual finals. Defending her crown in the latter would be quite the story. We are not yet at the point where this must be declared an unhappy ending, albeit she is facing a serious test of her character.

What made Kinsella’s stumble so perplexing was how her progress prior to it had been so serene.

She had recorded the highest individual mark in the team competition, which doubled as qualification for the all-around. But with no scores carried over, everyone was starting afresh.

Both Kinsella and Achampong began on the vault and though it was the latter who recorded the best mark, just as the previous night, the margin between them was just five-hundredths of a point.

Scotland’s Shannon Archer, who also attempted the most difficult vault, was a little further back in third with Godwin, the next best qualifier behind the England duo, in fourth. One of several differences between women’s gymnastics and the men’s is the use of music, the kind you might expect to find in the lifts at a provincial shopping centre. There is undoubtedly a jarring juxtaposition between that and the tension as athletes spin and fly through the air, aware a millimetre’s misjudgment could lead to disaster.

Nowhere more so is it felt than on the uneven bars, yet Kinsella seemed oblivious to any outside noise on her way to recording an excellent score of 13.700 which moved her ahead of Achampong and into the lead by four-tenths of a point at the halfway stage.

The assuredness of the performance made what happened on the beam feel almost unfathomable. Going through her acrobatic series, Kinsella missed her mark and her bearings and fell off, most of the crowd unable to gasp, such was the disbelief. Despite taking a deep breath before remounting, she never seemed to completely regain her composure, the routine containing a number of nervy wobbles and the score of 11.000 leaving her sitting in fourth and a whole point outside the medals heading to the floor.

When Achampong also fell off the beam, it allowed Godwin and Spence to take advantage and moved into the top two positions.

Both consolidated their medals with strong performances on the floor, before Achampong shot back up into second with a superb routine. In truth, that only made things tougher for Kinsella, the last to go and needing something extraordinary to salvage a medal.

It was not to be. Another fall, early in the routine, ended her chances once and for all and she left the floor in tears, her pain horribly public as a packed arena watched as she buried her head in her hands. Truly, this was a weekend of contrasts.