Canadians looking for world junior redemption, Gold medallist MacLennan keeps pushing herself,
Canadian trampoline champ Rosie MacLennan isn’t done after Olympic double,
During the Rio Olympics, the spotlight shone brightly on Canada’s summer athletes who, on the whole, performed better than ever. This is the third in a series on six athletes, their experiences in Rio and what life has been like for them since then:
To know that sport is about more than the hardware that comes with winning is to look no further than Rosie MacLennan.
She won a second Olympic gold medal in Rio, which no one else in the world has done since trampoline was included in the 2000 Summer Games. The 28-year-old from King City, Ont., also became Canada’s first summer athlete to win two individual gold medals. So, now what? Not retirement it seems. “There are routines and skills that I haven’t done yet and I’d really like to compete. I’m still loving my sport and loving my training,” MacLennan said.
“I don’t know how long I’ll go for, but I’ll definitely jump for the next season,” she said, before adding “barring any unforeseen things.”
There have been a few of those for her already.
Bouncing 18 feet in the air is a risky endeavour and, less than a month before she was to compete before a hometown crowd at the 2015 Toronto Pan Am Games, MacLennan overrotated a jump in training. She landed awkwardly on the side of the trampoline and suffered a concussion.
Dizziness and problems with spatial awareness aren’t things that can easily be overcome in a sport that involves incredible G-forces and split-second timing. But MacLennan was cleared to compete days before her Pan Am event and, with a dialedback routine that didn’t include her most difficult triple flips, she still won gold.
Then, a month later, she suffered another concussion in a fluke accident when someone banged her head with a car door and that one, coming so close to the last one, took far longer to recover from.
She was well into 2016, her Olympic year, before she felt her normal self.
“At the (Rio) Games I felt perfectly healthy,” said MacLennan, who debuted in the Olympics eight years earlier in Beijing. “It was probably the first Olympics that I went into not having to tape or take Advil, so in terms of that I felt really good and really strong.
“I just didn’t have the same amount of time to prepare.”
In Rio, because of the scoring system, an easier routine executed well was always going to score better than a routine of higher difficulty with some wobbles. So she dialed back her difficulty just as she did at the Pan Ams and it paid off with Olympic gold.
But that means she now finds herself with two Olympic gold medals and some unfinished business — perfecting her routine of three triples, the hardest performed in the elite women’s field, and pushing the boundaries with yet more difficult tricks.
That’s why the post-Rio landscape has looked a lot like her London followup.
“It’s the same as the first one,” she said, explaining what happens when you come back to Canada with Olympic gold.
“You get a lot of opportunities and invitations to a lot of events, but I’m still getting back into training and school.”
MacLennan is hoping to finish her master’s degree at the University of Toronto, where she is writing her thesis on athletes’ engagement in social issues, before summer. And, after a bit of a break right after the Olympics, she is back training with her eye on the 2017 world championships.
The Canadian public took notice after MacLennan won gold at the London Games — and again in Rio, of course — but she shook the trampoline world four years earlier in Beijing when, as an Olympic rookie, she tossed off a combination of moves that no woman had ever done in competition.
And she still wants to push her sport and show the world just how many flips and twists can be done in a 10-bounce routine.
“I don’t ever want to be a stagnant athlete.”
“There are routines and skills that I haven’t done yet . . . I’m still loving my sport and loving my training.” ROSIE MACLENNAN ON HER TRAMPOLINE FUTURE