Baines has Irn will to compete for Scots
Serious injury could not break young gymnast’s Games spirit
THAT Frank Baines has been selected to compete for Team Scotland at this summer’s Commonwealth Games is a remarkable achievement in itself. The fact he is able to take part in his sport at all is bordering on the miraculous.
In August, the 18-year-old gymnast was going through a routine on the high bar and came to the dismount. He did not land on his feet.
‘I got lost in the air and I thought the best thing to do in this situation is to tuck up and try to protect everything,’ he recalls. ‘Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work out.
‘Maybe if I’d stayed straight I would have landed on my back, but the extra rotation meant I landed on my head. I broke four vertebrae in my back.
‘I just remember thinking: “This really hurts”. ‘ My fear when I landed was that I wouldn’t be able to walk. The first thing I did, and it’s not advisable in that situation, was to move straight away and make sure I could use my legs.
‘After that I felt like a zombie. I got told after the accident that, 10 years before, a gymnast similar to my standard had a similar accident and hadn’t been able to walk afterwards, so I’m really lucky.
‘It felt like someone had hit me over the back of the head with a baseball bat, the trauma caused my eyes to swell up so I looked like I’d been in a bar fight.
‘And I had to wear a big neck brace. After I’ve finished with it I’m going to spray it red and yellow so I can use it as an Iron Man suit.
‘It wasn’t nice being trapped in that for six weeks.’
There were, however, some lighter moments amid the gloom.
‘I stayed in hospital overnight and it was pretty funny because there were a lot of drunk guys coming in and waking me up,’ says the Liverpudlian. ‘There was one guy who fell in a canal — twice. It sort of made me feel better about myself!’
The recovery process, both physically and mentally, was lengthy however. It took the best part of two months before Baines could get back to relative normality in training, but it transpired the enforced rehabilitation brought with it some very beneficial side effects.
‘I did a lot of leg conditioning and leg strengthening and, when I came back, my legs were a lot better for floor and vault,’ he reveals. ‘That’s helped me and, hopefully, I’ll be able to contribute good scores on those.
‘The rehab took six to eight weeks until I was back doing almost everything. It took quite a while before I was doing a basic handstand and it felt weird because I hadn’t done it for a while.’
That wasn’t the only obstacle Baines had to overcome.
‘After the accident I remember waking up at night thinking: “Jeez, I don’t want to do it again”,’ he says.
‘But I’m doing a bit of an easier dismount now. It still fulfils the requirement but it’s less scary.
‘Quite a few people have been through injuries, they all say doing the first dismount is the worst.
‘It was all about doing my first one. You can do it into a foam pit, so I didn’t have to land hard at first. There was no pressure on me.
‘But my heart was beating, that’s for sure, when I first went back up on the bar.
‘It was nerve-wracking doing my first one (competition) back, which was at the Scottish Championships (in February), but I managed it fine, so it was just a massive relief.
‘I’ve done other competitions since which led to me being qualified.’
The nation with which he has secured qualification has been a talking point among his training partners, though. Baines was born on Merseyside and has an English mother but his father hails from north of the border and there is discernible pride in the young man’s voice when he speaks about his decision to compete for Scotland. You also get the feeling that his national team-mates, Daniel Purvis and Keatings, gave him little choice in the matter.
‘I was cutting it quite close to decide between Scotland and England, but it all went through and I am Scottish,’ he says. ‘I feel like I’m Scottish as well as British, so it’s just a good feeling to be going to the Games in front of a home crowd.
‘My dad, Paul, was born in Inverness, so I’m half Scottish and I do like Irn-Bru!
‘I train with a lot of the English lads. There’s a lot of competition already in the gym. I got a lot of stick at first but it’s all smoothed out now. They tried to persuade me the other way but I felt more Scottish.
‘I train with Dan (Purvis) at Southport and I train three days a week at the National Sports Centre in Lilleshall with Dan Keatings and (England’s) Kristian (Thomas) and Sam (Oldham) as well.
‘So there’s a few Scottish and English lads there all the time.’
It’s his Scotland colleague Purvis, however, who has clearly had the biggest impact on this aspiring youngster. And that’s not just down to the fact that the ‘ginger gymnast’ was a bronze medallist at London 2012, as part of the first Olympic medal-winning performance by a British team in 100 years.
‘I was brought up only a few minutes from Dan’s house,’ says Baines of the pair’s Southport connection. ‘He’s a massive influence.
‘People always say their idols in gymnastics are Kohei Uchimura, the world champion, but he (Purvis) has always been my idol because he’s not just a good gymnast and really good worker but he’s really nice to everyone in the gym.
‘I was able to study his techniques and copy him so I could improve.
‘He was a local celebrity. A lot of people recognised him as the ginger gymnast. People would ask “were you at the Olympics? Oh yeah, you’re the ginger one”.’
So will combining with a colourful colleague result in Games celebration at the Hydro this summer?
‘We’re definitely pushing for a gold medal,’ says Baines, an all-rounder whose strengths lie in floor, parallel bars, vault and high bar. ‘A medal is definitely a good shout.
‘We’ll probably have some bets with the English guys as it gets closer. I’ve just seen the arena and it has really got me excited. It made me a bit nervous but it’s all good.’
After all he has been through, you suspect Baines will be able to handle those nerves just fine.