Meet Megan Kealy, Britain’s best gymnast you’ve never heard of

If Megan Kealy’s chosen art was the beam, floor or vault, she would not have spent the morning facilitating hire requests and writing social media posts for the gymnastics facility where we meet on the outskirts of Milton Keynes; ours would certainly not be the first interview she has done since becoming the best in the world. Her life, and public profile, would be altogether different.

But Kealy operates in the small sphere of tumbling, a thrilling discipline in which gymnasts perform a spectacular series of jumps, flips and twists along a 25-metre runway. It is, says Kealy, “fast, exciting and often described as the 100m sprint of gymnastics”. To the untrained eye, it is mind-boggling.

Crucially, it is not part of the Olympics, so Kealy receives no funding; hence the full-time, 40-hour-week administrative job. And it is why Kealy, 25, is Britain’s most distinguished gymnast you have almost certainly never heard of.

The gymnastics centre is deserted as we settle into seats high in the rafters and Kealy details her path to little-recognised greatness.

Despite living in Surrey, she spends most of the week braving the M25 on a 90-minute commute to and from Buckinghamshire. Each day offers a different blend of morning training and afternoon work, or morning work and afternoon training. After our interview she will coach some of the area’s youngsters. There is no more illustrious gymnast to pass on wisdom.

Kealy had already swept the board in tumbling’s age-group ranks – claiming world gold in the 13-14, 15-16 and 17-21 years categories – by the time she ascended the senior pile and won the world title in 2021. This summer, she added the sport’s most prestigious prize at the World Games.

Exclusion from the Olympics means tumbling takes its place alongside an array of seemingly random sports (everything from tug of war to boules, and wakeboarding to pool) at the quadrennial event. For those fortunate enough to compete, the World Games is the pinnacle of each sport. But its lack of mainstream coverage meant Kealy’s triumph in Chengdu, China – where she became the first British tumbler ever to win World Games gold – went largely unnoticed.

“I’d done this massive thing and made history, but life carries on as normal,” she says, without a flicker of resentment.

Given that Britain’s only Olympic champion gymnasts are Max Whitlock and Bryony Page, Kealy is in esteemed company. Yet while more than 1,000 British sportspeople in Olympic disciplines are funded every year through UK Sport, she is forced to hold down a full-time job and pay for all bar the biggest international competitions. Surely she is envious?

“No,” she replies. “I guess it would be nice to go to the Olympics, but I’ve always known that tumbling isn’t in the Olympics. I do what I do because I love it, not because it’s a career. When you make it a career it adds different pressure. They [Olympic athletes] must feel under unbelievable pressure, whereas we just do it for ourselves. I guess you don’t want that kind of pressure. I think if it was a career it would be very different.

“Obviously I’ve been fortunate to be successful and if it was an Olympic discipline I wouldn’t need to work a full-time job. But it’s just one of those things you accept. I wouldn’t change how I do things. I love what I do – I don’t do it for money because I don’t get any money. It just shows the love we have for the sport. There’s no other incentive.

“Since winning World Games gold, life has continued as it was. I went back to coaching and I’m just the same old me.”

Victory in China “finally closed the door” on a traumatic episode that occurred at the previous Covid-delayed World Games in 2022. As the reigning world champion, Kealy fully anticipated challenging for gold, only to tear her calf during her final training session two days out from competition. “It felt so unfair,” she says. “I felt so ready, and then one injury just stopped everything.”

While she returned to claim world silver in front of a home crowd in Birmingham a year later, the physical turmoil had left deeper mental scars. Every time she competed, her brain would tell her she was not good enough. When she suffered a small flare in the same calf ahead of this summer’s World Games, it almost became too much to cope with.

“I didn’t believe in myself and didn’t want to go,” she says. “The whole trauma of 2022 came into play. I was too scared so I was sabotaging my training.”

It sounds like post-traumatic stress disorder? “I think it probably was,” she replies.

The gold medal makes her the woman to beat at next week’s World Championships in Pamplona, Spain, but she insists all pressure is off after winning tumbling’s biggest prize.

“It’s probably coming to the end of my career and I just want to enjoy it,” she says. “I’ve already achieved everything that I could ever have imagined. My body is getting sore. My calf is OK, but not perfect. And at some point normal life has to start.

“I can’t do this for ever. It’s tiring. It’s hard work trying to work and train. If this was my job, I think I’d commit for another four years and try again for the World Games. But it’s not my job.”

Some greats have the luxury of focusing all their efforts on sporting endeavours; others have spreadsheets to fill and children to teach.

Photographs by Tom Pilston & Antonio Olmos/The Observer