Home meet extra appreciated by Ottawa gymnasts in return from injury and illness

By Dan Plouffe

There are several common advantages you’ll hear athletes list when competing in their hometown. One of the big ones is simply not having to travel and getting to sleep in your own bed. Athletes from the Ottawa Gymnastics Centre got a whole new appreciation for that convenience when their club hosted a men’s artistic gymnastics Ontario Cup meet from Dec. 12-14.

That flu you heard is going around? The OGC men can attest that it’s a particularly nasty one this year. They’d hardly been able to get out of bed in the lead-up to the season’s first provincial championships qualifier.

“The whole gym has been sick,” highlights 2025 provincial champion Connor Nguyen, who only returned to training the week before the competition after missing a week and a half. “I sure didn’t really want to travel.”

Illness struck early enough that the OGC gymnasts weren’t sidelined come the event, but most downgraded the difficulty of the skills they performed.

“I didn’t change any of my routines, but it was still really hectic and nerve wracking,” signals Nguyen, who was competing in the junior age 17-18 class for the first time after placing eighth nationally in the age 15-16 group last season.

Minus a few lingering sniffles, Nguyen pronounced himself “all good” for the Cup meet, although illness wasn’t the only unusual hurdle he encountered.

Gymnasts will tell you another advantage of a home meet is familiarity with their equipment, but that little edge was somewhat neutralized when the club’s parallel bars broke just before the competition and the pommel horse needed to be replaced too.

That only added to the nerves Nguyen felt following a training mishap a few days before the competition, when his hand slipped off the pommel, causing him to fall forward and hit his head. He didn’t feel lasting effects from the impact, but he still felt uneasy when it came time to compete on the apparatus.

“I didn’t really train on it before, so I was really scared, and then it was my first event too,” Nguyen recounts. “But there was no fall, so all good, and then that kind of set up my whole mood for the rest of the comp.”

Nguyen ultimately avoided trouble on all his events and rode podium performances on floor, high bar and vault to an all-around silver medal finish.

“I’m surprised it went so well,” admits Nguyen, who never looks at his marks during the competition. “I don’t like to compare or it’ll get my hopes up after I see my scores. I go with the flow. I like that feeling. And getting surprised at the end with my scores is also a fun experience.”

Elliot Choi of Orleans’ Tumblers Gymnastics Centre was also pleasantly surprised by his results at the event.

The first-year senior competitor, who was seventh at nationals as a junior last year, only competed in one event at the Ontario Cup after “a freak accident” dealt him a broken wrist two months ago during training.

While swinging atop the high bar, Choi had tried to turn his wrist as usual but his grip got locked. He’s still on the road to complete recovery, but he figured he could manage the floor routine and wound up winning the event by almost a full point with a score of 12.5.

“I wasn’t even sure that I was gonna compete,” Choi reflects. “I didn’t really feel much pressure for this comp, and I was just getting back into it, but it’s nice to be around the guys and feel the energy.”

The injury hasn’t dampened the University of Ottawa human kinetics student’s hopes for a strong season, with an eye on being at his best come February’s Elite Canada meet in Calgary and the springtime Canadian Championships.

“I want to see how many results I can get, how many medals maybe,” Choi smiles. “It’s just first season senior, you’re still getting experience, but it’s been great, I feel like the community is really welcoming.”

OGC head coach Florin Matei drawn to Ottawa for latest destination in long gymnastics journey

The meet at OGC also revealed a less common advantage of event hosting: recruitment.

Ottawa has been the first stop on the Ontario Cup men’s circuit for many years, and Florin Matei had made the trip many times, most often as a judge (which was a role he filled during sessions when he wasn’t busy coaching OGC athletes).

“Ottawa was always blinking to me,” indicates Matei, who’s now into his second season leading OGC’s men. “It was the gym and it was the environment in the gym.”

The Westboro neighbourhood around OGC was also attractive for Matei, who didn’t move nearly as far on this occasion as earlier in his life.

Matei was a national junior team member in his native Romania and went on to earn a university degree in physical education and gymnastics before beginning his career as a coach and teacher.

His family left for Israel in 1996 a few years after the Romanian revolution against the communist government, and then again decided to leave an unstable environment in 2012.

“You’re always looking for a better life for your children,” explains Matei, whose son was eight years old at the time.

While working on his masters degree in behavioural sciences, Matei’s studies helped him choose his next destination.

“One of the courses was talking about integration and immigration, and Canada was talked about a lot, as being the first country to really adopt multiculturalism,” Matei recalls. “That carried a lot of weight in our decision to choose Canada.”

He first landed in Owen Sound, then went to Hamilton, and was later commuting to coach in Kitchener-Waterloo daily before he jumped at the opportunity to lead OGC’s men’s program in summer 2024.

While “nothing is ever perfectly smooth,” Matei says he has a “very good feeling” about the trajectory of OGC’s program in its objective “to give the opportunity to each of the athletes to get the best of their abilities.”

“If they did get their goal, I’m happy. That doesn’t mean they have to be first place, the gold medal, but if they did their best, that’s awesome,” underlines Matei, noting that Nguyen making Team Ontario last season was a somewhat unexpected early success.

“This is a big honour for an athlete,” he adds. “Now we are continuing with, I cannot say ‘tradition’ yet, but on this line, looking forward, looking higher, and seeing what can be done.”

Read More: From being scolded for bouncing on the couch, Connor Nguyen now congratulated for provincial gymnastics crown

Local gymnasts delivered numerous encouraging performances in younger age groups at the Ontario Cup, led by Jamie Ghergari of OGC’s all-around gold in the junior national age 15-16 division.

Rideau Gymnastics’ Oliver Fong also topped the all-around standings in the novice national competition, while Rideau’s Ilya Baranov (provincial level 5), Tumblers’ Louis Ruest (P4, age 15+) and Rideau’s Artem Petrov (P2, U12) were are all-around runners-up, and Ottawa’s Valdemar Coveny (junior national age 15-16) was third.

Matei was impressed with his athletes’ performances, particularly given how sick they were shortly before the event.

“It’s one competition. They were not in the best shape,” he notes. “But what I told them is we can manage to do the best in the circumstances that we are in right now. And I think that they did very well.”