By Keiran Gorsky
The physical challenge is already great – gliding across a carpet smoothly, limbs aflutter, boldly moving about your eye-catching equipment and keeping it from dropping to the floor, all with graceful artistry.
Add onto that challenge a large audience watching your every move alongside the stakes of a championship competition, and the mental demands of the moment provide a whole layer more to prepare for.
Heading into the 2026 Canadian Rhythmic Gymnastics Championships from May 21-24 in Winnipeg, Eastern Canadian champion Evangelia Sarlis has seized control of every subtlety – right down to the music she performs to.
Her long-time coach at the Kanata Rhythmic Sportive Gymnastics Club, Yuliana Korolyova, finds the songs underlying her routines, and then Sarlis cuts them into 90-second snippets on iMovie. Pieces, or fragments of pieces, must be equal parts expressive and dynamic.
“There have to be some slow parts, faster parts, and music where you can show artistry,” Sarlis explains. “Sometimes we just have to scratch out the song because it just doesn’t work within the minute-(and)-30 (seconds).”
It provides some comfort that she herself pieced together the strange, stirring music whose every intricacy she must absorb. It’s one of many things Sarlis has been doing to access her best self in the heat of competition.
This season, the Algonquin College business student is “wearing a lot of hats,” Korolyova notes. In addition to her congested competitive schedule, Sarlis has also taken up coaching. It has been a joy to watch her students grow as athletes and as people, she says. This year’s Kanata Cup, designed to give local clubs a chance to perform and grow, served as a culmination of the KRSG coaching staff’s efforts.
“From goal setting, to overcoming challenges, we focus really on building through comfort. We’re building a whole human,” Korolyova says of her club’s philosophy.
Sarlis, who took part in the Kanata Cup herself as a prelude to a spectacular Eastern Regional Championships, took great pride in watching her students perform. Younger gymnasts at the club have come to revere Sarlis, who only started training for the national level at age 16.
Coaching, it turns out, is a two-way street. Correcting and perfecting the mindsets of sometimes self-critical students has led her to reexamine her own approach. With the pressure dialled up, it becomes all too easy to permit that timid, perpetually uncertain voice inside to thwart your rhythm and tempo, outlines Sarlis, who started to realize that’s what was happening to her when she saw it in others.
“Sometimes they say they can’t do something or they don’t want to do something and even though it’s so simple, every time I hear that, I’m like, ‘Oh no, we don’t say that,’” Sarlis reflects. “But I know that when I was training, I would say those words sometimes even without realizing it.”
Despite her talent, Sarlis has sometimes struggled to bring her competitive performances to the level of her practice routines. Competitions have a way of separating you from your best self.
“I think I leave my body a lot. I step on the carpet sometimes and just see blank,” she describes.
On her own, Sarlis focused on perfecting her ribbon routine ahead of April’s Eastern Canadians held in Moncton, N.B. That isn’t always an easy task at her home gym, with the six-metre sections of satin having a bad habit of getting caught up in the ceiling rafters, which is funny only the first few times.
“We have a long stick with us at all times that we fish our ribbons out of the ceiling with,” Sarlis laughs.
She didn’t saddle herself with sky-high expectations on the short flight to New Brunswick where she was accompanied by Silvia Yu, Victoria Wang and Erin Song, the latter in her first year as a national-stream athlete.
Korolyova has provided Sarlis with strategies to call upon in difficult moments. In Moncton, Sarlis employed box breathing techniques and focused intently on the red lines surrounding the carpet.
“To not let my thoughts go outside,” she highlights.
For the first time, Sarlis genuinely felt that she had settled into herself. The day didn’t pass totally without error, but Sarlis won all four of her events – hoop, ball, clubs and ribbon. She finished with a combined score of 86.800 for an impressive 4.65-point margin of victory in the senior open division.
It’s the quality of performance that would likely allow Sarlis to achieve high-performance status (top-15 among all senior competitors) come the nationals in Winnipeg. There, she’ll be joined by Yu, who won her ball event and finished second overall in the junior high-performance category at the Easterns, and Wang, who was 10th in junior open.
Senior open competitor Ziyun (Amy) Lan and Mia Lan (novice) of the Ottawa Rhythmic Gymnastics Club will also compete in Winnipeg, as will Ottawa’s senior development group.
Sarlis could hardly have asked for a better trial run as she aims to improve on her sixth-place standing in senior open at last year’s nationals, which her club hosted at Algonquin College.
“This competition (Eastern Regionals) was kind of just this first moment of being able to show even just some of what I feel like I do at training,” she underlines. “I joined national at 16… and I really didn’t expect to be in the position I am now or the dreams I can have now.”
Across the ocean, KRSG’s Kanata Charms exceeded all expectations with a ninth-place finish out of 30 teams at an Aesthetic Group Gymnastics World Cup event earlier this month in Goussainville, France.
The Charms team of Keira Agnew, Xinyu (Sharon) Li, Ella Qi, Leann Lili Situ, Kate Song, Fiona Tong and Emily Zhang were thrilled to finish ahead of teams who garner greater backing in aesthetic gymnastics powerhouses like Ukraine, Finland, Kazakhstan and Estonia.
The group performed a difficult, intense routine underscored by Canadian-Russian singer (and former gymnast) Ekaterina Shelehova’s “Earth Melodies” – an experimental ethno-classical piece interspersed with passages of throat singing.
“It’s so special just seeing all of that diversity and range of skill while we’re out on the carpet,” highlights Zhang, whose team left in a happy delirium amid a flurry of compliments from peers, volunteers and judges.