With return to Sioux Falls, 14-year-old elite gymnast sets sight on sport’s biggest stage

The skill is called a press to handstand.

A gymnast starts in a straddle sit, then pulls the lower body off the ground, and with a blend of strength and balance pushes up into a handstand, then lowers back into the original position.

At 4 years old, Gabrielle Hardie wasn’t just intent on learning how to do one — which she did — but within a year, the goal had grown: Do 100 in a row.

By 6, she was doing the full skill on a 4-inch-wide balance beam.

It was like that with most skills as Hardie seemingly clicked with the sport of gymnastics from the moment she walked into a Chicago gym at age 4 for a “bring a friend” class.

“The coach would teach her something, and she’d come home and keep working on it,” her mother, Sara Hardie, said. “She’d do 100 of them. She was passionate about learning the next thing.”

Now 14, Hardie and her family recently moved back to Sioux Falls, following a decade that has seen her rise from a child flipping on her couch to among the top junior elite gymnasts in the country — with a legitimate focus on competing in the Olympic Games.

How close is she already? At a monthly national team training camp she attends, Hardie stretched side by side earlier this year with the sport’s greatest ever, Simone Biles.

Earlier this year at national championships, Biles won the senior all-around title; Hardie won silver in the junior all-around.

“I think she knows my name,” Hardie laughed, adding that among the many already memorable moments in her young career was a photo the national team took after last summer’s USA championships.

“We got to take a picture with Simone Biles and all of them, and that was really cool — just knowing you’re on their path to being at an Olympics,” she said.

Journey to elite

Mark and Sara Hardie met while growing up in Clear Lake in eastern South Dakota and began moving their growing family around the country as Mark built his career in engineering.

Life brought them to Oregon, Iowa, Sioux Falls and then to the Chicago area, where 4-year-old Hardie caught a coach’s attention the day she followed her friend to a gymnastics class.

“I liked it when I was at the gym,” she remembers. “I think they recognized my talent.”

That first day, “the coach took me aside, and he said, ‘You really need to seriously consider bringing her to gymnastics,'” Sara Hardie said.

It wasn’t on the radar for the mother of seven — Hardie is the second youngest — but in retrospect, it added up, she said.

“I would have never brought her there. We were football, basketball, softball, baseball,” Sara Hardie said. “But I think maybe it went through my head that I thought it would be a good outlet for her energy.”

By the time Hardie was 6, the family had returned to Sioux Falls and she was training at All American Gymnastics Academy, competing for the first time on her seventh birthday.

“The coach at All American recognized her strength, and they had her try out for a TOPs (Talent Opportunity Program) team, and as a 7-year-old, she made the Diamond Team,” Sara Hardie said.

Being part of that program, which is the top 50 7-year-olds in the nation based on physical ability, led to an invitation to a developmental camp at the Karolyi Ranch in Texas, used as the national training center for USA Gymnastics from 2001 to 2018. Valeri Liukin, former team coordinator and father and coach of 2008 Olympic gold medalist Nastia Liukin, invited Hardie to begin attending the camps.

“It got me motivated to see all the big girls there,” she remembers. “And to think I could be one of them.”

She left All American in 2021 when the family moved to the Twin Cities, and she joined Twin City Twisters Gymnastics, which has produced a number of elite and collegiate gymnasts.

Hardie had grown up admiring several of them, “and when I went there in real life, it was really cool,” she said. “I really started getting better there.”

Here’s a look at her uneven bars performance at age 8:

By 2022, Hardie’s coach decided she was ready to compete for the chance to join the junior elite level of USA Gymnastics — one notch below the senior team that’s eligible for the sport’s top international competitions.

“I was just getting all the skills, and we went to a qualification and it was my first try, and I did really well and qualified,” she said. “And it wasn’t hard … but it wasn’t easy.”

It also served as the point at which the Hardie family realized that “this is going somewhere we need to support and continue to help develop any way we can,” Sara Hardie said. “And to see her passion, too, I think is what helps us know that it’s a God-given talent. As parents, we’re doing whatever we can to help support it.”

By 2023, Hardie’s scores at national meets had landed her on the junior national team, when she began to compete internationally.

“You could see her smile glowing when she put on the (Team USA) gear,” her mom said.

Hardie competed in the 2023 Jesolo Trophy in Italy and brought home gold in the all-around and uneven bars, and silver in vault, balance beam and floor exercise.

“It was an amazing experience,” she said.

She then finished fourth in the all-around in the junior elite division at the 2023 USA Championships and second in bars and floor.

This past spring, she and her team won gold at the 2024 Junior Pan American Games in Colombia, where she also won uneven bars and floor exercise and finished second in the all-around and balance beam.

“What’s so incredible to me is when they play the national anthem when your child is receiving a medal,” Sara Hardie said. “Tears. It’s a beautiful moment. Because you’re representing the United States, and this was Memorial Day weekend, so we took extra pride in winning that gold for our country.”

Here’s a look at Hardie’s uneven bars routine from the 2024 USA Championships, where she won silver in the junior elite all-around in addition to silver on the bars.

All American return

It’s shortly before noon on a Wednesday at All American Gymnastics in southeast Sioux Falls, and the gym is quiet but for a small handful of female gymnasts.

This is where Hardie has trained alongside other top area gymnasts since this summer, a schedule that brings her to the gym every weekday morning, with a break for lunch and school — which she does from home — and then a return to the gym for two more hours most days.

Homeschooling started when the Hardies’ oldest of seven was in fifth grade, “so the way of life was already in place for us,” Sara Hardie said.

Their other children have competed in various sports for O’Gorman High School, including Hardie’s older sister, Alea, the first female athlete in South Dakota high school history to win three consecutive state cross-country titles, who now competes at the University of Nebraska.

School work for Hardie is done around training during the week and sometimes at night and on weekends.

The decision to return to Sioux Falls in recent months was something the family considered broadly, Sara Hardie said. Hardie was doing well at her gym, but her dad’s job allowed for the move back. “My parents and older children are here, and we just both feel a strong connection to be here,” Sara Hardie said.

Even when Hardie was training in the Twin Cities, her national team biography listed her home as Sioux Falls, Sara Hardie added.

“I never took it off her profile that she’s from South Dakota,” she said. “A lot of people never even realized we were gone.”

But when they returned, All American Gymnastics aligned with Hardie’s Olympic ambitions in a way no one likely could have predicted when she first competed there.

In 2020, coach Keli Kitaura came to the gym after coaching Brazil’s Olympic team at the 2016 Olympics in Rio. She was followed by several others, including Ricardo Pereira and Cintia Nagata, who have worked with Brazil’s most decorated Olympic and World Champion gymnasts, including a young Rebecca Andrade, who won the silver medal in the all-around in Paris this summer.

“In Brazil, to be a gymnastics coach, you have to go to college. You have to study sports science, otherwise you’re not able to work with sports,” said Kitaura, who works closely with Hardie. “So we know about anatomy and how to field good body shape and make the gymnast healthy.”

Hardie has struggled with injuries in her training, including shin splints and a back fracture that have kept her from upgrading her skills in the past year.

“She’s improving a lot,” Pereira said. “Right now, we’re getting to know each other, and we have to find the good workload for her. … We have to take care not to push too much and not be too soft.”

When he came to the gym, the goal was “to produce some girls from South Dakota to the national team and to the Olympics,” Pereira said.

Then, in walked Hardie.

“She’s amazing,” he continued. “She’s smart and has a big, big talent. She’s already doing very well … but she can do much better.”

Hardie is “a very hard worker,” Kitaura added. “She’s very respectful. She’s a good listener. She knows what she wants, so it’s easy to work when they have this attitude. She wants it more than me and more than her mom, and that makes us as a coach very excited to work. It’s a pleasure to go home and plan for her because you know when we come here she will try the best she can every single day.”

Hardie has the innate intelligence to understand the angles and adjustments needed to master some of the hardest moves in gymnastics, Kitaura said.

“We never know what can happen on the way, but I can see a brilliant future if we work correctly with her. My goal is don’t rush,” she said.

“When we see a girl like her, we want everything right now because we know she can do it, but making her healthy and doing gymnastics for a long time will be the best option, and then she can be brilliant for a long time on the national team. That’s what I want for her because I can see that.”

Training in Sioux Falls “has been different,” Hardie said. “I’m the oldest, and I’m trying to be a leader to the girls at All American, and I’m trying to encourage them and always be positive, but I like it.”

In 2025, Hardie will be age eligible to compete at the senior elite level because she will turn 16 in November of next year. She already has achieved a score high enough to qualify to seniors.

“She’s very young, and she’s already getting ready for seniors,” Kitaura said. “She has basically everything. We just need her start value higher and put it all together, which is not an easy thing to do, but it’s the first year, and she’s already been the best junior in the country.”

Hardie will continue traveling to monthly camps from USA Gymnastics with a coach to train and receive feedback — a system that allows many elite gymnasts to train close to home instead of moving away from their families as they often did in the past. The organization also has made other adjustments, including appointing former Olympians Chellsie Memmel and Alicia Sacramone Quinn to help lead the program.

“Kudos to USA Gymnastics,” Sara Hardie said. “(Meeting with the national team) it was, ‘Here’s my number. Call me.’ They’re very open to the parents and athletes. Everything is so open now, and I feel like they want a relationship, and they encourage us to reach out. I’m so thankful she’s developing in the age and time she is.”

Working toward her Olympic dream from her home state is “kind of cool,” Hardie agreed. “From a small town, you can represent and be the first one, be the first gymnast to make it this far from South Dakota. So that’s cool.”

“And all her siblings are so supportive of her,” Sara Hardie added. “Most competitions, it’s just me (attending) because we divide and conquer because our other children have sports and there are responsibilities.”

When she’s not at the gym, Hardie tends to stay active in other ways.

“I biked 20 miles this week because I like to stay in shape,” she said, without a hint of irony, adding that after training that day she and a friend were going to lift weights for fun. She ran cross-country during eighth grade because she wanted to try it and has thought about attempting a triathlon because she enjoys swimming.

“I’m starting to meal prep, so I bought all the containers,” she added, and she even has started cooking meals for the family at times.

The perks of becoming better known in her sport are starting to emerge too. This fall, she’ll start designing her own leotards and has worked with a company to promote its line.

“She’s kind of leading us on this journey,” her mom said. “We’re following and supporting.”

The move to senior elite will show a lot, Hardie said.

“I’m going to be going against the top girls in the sport,” she said. “I always try to stay positive. At meets, just stay calm and trust in my training and know God has a plan and knows what I’m capable of. And I just trust in that.”