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The Acro road ends in Holon for Adam Upcott and Charlie Tate
November 1, 2019News
While most people are still trying to decide what they want to do at 19 or 20 years old, Adam Upcott and Charlie Tate, acrobatic gymnasts on Team GB, are planning their retirement from the sport. Upcott and Tate started out competing as part of a men's group. Together with Lewis Watts and Conor Sawenko they won medals at European and World Championships. The group finished their career on a high note by winning gold at the 2017 World Games. While Sawenko and Watts decided to retire, Upcott and Tate felt they were not done yet. They started competing as a pair and won bronze at the 2018 World Championships.
They came to the 2019 European Championships in Holon knowing full well it would be their last competition and trying to enjoy every second of it. Their upbeat dynamic routine set to Benassi's Satisfaction immediately draws the attention of the crowd:
As a men's four before we always had crowd-pleasing routines, we've always liked to have a lot of energy that gets people behind us, we like to have a big personality on the floor and we like to share that through our routines and choreography. So, we like to do something different and have fun. It's good that it still gets noticed. We don't want to be boring or have the same routine all the time and we like to try and mix things up a bit
One of the reasons for their retirement is purely physical. Upcott is growing taller and it is now harder for them to work together:
I think, normally, in senior pairs the base is a few years older than the top, so there's a height difference, but there's only 8 months difference between me and Charlie. I'm getting taller and the size difference is just not working out. We're still aiming at working together in the future. Not necessarily at competitions but in shows around the world
They would love to continue competing for longer but the career of a competitive acrobatic gymnast in Great Britain is not a great source of income, while training and competing requires a lot of investment on the part of the gymnasts. Tate explained:
I'm not looking to retire because of my age or because I've had enough of the sport. I'm looking to retire because I can't keep funding myself and doing crazy hours around it to try and balance everything out. Unfortunately, eventually, you have to sacrifice one or the other. If we were to get funded, I could easily stay for one, two, three more years in the sport.
Tate has been funding his gymnastics career by working full-time at his family business, a green-grocer stall at the local market:
I have to work in the family business at the market so I can pay for the sport. It's not something I'm going to do for the rest of my life, and, hopefully, I can move on after I finish competing. I usually work from maybe four in the morning till six at night and then train from half-past six to half-past nine afterward. The days are long but because I get up so early in the morning I can then train in the evening instead. It does affect my training. We probably would get a lot more done if I didn't have to work to pay for my gymnastics. But if I don't do it, I can't pay for the sport. It's a sacrifice I had to make to continue my career.
For Upcott, gymnastics is kind of a family business. His older brother Edward is a World champion, while his older sister Alice is a European Champion and multiple World medallist. He does not feel extra pressure because of this and for him, this competition was above all about having fun:
We're just here to have a good time. We love competing and we've been doing it for years. The main aim was to be as clean as possible, to make our coach proud, make ourselves proud, make the country proud, but we also want to enjoy every last second.
By Liubov Baladzhaeva for UEG
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