Gymnast Lisa Mason Refuses to Be ‘Seen and Not Heard’

Lisa Mason has swagger, which is not something you expect to see from female gymnasts. “Gymnasts are supposed to be seen and not heard,” Mason said. They’re supposed to be small and adorable and never boastful—there are no end zone dances for female gymnasts.

During a podcast interview, she recalled a recent outing on vault during a competition. Unable to train the skill for a few days due to pain, she went up and still hit it in the competition. When she finished, her coach asked her, incredulously, how she pulled it off, she told him, “Cause I’m a professional.” Now that’s swagger.

Mason’s swagger is borne out of age and experience. She’s both been there and done that: three British national all-around titles, the World Championships, the European Championships, the Commonwealth Games, the Olympics. Now 33 and in the midst of a comeback to elite gymnastics after a 13-year hiatus from the sport, Mason has no trouble speaking her mind. “I have an opinion, and you’re going to hear it if you like to or not,” she said with a laugh.

That Mason would return to gymnastics more than ten years after she left it for the first time is perhaps surprising to the Olympic year fan who associates the sport with slight prepubescent athletes, not with single mothers in their early 30s. But the tide in the sport has been slowly turning for over a decade. Mason is not exactly the anomaly that she might appear to be. In last year’s all-around rankings at the World Championships, there were five gymnasts who were 20 years of age or older in the top 20. and three of those gymnasts actually landed in the top 10. (The most celebrated of the “granny” elite gymnasts, Oksana Chusovitina of Uzbekistan, then 39, got injured before the start the meet and had to withdraw, but she would’ve probably been in that top group.)

But back in Mason’s heyday as an athlete, there weren’t many female gymnasts who stuck around for more than one Olympic cycle, let alone who found success competing at the elite level well into their 20s. “I think I could quite easily have done another Olympics but it was the natural thing, really. Nobody stayed on from my generation,” she said. The Olympics were college graduation for a gymnast and, after that, there were no more classes to take.

Mason’s generation was a pivotal one for British gymnastics. They were the first to qualify a full team to the Olympic Games for Great Britain by placing in the top 12 at the 1999 world championships. (Subsequent to that competition, she and her fellow gymnasts partied quite hard in Tianjin; Mason took over as DJ at a Chinese club with her CD collection of 90s hip hop and R&B.)

Mason felt that British gymnastics, while appreciative of the team’s contributions, was eager to move onto the next generation of athletes coming up the ranks. And so she retired and moved on too—at least, she tried to. Four years later, Mason found herself back in the gym again, training. She’d been at it for five months, getting ready to test for the British squad when she discovered she was pregnant, three months along. “I was a bit like, ‘Shit. It’s not meant to be,’” she recalled.

She considered returning to the gym shortly after her daughter Yarlana was born but decided against it. She felt that Yarlana was too young for her to put in the kind of training hours it would take to succeed once more at the elite level. “I waited, I think, for so long—until she was old enough and she was doing gymnastics herself,” she said. The gym is Mason’s childcare while she is training. (Yarlana, now 10, clearly shares her mother’s ability to flip and twist but competes in a different gymnastics discipline—trampoline. She’s not quite following in her mother’s footsteps.)

But Mason was not just waiting for her daughter to come of age; she was also waiting for the right catalyst, which turned out to be the London Olympics. She had been invited to perform at the Opening Ceremonies and realized that she hadn’t lost all of her skills since leaving the sport and giving birth to a child. More significantly, performing in front of an Olympic-sized audience reminded of the feeling of competing. “I just remember being in that arena with the whole crowd…I can’t explain how you feel. I was just like, ‘I need to be back here.’ It kind of ignited something in me,” she explained.

Her first move after her performance at the Games was getting back into shape. “If I looked like I was in shape, then it would be a lot easier,” she said of trying to get coaches to take her comeback seriously. Mason, who at 5’7″ is quite tall for a gymnast, seems proud of her physique, judging from her posts to her Instagram. Though she puts up pictures and videos from her training, most of the posts have her posing in front of the camera with her sculpted abs exposed, her brown hair cascading around her face, framing her shockingly blue eyes. Mason is not the little girl gymnast the way that Olga Korbut was in the early 70s with her hair in pigtails.

Despite the presence of others like her—those extending their careers into their 20s and beyond—Mason hasn’t exactly enjoyed robust support from the British gymnasts the way that other comparably aged gymnasts in other countries have. “I’ve literally had to do this by myself. I’ve scratched up from the bottom, people kicking me down, telling me, ‘You can’t do it, there’s no way you can do it, why are you here, you should just be a mum, I don’t know why you’re trying to be a gymnast again. You’re too old,’” she said.

So far, Mason has paid for her training and supported her daughter by working in schools, though this is something she’s had to scale back on in order to increase her training time in the gym. So she’s resorted to credit cards to fill in the gaps and pay to for things like physical therapy. “Last year and this year, I’ve maxed out two credit cards,” she said. She has yet to receive any financial help from the British gymnastics federation and doesn’t expect to. “They said they have no intention of using me and that they won’t use me for GB squad at this time so they can’t justify funding me.”

People have been kicking me down, telling me, ‘You can’t do it, you should just be a mum, I don’t know why you’re trying to be a gymnast again.’

Which means that this time around, Mason wasn’t part of the effort to qualify a full squad to the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio. She didn’t make the team sent to this year’s world championships, this week in Glasgow, Scotland. The teams that place among the top 8 will be able to send a full team to the upcoming Olympics. The British women easily made it into that group, which everyone expected; the talent level among the British gymnasts has never been higher than it is at the moment. The fight to get on the team this time around will be much harder than the one Mason had to go through in 2000.

Mason’s results so far, while not spectacular, definitely show potential for growth. She placed 7th all-around at the recent national championship. She also won the bronze on the floor exercise at the same competition. Yes, Mason is a bit on the bubble when it comes to making the British Olympic team, which will feature only five gymnasts, down from the six that made it to Sydney in 2000. But in an injury prone sport like gymnastics, having a well-trained, experienced gymnast like Mason warming the bench in the event that one of the current stars of the program is felled by an ill-timed injury makes sense.

“I’m not deluded. I’m not ever going to be their top all arounder,” she said. She hopes to contribute usable scores on balance beam and floor exercise, her two best pieces, as well as to provide leadership and experience to the team.

Mason surmises that some of the resistance she’s encountered in British gymnastics is due to her age. “I think it’s ageism,” Mason said. She noted a heightened level of preoccupation with her physical well-being when she attended a national squad training camp earlier this year. “It was very much, ‘Are you alright? You coping alright?’ I was like, ‘You serious? Yes. I’m fine. I can do this training.’”

Mason actually feels that she might be in better shape than some of her younger counterparts, who are perennially banged up. She’s had only one major injury over the course of her career—she snapped her arm in half as a 13-year-old, yet came back less than a year later to become the youngest woman ever to win the British national title—but in the twenty years since that injury, she said that she’s had no recurring problems with that arm. The injury was very much one and done. “I think my body, it’s been good,” Mason said.

I think that when you’re older, you take that into your own hands and you educate yourself and you know what your body is like.

As for her younger counterparts, “I feel like they’re way worse than I am, body wise, with injuries. They’re having MRIs every week, cortisone injections every other week. I’m thinking, half of you are like 18, 19, and you’re doing all of this to your body. I never had that. My whole career I’ve had two cortisone shots. That’s it,” she said emphatically.

“I listen to my body and that comes with age,” she continued. “As a gymnast you’re so used to taking orders from your coaches and nutritionists, all this kind of stuff. I think that when you’re older, you take that into your own hands and you educate yourself and you know what your body is like. I didn’t need people to tell me what I should and should not be eating. I’m very aware of my calorie intake and what is going to help me and what’s not going to help me.”

During her brief stay at the national training center, she ate a pudding with one of the meals. “The girls were going, ‘You’re eating dessert? Aren’t you worried that you’re going to get shouted at?’” she recalled them asking her incredulously.

“By who?” she asked, laughing. “I’m 33. Nobody is going to shout at me for eating pudding.”