Watching Lily McLaughlin, 13, of Weston riding effortlessly on her unicycle is almost as amazing as watching someone walk on water. What accomplished unicyclists do looks almost miraculous and it was with a quiet ''Gosh!'' that this columnist watched her, the new Australian unicycle junior female champion, glide up the steep driveway of her home and out on to her street.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
She has just triumphed in her category at UniNats 2012, the unicycle national championships in Melbourne earlier this month. She won more points than any other junior female.
Like the Olympic Games, the many different UniNats events are held in a variety of venues and one of her venues for one of the many events she competed in was ''an old warehouse with an orange floor and graffiti on the walls''.
UniNats offers a bewildering miscellany of events (there are sprints and distance races, events where you show tricky accomplishments, and cross-country races across rugged places) and she entered for almost everything she could and came home with a fistful of silken ribbons. She also set two Australian records but points out, modestly, these were events never held before in her age group so that she is really only the inaugural record holder.
Why is she a unicyclist? Wouldn't the nation rather that our determined young athletes play tennis or swim so that we can look forward to new Evonne Goolagongs, to new Dawn Frasers?
For her, unicycling was love at first try.
''I started at a week-long holiday program at the Warehouse Circus here in Canberra. There were lots of different things you could do but basically, I spent all of my free time that week with the unicycle. They said, 'You can't learn in a week. No one learns in a week.' But I really enjoyed it such a lot and got so into it that I did learn it [the basics, like staying upright most of the time] in a week. I learnt the unicycle before I learned how to ride a bike.''
She got the best of coaching and her love of unicycling grew and grew.
The next UniNats is in Canberra and she'll still be young enough to defend her junior female title.
She's adamant that circus unicycling and what happens at UniNats are two very different disciplines (''Circus unicycling is a bit more silly'') and yet at this stage she's already begun to dream of a career with Circus Oz. She's learning the trumpet now because it's an entry requirement of the National Institute of Circus Arts in Melbourne that you have more than one performance skill.
Lily McLaughlin is an immensely impressive youngster. In conversation she's articulate and assured, modest and yet transparently determined.
