Watching gymnastics makes it easy to presume the gymnasts are fearless, but for James Bacueti, the fear is very real, and particularly when he competes on the high bar.
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"It horrifies me," he said after nominating the high bar as one of his two favourite apparatus.
"Everything about gymnastics is covered in high bar, [it's] the scariest thing I've ever done in my life, but that's why I love it so much, because that's what gymnastics is."
The 17-year-old recently advanced to the top tier of his sport, level 10, which he said was a challenge, but one he relished.
"Competing with people who are already at the top level, it brings you up a bit, makes you try a bit harder, you can't just laze around . . . it pushes you, there's not really room for 'I'm scared', you just do it."
Bacueti and 36 other gymnasts have been chosen to represent the territory in following the ACT gymnastics championships held over the weekend.
The team will travel to Sydney next month for the national titles.
Bacueti, as the only male competing at level 10, needed to achieve the benchmark scores to qualify. Having done that comfortably, the Stromlo High School student is now looking ahead to his next goal; an overall top three place at nationals, with "a couple of apparatus medals hopefully".
If he achieves that Bacueti will be pushing for selection in the Australian team to travel to Austria for the junior European championships in October. Ultimately he aims to compete at the world championships and the Olympics, but is taking things one step at a time.
"I've got to do well this year first" he said.
Bob Morton, president of the Woden Valley Gymnastics Club where Bacueti trains, said his star gymnast's first senior representative goal would be the 2014 Commonwealth Games.
Bacueti, who took up gymnastics as a two-year-old, trains for 24 hours a week, but while that may sound like a heavy load, he said others do much more.
"Compared to the other high performance [gymnasts] we do nothing," he said.
His coach, former high bar champion Zhou Li Min, started an extra morning session to take training hours up to 30, but cancelled it when Bacueti was the only gymnast consistently turning up for the early start.
Despite the fewer training hours, the ACT continues to do well at a national level. Morton has been taking gymnasts to nationals for the past 21 years and said, "the boys in the ACT perform really well against the bigger states" and never fail to bring home medals.