In her interview to DTB.de, Pauline Schäfer said: “Actually, I don’t even like beam”, despite being the 2017 World champion on the event. Schäfer was not named to the German Worlds team despite posting the highest beam score at the Worlds Trials and her shaky performance both at the German Championships and in the beam final at Euros likely played a role.
Schäfer said her success on beam comes despite battling fears: One time, long before her move to Chemnitz as a 15-year old, a double twist which went wrong and she landed on her head. After that, Pauline developed a mental block for backward tumbling. She avoids backwards flight whenever possible, but can’t avoid it altogether. On beam, for example, an acrobatic series has to be included in the routine, which is easiest fulfilled with backward tumbling. Because of that, she says, every practice is like a fight in which she has to talk herself into completing the backward elements: “I have developed methods to force myself to do it”. However, Schäfer is wondering how far she could have come without that problem.
Like her three older brothers and her younger sister Helene, she also started children’s gymnastics at the TV Pflugscheid-Hixberg: “That was a small gym, where we always had to set up our apparatuses each time before practice.”
Soon it was clear that she had more potential. So, she switched to Dillingen and later to Saarbrücken. At some point, she was left alone in her training group. So she paused her ascending gymnastics career to try pole vaulting: “But that was too boring for me.” Soon enough she found her way back into gymnastics.
After the youth national championships in 2012, the national Ulla Koch, WAG program coordinator, gave her an ultimatum. If Schäfer didn’t switch gyms (to Chemnitz, national training gym) she would have trouble advancing further. So, Schäfer moved to the boarding school in Chemnitz: “A radical change”, she stressed, which she had enough of after just one day. Yet, her mother advised her to give it a try regardless: “She said I would regret it otherwise.”
Schäfer stayed, 600 kilometers away from her home, in Saxony. It became only somewhat easier for her after a year, when her sister Helene joined her. Both of them still motivate each other and even dare to dream about going to the Olympic Games in Tokyo together.
After winning the gold medal in 2017, Schäfer says it was quite hard to continue to focus on the training for a bit, as appearances and ceremonies took a lot of her time: “It was not easy to motivate myself again.”
In 2018, she was not able to defend her title as she was injured while trying to make the Worlds team. Even before that, many things have changed in training. After her 6th place finish in the beam final at the Glasgow European Championships, she and her coach (Frehse) went separate ways. Since then, Schäfer follows the training plans of Ulla Koch with several different coaches, as well as joins the training of the men during floor exercise and vault.
Schäfer, who is also working on graduating secondary school (Abitur), hopes to profit from the somewhat different training methods to further improve in the all-around.
Translation from German by Barbara.
I never liked it, neither. I took lessons as a kid and always dreaded it when it was my group’s turn to do the beam. The bars are my favorite!