“All the dedication, hard daily work and prayers paid off,” says Nicole Pace, a 12-year old who gained glory as the national champion at the recent championships which took place at the Gymstars Club at Tarxien.

She succeeds the previous uncontesting champion Francesca Borg, also from Gymstars. The Women’s Open Category was quite an intense competition where Nicole Pace entered the record books as the youngest national champion in Malta.

She completed excellent routines on all four apparata landing two silver medals on Beam and Bars that ultimately secured for her the coveted title of Malta Open Gymnastics champion.

Pace obtained an overall gold with a total score of 45.85, ahead of her club mate Martina Galea with 44.50 total score. Peppijna Dalli of ISC ended up third with a score of 43.00.

Nicole is now training for an international competition to be held next month in Deventer, Holland, where last year she and her club mates gave an excellent performance and obtained gold overall.

Following this, in July they will be competing in another international competition to be held at Gymstars Club.

The immediate goal after these would be to compete in the Small Nations Games to be held in Cyprus next year.

“I especially owe this title to all my family, my Bulgarian coaches Antonina Uzunova and Plamen Angelov Peynov and my club Gymstars,” Her major future aspiration is to compete in the London 2012 Olympic Games.

It is well to note that Nicole’s younger sister, Raquel, also did well at these championships. In fact, she clinched gold overall in the ‘B’ championships just a few hours later. One must appreciate the commitment to gymnastics of these two sisters, despite excelling in their academic work.