In her return to competition since her 2020 retirement, Courtney McGregor won a silver medal vault at the DTB Pokal Cup in Germany. Photo / Christian Habel
Suzanne McFadden for LockerRoom
Less than 24 hours after flying home from Germany, Courtney McGregor swapped her sequin-studded leotard – and silver medal – for medical scrubs, back on the wards of North Shore Hospital.
She sometimes turns up at the Tri Star gymnasium to train, her stethoscope peeking out of her gym bag, fascinating the kids who gather around her.
The final year of training to become a doctor would be enough of a challenge for most people. But not McGregor.
The 27-year-old has decided now is the perfect time to make her comeback as an international gymnast – a decade after she flipped through the air at the Olympic Games in Rio 2016.
In the past fortnight, McGregor has competed in the first two events of her return to the world stage – finishing fifth on vault at a World Cup in Turkey, then claiming vaulting silver at the esteemed DTB Pokal competition in Stuttgart.
It’s been a challenging month, with her two careers colliding.
“My build-up was interrupted by pretty much the biggest exam in med school – the culmination of all of your study – two weeks before I left for Europe,” the trainee says.
“Ideally, I would’ve done a bit more in the lead-up, but now I’ve made it through with some good results, it will be interesting to see what I can do with better preparation.”
Now she’s turning her attention to what she must do to qualify for the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in July – an event she couldn’t tick off in the first era of her career.
Fellow former Olympian David Phillips, now head of gymnastics at Gymnastics New Zealand, believes McGregor has a lot more to give as an athlete – especially on vault.
“If she can continue to progress the way she is, then it wouldn’t surprise me if she was successful in selection for the Commonwealth Games – and pushing for a medal,” the Sydney 2000 Olympian says.
McGregor, who was 13th on vault at the 2016 Olympics, retired as a gymnast four years later – her career brought to a halt by a torn Achilles and the disruption of the Covid pandemic.
She returned home from a four-year scholarship with US gymnastic powerhouse Boise State University, on the path to applying for med school at the University of Auckland.
“I wasn’t able to qualify for the Tokyo Olympics because of my Achilles injury, so I had to sit down and think, ‘is gymnastics something I want to continue with?’” she says.
“Especially coming back from the States where there was so much resource for gymnastics and I was so well supported. To then come home to New Zealand and have to fund everything yourself while also pursuing quite an academically rigorous degree – I didn’t think I’d be able to manage both.
“I’d achieved pretty much everything I wanted to in gymnastics, so I was content to move on.”
But there was still an itch. When McGregor learned the Commonwealth Games were to be in Victoria, Australia, in 2026, her interest was piqued.
At 15, she was selected to compete at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, but a knee injury in her final warm-up forced her to withdraw before the competition even began. She never got another chance at the Commonwealth Games.
“Since I’ve been working in a hospital and seeing people who are really unwell, it’s given me a bit of perspective,” she says. “I’m really lucky I’m still physically able to do this.
“I knew it could be really hard to do both of these demanding things at once, but I thought I should at least give it a go.”
McGregor started training again in 2023, with “a brief thought” of trying to qualify for the Paris Olympics, but the process was complicated. After six months, she gave the sport away again.
But the pull was too strong and last May, she returned to training and competing domestically – winning the New Zealand senior championships for the first time in 10 years. That title put the next Commonwealth Games, now back in Glasgow, on her radar.
Phillips says McGregor is physically as strong as ever, and she’s adapting her training to other priorities in her life and making it work.
“One of the benefits of coming back as a mature athlete is you’ve done the work to have a really solid foundation and you don’t lose that muscle memory,” he says. “They’re more attuned to their body, attuned to their mental and emotional needs, and they’re making choices in life about what they do … and that naturally leads to smart decisions.”
A changing culture in gymnastics, with athletes staying in the sport longer, has appealed to McGregor. She’s found joy in knowing that as a mature gymnast, she’s an expert in her craft – after four years enduring what she calls “a humiliation ritual” as a medical student.
“Every couple of weeks you swap to a new speciality, and medicine is so hierarchical, you’re always bottom of the ladder,” she says. “So it was nice once I started training again, I knew what I was doing after years of experience. It’s been quite a fun journey coming back.”
Another change to McGregor’s gymnastics routine – and an essential one to help her juggle two careers – has been reducing her training load from the 30 hours a week she did as a young athlete, to now 15-20 hours.
“I go straight to the gym after I’m done at the hospital, and get in three or four hours of training, then a day off Sunday,” she says.
“I’m being a little more flexible and nicer to myself than I have been in the past. I have to be efficient because I just don’t have that much time. Managing my placement and my gym training is doable, but when you add in studying for a big exam or going to work, it tends to get a wee bit less manageable.
“When I was young, I was at the gym from 4pm to 8pm, and if I was a minute late, there was a punishment. Now I’m an adult, I can ring and say, ‘There’s an emergency at the hospital, I’m going to be late’ and it’s okay.”
Now at Tri Star Gymnastics in Mt Roskill, McGregor works with Sarah Kelly, the club’s women’s artistic gymnastics coach. Last year she trained in Tauranga while she was on placement at the city’s hospital.
“It’s cool to have a more collaborative experience with my coaches now. When you’re younger you’re pretty much obedient and do what you’re told,” McGregor says with a laugh.
Her repaired Achilles hasn’t given her trouble since it was sewn back together and screwed to her heel.
To qualify for July’s Commonwealth Games, gymnasts have to have at least two key international events under their belts, with results from national or regional events used to beef up their nomination to the New Zealand Olympic Committee. McGregor expects to compete either here or in Australia over the next two months to help her cause.
She was happy with her first two major events, but reckons she still has room to improve on her vaulting.
“I can up the difficulty on one of my vaults and improve my execution too. But it’s cool to see even in the early phase it’s going well in competition,” she says.
The two vaults to have brought her success so far are a Yurchenko layout one-and-a-half twist, and a Yurchenko half-on, tuck half-twist. “A bit of a tongue twister,” she laughs.
Her greatest challenge has been financial. New Zealand gymnasts have to fund their own way to international qualifying events, usually on the other side of the globe. McGregor has taken on summer jobs, tutoring other med students and coaching young gymnasts to help cover the cost of her travel.
“Gymnastics is club based in New Zealand so it’s very much every man for himself, trying to find a way to go and compete,” she says.
Two other Kiwi gymnasts – Reece Cobb, 19, and Freya Reid, 18 – were also competing in Europe with McGregor, with Cobb finishing fourth on floor in her first international final in Germany.
There’s a chance New Zealand could send both women’s and men’s artistic teams to Glasgow – “an aspirational goal”, Phillips says. At the last Commonwealth Games, there were no Kiwi women’s artistic gymnasts, but a team of five men, and two female rhythmic gymnasts.
“It’s exciting to see our [women’s] athletes swell in volume again. For a while, we didn’t have a lot of senior international women vying for events,” Phillips says.
“We’ve seen a real change in the last couple of years to what might have been quite a rigid environment – the ‘my way or the highway’ approach – and we’re seeing a really good retention of older athletes who are bringing maturity to their training and are now able to realise their potential.”
Once McGregor dreamed of going to a second Olympics. So is Los Angeles 2028 on her horizon?
“I genuinely haven’t thought that far ahead. I’m just enjoying doing gym for myself; enjoying the process and being more detached from the outcome than when I was younger. Gym was pretty much my whole life, and now I have a bit more perspective, it’s just a cool thing that I do,” she says.
“At 17 going to the Olympics in Rio, I’d already put in over a decade of work to get there, and it all felt very stressful. Whereas now I’m doing it for fun and enjoying the experience.”
This story was originally published at Newsroom.co.nz and is republished with permission.