15-year-old Verona Van de Leur is slowly but steadily making her mark on the international scene. A highly successful junior, she won two bronze medals at last year’s Junior European Championships in Paris, this year’s France Telecom was her coming-out party among the world’s best. Her impressive bars routine helped her take the gold, beating a crop of established international performers.

Van de Leur continued her winning ways at the prestigious Romanian International, again taking the bars title. At the Cottbus Tournament of Masters, she fell from bars in the final, but just narrowly missed out on the floor title in the head-to-head with Russia’s Ekaterina Lobaznyuk. In addition, Verona’s bars routine was the only routine of the entire women’s competition that started from a ten.

“I guess I am bit of a hero in Holland now,” the soft-spoken Van de Leur reflects, “but I don’t feel nervous being known as the girl who won bars.” While her greatest moments have come on bars so far, she is an accomplished all arounder who hopes to help her team on all pieces of apparatus at the World Championships in Ghent, Belgium.

Van de Leur’s favourite gymnast is Russian Elena Zamolodchikova, with whom she frequently shares the world’s podiums. “It doesn’t feel quite normal yet to be competing with all these big stars,” she says with a modest smile. In future, it surely will.

Read more about Verona Van de Leur in the next issue of German gymnastics magazine LEON*.

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